Just imagine playing this beautiful card on a Ruin Runner and sending it into a Green/Purple battlefield. [EDIT: didn't mean for the card to be gigantic lol]
I've been looking at competitive decks in other TCGs and noticing that FaB's competitive decks are very expensive by comparison, and trying to figure out why. The TLDR is that I think it's because other TCGs have world-famous characters which allows alternative arts to carry the price of booster boxes whereas in FaB we are meeting the characters for the first time. What do you think?
Here's why:
Like most TCGs, almost all cards are distributed through booster boxes. Since booster packs and booster boxes cost money, the experience of opening packs needs to be valuable so that enough cards get out in circulation, and it needs to be enough value to justify the price.
Value means different things to different people, and it can come from:
Some of the excitement comes from cards being expensive, which means rare. Much like the diamond industry, the people in charge choose to release their diamonds into the market at the rate they want to in order to influence the value. If they get the balance wrong in either direction, that could be the end of their business.
For any TCG, IF booster boxes become worth less to the customer than what stores pay their distributors, then the game would be in a lot of trouble. In fact there has to be quite a bit of margin when we consider limited shelf space, rent, paying employees, healthcare, bills, time spent, etc. So the expected value of opening a booster box needs to seem reasonable to the customer.
I was looking at Riftbound decks and Pokemon decks and comparing the price of competitive decks versus Flesh and Blood's, and FaB is definitely expensive. Even off meta decks in FaB cost several times more than on-meta decks in those games.
Flesh and Blood's greatest strength is its support for competitive play, and most of the value comes from the cards being strong mechanically.
Riftbound and Pokemon have world-famous characters and can print special arts and treatments of beloved characters in the game that can carry the value of the booster boxes. This makes it possible to have rarer alternative arts of characters that are mechanically identical. In other words, you can have your diamonds and your cubic zirconias and they play the same way. [Edit: yes, there are even more extremely rare marvels in FaB, but these don't have the same appeal to non-players as a special edition League of Legends character or Pokemon]
In Flesh and Blood, most of the value comes from mechanically-unique rare and powerful cards. The primary reason people open packs is because of what the cards do in the game, so the power needs to be rare in order to get packs sold. This explains Majestics such as Shelter from the Storm, being reprinted at Legendary. There also needs to be some great cards that work in multiple classes or generically in all classes.
I will say that the meta influences other games too, and a heavily-printed tech card at common rarity can spike based on the meta in any game. I'm speaking more generally.
What do you think? What am I missing?
Hi There!
I thought my deck was pretty good and I was seeing many artifacts cards, but then I got absolutely crushed in all three games. Is this deck bad? Poor build choices? Maybe some cards chosen are worse than they look? It seemed like it wasn't fast enough and maybe had too little interaction. What do you think? (rank Gold if it affects recommendations)
Not Pictured in Sideboard: Shadowspear and Traxos Scourg, of Kroug
