Josh, I agree with you especially on the price of the product. Unless there is a significant uptick in the value of some of the cards the price point just doesnt add up for the smaller set. Good video!
I think a lot of your feedback for issues are things that Alpha Clash has been doing very well. I follow a bunch of indie TCG's, and they're making the products, doing the events, staying very communicative with the player base, pumping out sets, keeping the artwork fresh, keeping collectors interested with Chase cards, and doing it all at a pretty good price point.
On a related… unrelated topic. One of the things I found totally disappointing about this set is that I felt that the meta actually narrowed and became simplistic despite the card pool getting bigger. Just food for thought… consider this. I was primarily a battlemage and sorceror player in the beta era but I didn’t really want to be. I was really anticipating the release with the hope of new cards for enchantress and pathfinder to be better. Pathfinder with the increased atlas is unusable competitively and is completely casual as it generally was before and enchantress went from being borderline to really weakened because there was very little attention paid to enhance this aspect of the game… However… what we did not need is another half dozen game pieces to make deathspeaker run as efficiently as possible, battlemage more competitive and adding a more oppressive avatar like witch to the meta. Enchantress and pathfinder made the game a bit asymmetric and interesting and seems necessary for the health of the game… what’s going on with this set with additional burn and archimego and battlemage is the opposite of what I thought they wanted… which is that with the right draw the game can end extremely quickly and in kind of a dumb way… They call it splashy but it feels a bit watered down and less like “sorcery” to me
Great video and recap! Very well stated. I vote Annual Fair at Exceptional and Valley of Delight at Elite for sites that I’ll have in tons of current and future decks. Love those cards so much.
Hats off to you for even remotely talking about the bad/ugly. Sick of all the schills saying everything is godlike. Some of the artwork is TERRIBLE. They do need to make some "legal" precons at some point.
Great summary! From the play perspective the set size is not an issue for me, because the number of possible interactions or combinations between cards scales faster than the number of cards. By adding 50% more cards we more than doubled the deck design space. Plus we have the Dragonlord which will shake things up like the beta elemental avatars did.
Good points! I feel it has been a bit underwhelming especially after the long wait post alpha/beta. Another point I would add to the bad is the lack of information post AL. Dragon set we knew, I want some teasers of the next set. Maybe only a name, something like that.
A once a year release is tough. It’s cool, totally respectable… but it’s their decision alone that kind of forces some of these issues to be particularly more focused when they miss. If it’s going to be once a year… they all have to be really high batting averages. This was a good card set… but I agree with this take and you were very kind in only mentioning the issues that you did. A limited focused set was in my opinion a mistake unto itself and will drive away people from buying allot of boxes, cases in the future on the next set.
I honestly am guessing that with their team size, and that every piece of commissioned physical work of art, they are only able to really do 1 a year. I could be wrong. But yea for once a year, we need a roughly 400 card set. As they grow with all the money they have made, hopefully they start doing 2 sets a year or branching out more.
Thats my opinion too. Once a year means you have to print more of each set in order to have enough stock to last an entire year. If you had more sets per year, you could print less of each. Printing that much stock means that some collectors will be unhappy with the amount of product being printed. Beta is also a core set product and needs to be in print while the expansion sets are done, like AL. While the next set after DragonLord is supposed to be larger, I don't think they can rotate out Beta yet. There is not enough cards in AL to swap out with Beta cards to make a new core set. This is further confirmed with the expansion at that point to 60/40.
Opening is a huge risk with this set. Remember you will only get four to five uniques in a box, so opening the boxes will only get you another 12 to 15 uniques, and there are 55 in the set. You would have to hope to pull something high value to sell or pull multiple high end unique duplicates to have some way to get the other uniques. On the other hand, if you sell the boxes even at a small loss, you would likely be able to complete your non-foil set by using those funds to buy singles.
Good: Flavor is on point. In a vacuum, set is incredibly fun to draft, a bit "weaker" than Alpha/Beta but i personally don't mind that. Power creep is inevitable so hold off on it for as long as you can I say. Bad: Set is a bit too small for my tastes being that the game has a single release year on year. 24 packs per box as a result of this but price tag puts boxes at 129. Should have been 100 or 110 at most. Ugly: The fake Uniques. In a set that is already as small as it is, to inflate the unique pool like this and yet STILL insist on printing said "uniques" at elite print rates...poor performance indeed...
cardmarket should add Sorcery. Would help a lot for europe community
Josh, I agree with you especially on the price of the product. Unless there is a significant uptick in the value of some of the cards the price point just doesnt add up for the smaller set. Good video!
I see that stack on the shelf. Let’s get those cards sorted! 😂
Those are for events!
