Hey everybody, July has been a funny old month, in many ways. The dental problems I had at the start of the year have returned, resulting in getting the tooth extracted yesterday. What a joy that was. Hopefully it’ll calm down shortly, anyway! I think the elephant in the virtual room has been the fact that Games Workshop has made a stealth-return to the blog, as I’ve been writing more about Warcry in the last few weeks, as well as a bit of a celebration post for Age of Sigmar turning 10 at the start of the month. After six years, I’ve also fully-painted the original starter set for Warcry, which is nothing short of amazing, I feel! I’ve never done this for any of the big boxes of models that we’ve had in the past, so I feel really good about it.
Of course, I have yet to play a game on it, but hopefully that’ll all change soon.
At the start of July, I’d made some vague plans where I wanted to play Marvel Champions more, and I wanted to get more painting done this month. Well, I have pretty much succeeded on both of those fronts, having got the Warcry set finished, as well as the Fomoroid Crusher for that game, and the Bloodsecrator for the Sigmar celebration. I’ve also been able to finally call an end to my efforts at painting the Wrecking Crew for Marvel Crisis Protocol – something I’d started way back at the start of the year. I’d decided I wouldn’t play them until I’d got them painted, so I’m pleased to say that these lads are now finished!
I think I’m getting back into the whole painting thing, which is good because I still have a tremendous backlog! I definitely want to try my best to keep going here, because it’s always better to get games with painted models, after all.
There’ll be more to say on this next week, though.
In terms of gaming, though, July has been pretty good. I’ve been predominantly playing Marvel Champions, which has become something of an all-star for me once again. I’ve had some fantastic games, and have launched a kind-of campaign against the Red Skull again where I’m using Winter Soldier with a rotating cast of other heroes. I’ve already played him and Cap against Zola and it was awesome, so I’ve played against Crossbones with Spider-Woman, and it was another amazing outing as both heroes are extremely powerful, but going up against Absorbing Man with Hawkeye wasn’t quite the same! I think I’ve said this before, but Absorbing Man is usually decried in the community, however with the wrong sort of heroes, he can very easily scheme his way to victory.
I’ve also been using Zola’s Algorithm, the obligation card from the campaign set that gets shuffled into the hero decks. It’s just an annoying stumbling block, which has an Acceleration icon on and you need to exhaust your alter-ego and spend a mental resource to discard, so I thought would be thematic. Well, I drew both Bucky’s and Clint’s copies during that game, and of course it happened when there were two copies of Avalanche in play, so I was adding 5 threat to the scheme at the start of the villain phase!
This is something that I really love about Marvel Champions, though, the way that you can adjust the difficulty with so many different levers to pull or push. I haven’t really been doing all that much with the campaign cards, aside from playing the Red Skull campaign in 2023 (I think). When I played the Guardians campaign last December, I forgot all about the campaign cards, so I think I’m going to try and give that another try using those, but in general I think it might be worth exploring more of those cards anyway. I know the X-Men boxes include a few interesting things, so I’d like to see whether there are ways of using these things outside of the campaign itself.
I had a game of Star Wars Legion, using the FFG rules from the game’s initial launch, and it was an absolute blast – definitely feels like a good move getting into that one, though I haven’t yet made a move to start painting those models. I haven’t yet managed to get in a second game, but I’ve also been devoting more to Star Wars Unlimited, as I am really enamoured with that game right now. I’ve made some initial forays into the unofficial solo mode for that game, getting the challenge decks printed off and so on, so hopefully it won’t be too long before I can put my collection to good use there!
Star Wars and Marvel are very much the cornerstones of my gaming right now, but during the height of the heatwave we had here, I stayed up until midnight playing games and included the classics Runebound and Elder Sign, that last being my 50th game! I am still to get back to the Arkham LCG, but I suspect it won’t be too long before I finally make the effort to get back to The Forgotten Age for a second run-through, as I’ve definitely been thinking about that more in the last week or so.
I really enjoyed the late night games, even if it was hotter than I’d like, so I might look at doing something like that again. It’s usually par for the course when playing miniature wargames of course, but it’s sometimes nice to just launch into something thematic and see where the night takes you!
