Cost comparisons

[hwango]

Earlier, in the Card Hunter chat lobby thing, we were discussing other card/board games, and someone mentioned the new version of Netrunner. Among their praises, they pointed out that because it's not a collectible card game it doesn't cost "an arm and a leg," to which I replied:

"Base set only costs an arm, and expansion packs go for mere toes."

Comments

[unferth.livejournal.com]

I bought the base set and liked it, but I don't get to play often enough to justify the expansions. Or, for that matter, to really justify the base set. I wish I did, but a purely two-player game is at a disadvantage.

I really wonder about the economics of the expansions, though. They seem awfully pricy for the number of cards involved. Maybe it's art expenses and a relatively small print run driving up the cost?

Anyway, I think at this point I'd be paying several hundred dollars to get caught up. Yeah, that's not happening unless, like, I stumble into a weekly Netrunner group.

[hwango.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd happily try the new Netrunner...but most of my gaming opportunities tend to be with more than one other person. Which is why I never get to play Monsterpocalypse, Dreamblade, Call of Cthulhu, etc.

As for the cost, it's one thing that I find interesting about the complaints of the "high cost" of playing a CCG. If you want to play competitively in a tournament, yes, it costs a lot. If you and your friends what to play together casually, it costs what you want it to cost past a certain minimum...heck, you could play for free if you just scooped up the commons, uncommons, and lands abandoned by higher level players after Limited format tournaments.

Don't get me wrong, I think the fixed core set/fixed expansion model it better in many ways. If you read spoilers and such you can know exactly what you're buying in an expansion rather than trying your luck with the blind purchase format, which is a big plus. The fact that you don't need to buy boxes and boxes of cards searching for an elusive broken rare should make it harder to buy your way to victory in competitive play.

But it certainly CAN cost just as much as a CCG if you decided you want to have a complete set of everything they print, which is something I rarely cared about in a CCG. And one thing I like about the random packaging method for Magic is that it allows for Sealed Deck and Draft formats, which I both really enjoy. Those would be a bit less exciting with fixed sets. Though you could still cobble together a draft of sorts...it would require extra hoops for Netrunner, and you'd certainly need more than two people since you'd have to draft the Corp and Runner cards in separate pools for a whole second set of players. Eh, not something I'm likely to need to do anyway.