Keep up the good work, m'lord! Never miss a video.
I think a lot of your feedback for issues are things that Alpha Clash has been doing very well. I follow a bunch of indie TCG's, and they're making the products, doing the events, staying very communicative with the player base, pumping out sets, keeping the artwork fresh, keeping collectors interested with Chase cards, and doing it all at a pretty good price point.
Good points, Josh.
On a related… unrelated topic. One of the things I found totally disappointing about this set is that I felt that the meta actually narrowed and became simplistic despite the card pool getting bigger. Just food for thought… consider this.
I was primarily a battlemage and sorceror player in the beta era but I didn’t really want to be. I was really anticipating the release with the hope of new cards for enchantress and pathfinder to be better.
Pathfinder with the increased atlas is unusable competitively and is completely casual as it generally was before and enchantress went from being borderline to really weakened because there was very little attention paid to enhance this aspect of the game…
However… what we did not need is another half dozen game pieces to make deathspeaker run as efficiently as possible, battlemage more competitive and adding a more oppressive avatar like witch to the meta.
Enchantress and pathfinder made the game a bit asymmetric and interesting and seems necessary for the health of the game… what’s going on with this set with additional burn and archimego and battlemage is the opposite of what I thought they wanted… which is that with the right draw the game can end extremely quickly and in kind of a dumb way…
They call it splashy but it feels a bit watered down and less like “sorcery” to me
Precons with two colors would have been really nice...
Josh is my Arthurian Legend.
Great video and recap! Very well stated. I vote Annual Fair at Exceptional and Valley of Delight at Elite for sites that I’ll have in tons of current and future decks. Love those cards so much.
Hats off to you for even remotely talking about the bad/ugly. Sick of all the schills saying everything is godlike. Some of the artwork is TERRIBLE. They do need to make some "legal" precons at some point.
Great summary! From the play perspective the set size is not an issue for me, because the number of possible interactions or combinations between cards scales faster than the number of cards. By adding 50% more cards we more than doubled the deck design space. Plus we have the Dragonlord which will shake things up like the beta elemental avatars did.
It is a problem for new players though. And growing the player base is still crucial at this point.
The boxes I opened were great!
Good points! I feel it has been a bit underwhelming especially after the long wait post alpha/beta. Another point I would add to the bad is the lack of information post AL. Dragon set we knew, I want some teasers of the next set. Maybe only a name, something like that.
A once a year release is tough. It’s cool, totally respectable… but it’s their decision alone that kind of forces some of these issues to be particularly more focused when they miss.
If it’s going to be once a year… they all have to be really high batting averages. This was a good card set… but I agree with this take and you were very kind in only mentioning the issues that you did.
A limited focused set was in my opinion a mistake unto itself and will drive away people from buying allot of boxes, cases in the future on the next set.
I honestly am guessing that with their team size, and that every piece of commissioned physical work of art, they are only able to really do 1 a year. I could be wrong. But yea for once a year, we need a roughly 400 card set. As they grow with all the money they have made, hopefully they start doing 2 sets a year or branching out more.
Thats my opinion too. Once a year means you have to print more of each set in order to have enough stock to last an entire year. If you had more sets per year, you could print less of each. Printing that much stock means that some collectors will be unhappy with the amount of product being printed.
Beta is also a core set product and needs to be in print while the expansion sets are done, like AL. While the next set after DragonLord is supposed to be larger, I don't think they can rotate out Beta yet. There is not enough cards in AL to swap out with Beta cards to make a new core set. This is further confirmed with the expansion at that point to 60/40.
I opened 3 boxes. Should I open my other 3? or sell them at a loss and buy the singles to complete my nonfoil set?
Opening is a huge risk with this set. Remember you will only get four to five uniques in a box, so opening the boxes will only get you another 12 to 15 uniques, and there are 55 in the set. You would have to hope to pull something high value to sell or pull multiple high end unique duplicates to have some way to get the other uniques. On the other hand, if you sell the boxes even at a small loss, you would likely be able to complete your non-foil set by using those funds to buy singles.
Good: Flavor is on point. In a vacuum, set is incredibly fun to draft, a bit "weaker" than Alpha/Beta but i personally don't mind that. Power creep is inevitable so hold off on it for as long as you can I say.
Bad: Set is a bit too small for my tastes being that the game has a single release year on year. 24 packs per box as a result of this but price tag puts boxes at 129. Should have been 100 or 110 at most.
Ugly: The fake Uniques. In a set that is already as small as it is, to inflate the unique pool like this and yet STILL insist on printing said "uniques" at elite print rates...poor performance indeed...