So, July was pretty good, if I’m honest! Loss of the tooth aside, some great games were had, and I’ve managed to get quite a bit painted from the backlog! Let’s see what August brings…
This past weekend, we saw the first Galactic Championship tournament for Star Wars Unlimited, essentially a Worlds tournament of old where all the best players converged on Las Vegas to compete for the top slot. The winner, Filip Szkudlarek, was playing Mother Talzin Red, which is really interesting to me because of the amount of cards from the new set.
The event had a lot of noise on social media for how poorly organised it seemed in some respects, with folks waiting hours in line to buy tickets for side events being a major bone of contention. FFG have already released an article about their plans for next year though, with some differences afoot.
Of course, the tournament was a bit of an Event for FFG, who have used it for a number of announcements for the future!
Secrets of Power is the sixth set for Star Wars Unlimited, and will form the final set in the first ‘block’ for the game. When set 7 launches next year, sets 1-3 will rotate out of the standard environment. Secrets of Power seems to be following a bit of a political path, with the spotlight decks featuring Chancellor Palpatine and Padmé Amidala.
Palpatine being blue/black feels a bit weird to me. I mean, I know he’s the baddie, but his Palpatine persona is meant to be a good guy, so having his deck include the villainy aspect feels wrong from the flavour standpoint. His earlier card, of course, was in heroism, which at the time seemed a bit weird, but the Chancellor is meant to be the leader of the good guys, after all!
Palpatine shows off the new Plot mechanic, which feels similar to Smuggle from set two. Smuggle gives a card an alternate cost to play it from your resources, and then replace it with the top card of your deck. Plot just lets you pay the card’s cost to play it from your resources. Either way, it’s great to be able to see an expensive card like Cad Bane in your opening hand, and use him as a resource knowing that you have a way to get him back later in the game. Normally, your resources are gone as cards for the game, and sometimes it can be a terrible choice to put something face down!
Padmé’s new mechanic is Disclose, although she herself doesn’t have the word on her card. Disclose allows you to reveal a card with the matching icons, to receive a benefit. Captain Typho there lets you heal 1 damage from your base by revealing a card with green and white icons. The article goes on to suggest that you could reveal C-3PO from your hand, then use him later for his ability to return him to your hand, and so keep revealing just the one card, denying your opponent further knowledge. I do like that! Padmé herself then lets you deal one damage to a unit whenever you reveal or discard a card from your hand. So you could buff a unit with Threepio and return him to hand, then later reveal him for Typho’s ability, and trigger Padmé from the reveal.
We’ve also had a few more cards revealed from Reddit and other places, including Major Partagaz and Syril Karn – Andor characters are definitely coming into the fore now!
But this isn’t all that has been revealed…
There’s a new 2-player intro experience, Battle for Hoth, which comes with intro decks that are designed specifically for new players. It seems to be modelled after the Pokémon battle academy boxes, which use decks in a very specific order to explain how the game is supposed to work. Of course, the cards still work in the main game, and some look very interesting. Might try to tempt my wife into playing with this… 🥴
Finally, we’ve had the set names revealed for sets 7-9, which sound very interesting…
I think they had originally said that the game had been developed up to nine sets’ worth before it was initially launched, but obviously in that time we’ve had ample opportunity to not only refine those mechanics but I presume they’re still designing well into the future. I hope this game continues to flourish for many years to come, at any rate!!
It’s almost six months since I started work on these guys, and while it hasn’t been a solid six months’ work, I’ve finally finished painting these lads!
The piping on Wrecker’s jacket isn’t as clean as perhaps it could be, but all in all I’m pretty happy with how they’ve turned out!
My earlier post in February goes over the rules for these guys, but I’m planning to play them in a game on Friday, after which I’ll be sure to report back!
Hey everybody, As many of you no doubt know, I do enjoy playing board games, but it constantly surprises me just how many times I’ve played some of these things. Elder Sign is an absolute classic, and I’ve had it since it was released back in the mists of time we now call 2011, but it was only during the recent heatwave here in the UK that I actually clocked my 50th game with it. It’s one of those games that feels like I’ve played it far more often than I have! I suppose I’m not playing games daily and thus at risk of getting bored with them, though.
Elder Sign is an absolute classic, like I said. It’s one of the Arkham Files games from Fantasy Flight, and while it is set in the same universe, and makes use of the same characters as Arkham Horror, the basic premise of the game when it first came out was that you’re stuck in a museum and you’re investigating the strange goings-on there. It’s a push-your-luck dice game, with oversized cards that represent the ever-changing challenges that you have to overcome, matching dice results to skill tests in order to complete them, and claim the card as a trophy.
However, the object of the game is to claim enough Elder Signs to seal away an Ancient One, and there is a timer mechanic that uses a literal clock face that forces you to keep going – each time the clock strikes midnight, a mythos card is revealed, which often gives awful, global effects for the “day” (round). There are also various “at midnight” effects, and indeed the price of failure for some adventures, that will add doom tokens to the Ancient One, and when enough of these have been placed, you need to battle them in order to attempt to seal them away for good.
After the initial expansion, Unseen Forces, added more of the same to this formula (with the addition of the bless/curse mechanic that is a staple of the main game), we had four more expansions that widened the scope significantly. Gates of Arkham took us out of the museum and into the streets, where we could visit the classic locations from the board game. Omens of Ice took us to Alaska, then we went to Egypt with Omens of the Pharoah, and finally beneath the waves with Omens of the Deep. Each of these expansions brings its own flavour, and slightly different twists to the mechanic of completing adventures, but it’s still very much Elder Sign.
All of these expansions were released during the 2010s but I suppose I had shifted gears a bit into miniature wargaming shortly before Gates of Arkham came out. As a result, while I still snapped them up as they released, I wasn’t really playing them, a situation that has only changed in the last couple of years. It’s been great to see how the game has evolved, and it does make me a bit sad they haven’t continued to produce expansions that further explore the mythos, but I suppose the major points of the Arctic tundra and the desert of Egypt are met, with the bonus of going under water with Cthulhu.
The 2010s were really amazing for Cthulhu / Lovecraft games, as we had this one, as well as Eldritch Horror going strong. The Arkham Horror LCG debuted and hit its high point with Path to Carcosa, and the third edition of the board game was launched towards the end of the decade. Nowadays, of course, we’re pretty much limited to just the LCG, which is going through a bit of a metamorphosis as they move into the new format of rotating out the old stuff, so it’s a bit of a sad state of affairs. But I like going back to these “older games”, and I think Elder Sign in particular has held up really well.
But still, only 50 games with this one, it really surprises me. I still haven’t played Omens of the Deep, and I had initially thought I might break that one out for the milestone. Instead, I opted to use Gates of Arkham with as many components from Unseen Forces as I could, to ensure the bless/curse mechanic came into play. I’d forgotten that I also wanted to use the Grave Consequences mini expansion pack as well, for a bit of an epic experience, but never mind! The game was fantastic, and as tense as it always is – I was playing as Trish Scarborough and Wilson Richards, but Wilson didn’t make it and was replaced with Diana Stanley before we were finally able to seal away the Gates version of Yog Sothoth. It’s always so much better when an investigator dies, definitely adds to the tension!
Aside from wanting to play with that final expansion, I will certainly keep playing this game for many years to come. There’s definitely something to be said about a “complete” game like this. There’s a fantastic suite of 54 investigators to choose from (55 if you count the promo Daniela Reyes) with plenty of Ancient Ones to battle. Between the core box and Unseen Forces there’s a veritable brick of adventure cards, and the four additional “game modes” that change things up significantly. I’m always one of those people who wants more, but if I’m being completely honest, I think this is a game that I definitely think stands perfectly as a great experience.
It’s been almost five months since the last real update here on how my collection of Star Wars comics is going – so let’s take a look at what I’ve been able to acquire since that last post…
I think I’m nearing the end here, with the 2020 run of Doctor Aphra certainly being complete now in seven books. I was initially going to stop collecting the Bounty Hunters series after the War of the Bounty Hunters issue, but after realising that it’s also only 7 volumes, and at least one of them involves Iden Versio and Inferno Squad, I’ve decided to just get those, as well.
I think this now leaves me with just six books to get before the whole period of comics between Episodes IV and V is complete, which is really very exciting!
I know they’re not universally loved, so I’m not expecting greatness of course. But I did start to read them back in November last year, and I didn’t think they were terrible. I think I need to try to forget about Shadows of the Empire, and try instead to judge them on their own merit. Ultimately, this is Star Wars now, and I am excited to see how things like Sabé and the Amidalans work out in the Vader series, and of course Inferno Squad now that I know they’re in the Bounty Hunters book.
I’ve been thinking I want to wait until I have everything before I start to read these things, but I might start sooner. I still have the Doctor Aphra series from 2016 to finish, and of course, the whole Poe Dameron run as well. So it’s not like I’m short of reading material right now.
Hey everybody, Adepticon was months ago, I know, but I’ve finally been able to catch up with the new model reveals from AMG that they’ve shown on their roadmap, and I’m really very excited about the future of Marvel Crisis Protocol as we see a fantastic mix of old models getting re-released, and these new things on the way! We’re getting a lot of models re-packed into larger boxes somewhat reminiscent of the original affiliation packs of four models, so we’ve got Criminal Syndicate, Defenders and Asgardians getting this treatment, as well as the long-awaited Spider Woman and Agent Venom coming in another Web Warriors box. I’m not particularly a fan of the Spider-verse people, but I have wanted those characters for a long time, so that’ll be nice. Cable and Domino are getting repackaged with Bishop and Nightcrawler, though, which was a surprise to me, as those last two aren’t particularly old but are fairly sold out all over. Thankfully, though, I was able to nab them earlier in the week so at least I have that!
The collected repacks are great of course, but it slightly bothers me when Rogue and Gambit are being bundled into a box with 8 other X-Men characters, all of whom I own. So I feel like I won’t be getting those, but I suppose it’s always possible that they may be split up via ebay or something!
In Q3 of this year, we’re getting a bunch of new Spider-folks, as well as a bit of an Avengers/Defenders injection. Echo, Ronin and Tigra are some interesting models that are coming, I do like Echo so that should be nice to have. We’re getting Spider-Man 2099, Ultimate Spider-Man and Prowler, as well as Silk, Spider-Noir, and Spider-Ham. This seems to be the new way of releasing models, in packs of 3 rather than 2. I think the idea is one of logistics and whatnot, and while it does make sense in that respect – as well as being somehow more exciting for having a bigger pack of models – I’m not a huge fan of the inevitable price increases!
Like I said before, Spider-verse folks don’t really excite me, but I have become quite a fan of Silk after playing her in Marvel Champions, and the models for Miguel and Prowler looks amazing, so I could actually see myself picking these up at some point… Especially if I’m getting the Spider-Woman box as well, because that comes with Amazing Spider-Man and Black Cat, so I’d get a leader and pretty much a well-rounded affiliation out of it all!
In Q4, we’re getting Spectrum and Blue Marvel. I know a lot of folks aren’t fans of Spectrum but, again, thanks to the card game, I do like her powers and kit from there, so it’ll be fun to get another Marvel Champions hero in MCP.
Moving into 2026, we’re getting Kang the Conqueror, along with Iron Lad, Iron Monger and Rescue – lots of Iron Man villains alongside Kang! That seems like a very exciting box – Iron Monger is massive!
We also have Adam Warlock (a new Guardians leader), Moondragon and Quasar which seems exciting, though I haven’t yet delved into the Guardians so I don’t think I’m gonna rush to get that.
In Q2 2026, we’re getting mutants and sentinels! Dani Moonstar, Havoc, Multiple Man and Jubilee are coming, apparently with a new affiliation of X-Factor, then we’ve got Bastion, Nimrod and Omega Sentinel. Furthermore, much like the War of Kings crisis card pack that came out with new crisis cards for 2025, we’re getting Tolerance is Extinction, which is a new crisis card pack with Omega Prime as the character. Q2 is going to be a very expensive time for me, then, so I’ll need to start saving now…
With games like MCP, where they release big name heroes with big fan followings, it’s always a bit dicey as regards new releases, because it’s always so tempting to be chasing the next big thing. I have a fairly hefty stack of models that I haven’t even primed up yet, let along started painting, so I shouldn’t really be looking longingly at so many new things… and yet, that Havoc/Jubilee pack is really enticing me. I think I’m gonna try my best to use this as something of a target, then, to make myself get more stuff painted. I think it’s good to have a decent lead-in time, though, as we can start to get things ready before a massive injection of more models…
Regardless of my own hobby backlog though, it feels like a fantastic time to be playing this game, with a lot of very exciting new releases on the horizon. Interestingly, there’s only Ironheart from Marvel Champions who doesn’t yet have a model in MCP. Nova and Shuri are possibly corner cases, as we have a different Nova in Marvel Champions, and obviously Shuri comes as Black Panther in the LCG rather than as the head of Wakanda R&D. So that’s really fun that we have so many of these characters now, though it does beg the question… where’s the Fantastic Four?
Six years ago, Warcry hit the shelves and I began building up some Iron Golem models. Progress was extremely slow with building the rest of the box, of course, as the box released into the utter carnage of me moving house and my eldest daughter being born. However, over the years I slowly got to try the game, and was pretty much hooked. I’ve bought a lot for Warcry during the red-topped first edition of the game, and back in February last year, I finally started to get the terrain painted…
Well, that’s great of course, but what about the rest of the box? The starter set competes with Necromunda: Dark Uprising for being the best value big-box GW has ever put out, as not only was there a table full of terrain, but we also got two warbands, and two groups of Chaotic Beasts to spice up the game. The Iron Golem were some of the miniatures that had initially drawn me in to this game, so I painted those up around the same time as the terrain.
In the last few weeks, I’ve finally gotten the beasts done, which was a task I had been putting off for far too long. In the end, I decided to paint them in a bit of an abstract way. In my mind, these beasts are manifestations of Chaos, so I wanted to have the suggestion of colour, rather than painting every detail. The Furies are a sort of deep crimson, while the Raptoryx have shades of Slaanesh, hence the purple hues…
And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the finished box! For the first time ever, I have fully painted a Games Workshop big box, and I absolutely love it!!
Okay, so the Exalted Chariot isn’t part of the box set, but I thought I’d put it in there for the hell of it!
I’m extremely happy with how it all turned out, and with the addition of two other warbands from the first wave fully painted, I’m thrilled to have so many options for fully-painted games!!
Hey everybody, Warcry has been somewhat on the ascendant here on the blog once more, hasn’t it? I’ve recently been on a bit of a painting streak to get the original starter box fully painted, so there will be a post coming out later today with all of that goodness to show off. In addition to getting the Fomoroid Crusher and the Untamed Beasts finished, I have also started to get some paint on the Khorne models in my collection, with a view to running them as a warband. I have a lot of Khorne things, so there are quite a few configurations available to me there.
However, a couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video on Youtube from Dana Howl, where she was talking (I think) about the Warhammer Old World stuff, and at a couple of points during that video, she had one of the models from the new(ish) Cities of Sigmar range.
And I kinda fell in love with it.
Cities of Sigmar was of course a thing back in (I think) second edition of AoS, where Games Workshop took some of the plastic models for the high elves, dark elves and dwarves, and made them three different “cities” factions. Up until that point, there were loads of tiny factions that attempted to re-use some of the old Warhammer Fantasy models, but a couple of Start Collecting boxes were issued – Anvilgard (dark elves), and Greywater Fastness (dwarves). It was alright, but by this time we had new Chaos, the Stormcast models, and all the Nighthaunt stuff, so these older models were definitely showing their age.
All of that changed late in 2023, as Age of Sigmar wound down third edition, and the release of a new model line of Cities of Sigmar. This range is more generic fantasy/historical army types, and it looks pretty superb. In Warcry terms, the Cities of Sigmar is split into three subdivisions – the new stuff is referred to as the Castelite Hosts, but the dark elves and dwarves have reverted to their old, AoS1 names of Darkling Covens and Dispossessed, respectively.
It’s the Castelite Hosts that have drawn my attention, however, and I have become really intrigued by getting a few units to use in Warcry. By my calculations, a box of Freeguild Steelhelms would get me a 700-point warband of 9 Steelhelms (60 points) led by a Sergeant-at-Arms (100 points). The Alchemite Warforger (125 points) is an incredible-looking model, and one that I have off-and-on had my eye on since the preview in 2023, while the Freeguild Command Corps gives plenty of one-off hero-type models such as the Arch-Knight (120 points) or the Whisperblade (80 points). There is definitely options by buying those three kits – the Steelhelms, Command Corps and the Warforger – though at £92 MSRP, that might be a bit steep!
The Steelhelms are the models that have most attracted me to this faction, though, and I like the idea of them being more of a trained militia rather than the fairly chaotic warbands that I usually look at playing. The Sergeant-at-Arms has the ability to give +2 toughness to fighters within 3” as a [Double], which I like. Feels like a real shieldwall-type force. The Warforger, as a [Triple], can add +2 to the crit value of a melee attack for fighters within 6” as well, which would raise the Steelhelms’ crits to 5 damage each. Very nice.
This probably isn’t going to be something that I’ll be rushing to do, of course, but after having my imagination fired up by seeing the models, I wanted to get some ideas down so that I have a foundation to work from in the future… you know, because I’ll have so much time to work on this stuff…
Hey everybody, For today’s Thursday Unlimited post, I wanted to talk a little bit about my approach to collectible card games in general, albeit through the lens of Star Wars Unlimited as this is the game that continues to dominate my thoughts right now.
In general terms, CCGs are released in sets that are distributed by means of booster packs, which can be bought in various configurations, either singly or in booster boxes. The cards that make up a set will very often be tiered by rarity, going from common to uncommon, rare to legendary or mythic, or something like that. In addition to a card being printed in its regular form, you can also find cards in foil versions, and in the last few years companies have made a big deal of making cards in full-art, alternative art, or some other kind of special treatment.
Star Wars Unlimited comes in booster packs of 16 cards, which are divided between the various card types and rarities. In each pack, there is always a leader card and a base card, as that is the defining block of how to build a deck. You then get 9 commons, 3 uncommons, and 1 rare or legendary card. The sixteenth card is a foil card, and can be from any rarity. In addition to this, there is the chance of getting a “hyperspace” variant, which is the full-art version of a card, and that can be from any rarity, including leaders and bases, or even the foil card. So you have the potential to have a full-art legendary and a full-art foil legendary card in the same pack. Potentially.
Finally, the leader has an additional variation, the “showcase”, which is an alt-art, full art with special foil treatment. The distribution of all these different alt cards is obviously vanishing, so you have the chance for a foil in every pack, but a hyperspace rare or legendary is about one in fifteen packs, while a foil hyperspace rare or legendary is roughly one in fifty packs. The showcase variant? Roughly one in twelve boxes, or 288 packs.
Why am I talking about all of this?
I’ve recently been hearing a lot about the value of Star Wars Unlimited cards. In CCGs, there seems to be an almost unspoken agreement that the rarer a card is, the more it could be worth on the secondary market. Also, a card’s value is often driven by its utility in the game, so if you need a playset of legendary cards, because that card is good, then the card value will be high. Some legendary cards are not so useful though, so their value is low, but a card’s worth will often fluctuate around tournament season as a winning deck may have made use of a sleeper card, which suddenly explodes in value.
Despite rarity though, if a lot of product is opened then the value can sometimes go down because there is a lot of it out there. Initially, when Star Wars Unlimited came out, people were hoarding booster boxes of Spark of Rebellion, the first set, so product was scarce – I think this was more about the fact it was the first set of a new Star Wars CCG, so there was an expected value to it regardless. However, this became hurtful to the game because nobody could get product to use to play the game, which would affect its popularity and future. FFG had over-printed but there was still a supply issue, so they kept printing it and eventually the card values settled. When it came to the next set, Shadows of the Galaxy, FFG over-printed expecting similar issues, but it’s the second set and the demand wasn’t quite there, so the value of those boxes went down as a result. I believe the third set, Twilight of the Republic, was printed in somewhat normal quantities, but the power level wasn’t quite there, and so the value of that set is equally low, if not lower.
So the utility of cards in a game definitely has impact on the value of a set, but this is Star Wars. While we do also see this with Pokémon and Magic, where the characters are big names within the fandom and so can become collector’s items on that basis, Star Wars does have more cultural cachet in the English speaking world and so cards with Luke, Han and Leia, or Spectre cell, will demand high value because of who they are, regardless of whether the card is good or not.
This is why I think the approach FFG has taken with the hyperspace foils and whatnot is great. While I think Magic has had special versions of cards in the past, it wasn’t until Battle for Zendikar when they began to produce special versions specifically for collectors – BfZ is the 68th expansion set for Magic, just FYI. Having these chase variants gives collectors something to hunt down and hoard, while the regular versions of cards are kept in circulation for people like myself to play the actual game with.
With the fourth set, Jump to Lightspeed, FFG changed the model slightly and included a new product, Carbonite boosters. These are £25 boosters that are aimed solely at collectors, and are entirely made up of the alt versions of cards – no mechanically unique cards, just alternative versions. So you have a leader that is either hyperspace or showcase, then seven foil cards, five hyperspace cards, and two hyperspace foils. These are cards from any rarity, though with generally more uncommons and higher than in a normal booster pack.
However, the sixteenth card in a carbonite booster is a Prestige card, which is an alt-art, full-art card with three subdivisions. There is the “normal” Prestige variant, a variant with foiling, and a serialized variant that has a number between 1 and 250, as well as the foiling. To add an additional layer to this, there is only one printing of carbonite boosters, at the set’s launch. Once they’re sold, they’re done.
All of this adds a lustre, and in turn it helps to keep the price of “normal” cards down on the secondary market. Which is great, because ultimately the point of these cards is to play a game. Sure, they have some nice art on, but I’ve never been into the whole collecting aspect of these games. I collect the cards so that I have a good enough supply from which to build decks, I suppose.
Which brings me on to the topic of why did I buy boxes for each of the first three sets of this game? A box is 24 boosters, and retail prices vary, but I bought mine for between £70 and £80 each time, as far as I remember. At the lower end, then, that makes the boosters cost between £2.92 and £3.34 (MSRP is £4.99), so buying a box becomes super economical if you think you’re going to want to open a lot of product. I haven’t bought a box for Jump to Lightspeed, but as a guess I would say I’ve probably bought about a dozen packs for that set so far, which begins to broach the point of “just buy a box!” as it’s cheaper than spending £120 on individual boosters over time.
A lot of folks will often complain about the perceived value of these things, though. I’ve heard this most often within the Magic community, where people will work out the total value of the cards pulled from a single booster, and get mad when they’re not collectively worth more than the booster itself. It’s a point of view that I have always struggled with, though for the box of Shadows of the Galaxy I opened, I did work out the value of the big-money cards came to more than the price of the box (when I opened it). That was more a fun exercise for the blog, I honestly don’t care – and indeed, I have very little knowledge of the chase cards for a set for this game because it’s just not a factor for me. I think this is perhaps because I’m a fan of the IP, so I’m more excited by who or what I’m pulling from boosters, than by their overall worth.
It always makes me feel a little bit sad, though, that people discuss cards in terms of their value compared with (a) their in-game utility, or (b) the fact that you’ve got a card with Count Dooku on it! Or any other amazing character or similar from the Star Wars universe. This is, of course, just me, because I know there are plenty of folks out there who will take issue when a company has said they will make a product in a certain way, but then falls short of that. I’m referring specifically to the issue we’ve seen with carbonite packs of the current set, Legends of the Force, where the distribution of Prestige cards has been off. People have opened multiple boxes of carbonite packs (which alone gives me shudders, as these boxes are £300 each!) and not got a Prestige card, while other folks have had two in theirs – including two serialized cards. This is a problem with the way that cards are manufactured, I guess, because that shouldn’t be able to happen, but there we go. It’s all a part of the chase, and so doesn’t really interest me that much.
I suppose the thesis of this post, if such a rambling collection of paragraphs could be said to have such a thing, is that I like card games as games that I can play. The collectible nature of them makes me shudder, because I know that will mean the whole lottery of trying to get the cards I want to play the game. Still, I like how FFG have handled it for Star Wars Unlimited because they have so many additional layers that means the basic versions of cards are pretty accessible to come by for playing purposes. While there were some issues with supply at first because of folks seemingly building forts out of booster boxes, it seems like overall the game is in a fairly decent place from my perspective, because I can access these cards to play the game with, which is the whole point of the product’s existence, in my view.
This is all very much a me-issue, though. CCGs aren’t meant to be some kind of board game-like experience, where you have access to all of the pieces you need to play. There is definitely a balance being struck between a playable game and the whole chase of cards. There’s a story from way back in the 90s from Richard Garfield, who created the CCG genre with Magic the Gathering in 1993, where he said how he envisioned the game as something that could drive genuine wonder – people weren’t necessarily going to know all of the cards in the game, and there would be real excitement if you saw a certain big dragon, or something, during a game. I do like that idea, but equally, I think it’s something that can be quite harmful to the health of a game if someone is essentially paying to win.
The idea of not knowing the full card list for a set is somewhat wild, but it sounds like a driver for genuine excitement, seeing something that you didn’t know was possible to exist within the game. I suppose the idea was that you’d then go buy more packs in the hope that you would also pull such a big dragon, but from this idea of a pack-opening frenzy that drives sales, it seems that the possibility of a card existing in a pack can make a sealed pack worth more over time. Going back to Magic once again, the original Zendikar block (50th expansion set) featured powerful land cards (the resources for that game), which has driven up the demand for that set, especially as time goes by, and Wizards of the Coast no longer print older sets. The longer a card (or card type) goes without being reprinted, the more expensive it can be, and just the possibility that a booster (or booster box) could contain those cards demands a high price for them. This is what really drives people to hoard product, with the idea of it being “an investment”. Pokémon is currently plagued with this attitude, to the point that regular players (and even, regular collectors, as that game is almost 50/50 on that front) simply cannot buy new sets.
I really don’t wish to disdain those people who collect for its own ends, though, as I know a few folks in my local area who play the game but also buy cards for “a collection”. Indeed, I have started to think about doing something similar as well, collecting my favourite characters or something. While ordinarily I’m not a fan of full-art cards, as I prefer to play with cards that have the “proper” templates, I have really come around on the look of hyperspace cards, and some of them are really very nice to own. Heck, I’ve even bought a carbonite booster pack for the purpose of writing this post. There is a lot to love about this game in this way.
But I do find it very, very weird when people get more caught up in whether a card is worth money, as opposed to how good it is for the game…
Hey everybody, This week, I’ve finished reading The Red Duke, a Warhammer Fantasy novel from 2011, written by CL Werner. This is the Old World, so we’ve still got all of the old names for stuff, but despite this, I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed in the book, as a whole. I think having a classic Warhammer Vampire on the cover made me think I’d be in for one thing, but in reality I got something pretty different.
See, the book takes place in Bretonnia, which I have always found to be incredibly irritating. The Empire being based on central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire is one thing, but Bretonnia is so transparently France, to the point that there is an Aquitaine, a Carcassone, and so on. All of the names are very Frenchy-sounding, and I find it really irritating. At least Tilea and Estalia try to be a bit different from Italy and Spain, respectively!
This isn’t the fault of Werner, because this is what Bretonnia is, of course. I’m sure there are plenty of fans of the faction who lap this sort of thing up. Bretonnia is also known for its Arthurian lore, with Grail Knights on quests in the name of the Lady of the Lake, and all that. I’m not saying this to be a hipster of course, but I speak French and I have an interest in Arthurian legends, so for the majority of this book I really didn’t feel like I was in Warhammer.
The story is basically of a feud between two families, which escalates when the last son of the Earl Gaubert d’Elbiq is killed in an honour duel by the son of Count Ergon du Maisne. D’Elbiq makes a pact with the witch Jacquetta to resurrect the spirit of the bloodthirsty Red Duke, who five hundred years ago led an army of the undead through Bretonnia. The idea is that d’Elbiq could use the vampire’s spirit to exact his revenge on du Maisne. Sadly, the Red Duke has had five hundred years trapped inside his tomb, and his bloodlust initially blinds him to all of this. He does cut a bloody swathe through the Chateau du Maisne, but then repeats his past conquests as he attempts to wrest control of Aquitaine from his brother, King Louis.
It’s almost a comedy as the Red Duke re-enacts these battles, but eventually the current Duke Gilon of Aquitaine is able to lure him back to Ceren Field, where he met his demise five hundred years ago. Duke Gilon meets his demise at the hands of the Red Duke, however the Prophetess Isaure breaks his resolve by telling him his campaign was all in vain. The Duke’s wife had given birth to a son after he had left on crusade in Araby, and King Louis had ensured this son was given Aquitaine as a dukedom when he came of age. So the Duke’s line had never lost its inheritance. The Duke flees into the forests and is never seen again…
I mean, honestly… talk about a contrived ending. The majority of this book had been building up to a battle that was over in about 40 pages, and didn’t really feel all that satisfying, if I’m being completely honest. As I said, though, I think I would have preferred to have less Bretonnia in this story, and more general Vampire Counts goodness!
spalanz.com 