Forgive me for sounding childish and "Ooo, look, something shiny!"-ish, but I really miss having Super Rare character cards. They were cards that were really awesome to pull in a booster, would solve the oversaturation of character cards we've had in the past couple of sets, and more often than not, have amazing artwork which is AUGMENTED BY THE SHININESS! *ahem*

Street Fighter Set 1's SR Characters all had spectacular artwork (except maybe Zangief, who was never all that interesting to look at anyway), and I for one was definately more excited about pulling some of the characters than some of the SR's you get which aren't. Anyone remember looking at SR Vega for the first time? I think I nearly cried tears of joy. Then think about the first time you looked at Deadly Ground Vega... I remember crying, but for a totally different reason... We've never had SR Darkstalkers or SNK characters. I would have paid a hefty price to see :.Morrigan with the extra pizazz the SR's and promos get. If you look at some of the recent promos like Karin and Demitri, the artworks all there. I just think it would be nice to pull that sort of thing out of a booster once in a blue moon

These were the worst things to trade for, which honestly didn't make too much sense. People never brought them in trade binders, especially the ones who weren't that good. It took almost a full year for me to get the last 3 characters from Set 4, and those ones were UR Charlie, UR Chun-Li, and UR Taki.

So, UR characters like there used to be? I don't miss it at all.

Man I was just having this conversation with someone earlier this week and I've got to agree with Viewtiful. I mean besides just looking awesome, as SR versions of characters tend to do, I think it would help solve the limited character selection in block 3 currently. (of course I realize there is alot of block 3 to come, like an entire years worth. lol) I just liked the idea of having two choices of one character, without having to wait for a promo to come out.

No. It was a bad idea then and it's a bad idea now. I was so happy when they finally stopped doing this in all sets. It made the "bad version" of the character completely worthless and only served to frustrate people who didn't get the version they were looking for. It was a ploy to sell more packs that might have worked if the secondary market didn't exist. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say.

I'd rather just stick to promo cards. True, UR characters had some awesome art and all but the leauge tourney promos are alot easier to get than the ultra rare characters.

Mt_Do said:

I would rather all characters are promos or starters I would hate if characters are made UR again .

I'd far rather have SR characters than to have all the good character-exclusive or character-ability cards be SR. Most people are only going to have to find ONE copy of their character. But there doesn't seem to be any desire on the staff's part to change this 'tradition'. =(

If they're going to have SR cards, it shouldn't be in order to limit or discourage people from playing particular characters. I can see reasons why they'd pack all the good character-specific stuff into UR, but honestly, it really just makes most UR pulls become either dead weight for trading or (far more rarely) nutso chase cards. And it's not like someone's odds of just pulling stuff for a character they play are all that good.

One reason they might've gotten rid of SR characters was the over-numerous amount of people who just wanted to have "one of every character". 'Collectors' have always been the bane of TCG players who are simply looking for cards they want to use, and having players (especially new ones) who want to play a specific character struggle to do so, because too many others either "just have 1" or "need 1" for their playset/collection, can really injure a metagame.

SR characters just make that become far more prevalent and far worse a problem. And it's worse for UFS where some of the draw is using certain characters you like. If a Magic player can't find a Chameleon Colossus, tough beans, but they can find some other Green deck to play. A player that is interested in UFS and really wants to use Chae Lim can't do so without that specific card - and if everyone is hoarding their *Chae* copies without even using them, that's the kinda thing that can lead to people quitting early on.

Well there isn't a really magical solution to the complaints people have about the frequency of characters.

Currently, players that purchase a box at a time or more complain about too many characters in a box, but those that just buy casually are happy to get a character since they may only get 4-6 packs out of each opened box.

Obviously people would rather get a Feline Spike or equivalent than a UR version of a character, so that is something that if FFG were to go back to, it wouldn't really be a step forward.

One idea, though it may disappoint the more casual players is make all characters in a booster set the URs. This way less would be pulled from a box, and we wouldn't have absurdly hard to get playable cards such as Spikes, Addes, Spinta and whatnot. Sadly then there would be characters that would be incredibly difficult to pull, and people who want to play their favorite character would have to pay more than they probably should.

The other two games that have/had a similar character mechanic, Raw Deal and World Of Warcraft each have unique strategies to their distribution of characters.
Raw Deal (classic) contained two rares per 11-card pack, one possibly being a character (superstar). There were usually 4 starter deck characters and 4 characters that could only be pulled from packs. The sets, however, were usually larger than a set of UFS, (base sets being 300+ cards, with expansions approximately 150~180) so you didn't get quite as many characters as compared to other rares/Ultra rares.

World Of Warcraft contains a character in every 15 or later 19 card pack, unless the pack contains a Loot card. There are 18 or 36 characters per set, and each set has about 260+ cards, again considerably larger than most UFS sets. (The sets with 36 characters are alternate "traitor" versions, and there are no "character only" cards, rather they have "Race or class only" cards so you have many more options for character builds than in UFS)

What the issue really comes down to isn't that character rares are too common, rather there are not enough cards per set to dilute the 11 characters in an expansion, so you are much more likely to pull a character than any other rare since over 10% of the set is characters. If there were 200 or 250 cards in a set, and there were 11 characters, we wouldn't see as many characters opened in a box, but then that is a whole new can of worms as well.

Just my thoughts as per usual.

If there is ONE thing I hate about no UR character cards, is that it throws an interesting mechanic of the game straight out the window for most characters - That's right, I'm talking about Stacking characters.

ok tell me if i m wrong

but people dont want UR characters because it makes them to had to get hold of.

but the best thing about when they did two characters was that there where 18 cards for each character so it made it a lot easyer to biuld decks around youre character.

so why not still only print one SR character but still make 18 cards for ach one per set. this way you dont get as many characters but you get loads of stuff to support it.

See, the thing is, even if people want to play their favourite character who's a UR, that means they need one single copy of said UR, unlike people that want a playset of Feline Spike, Darkness Blade, and Great Gerdenheim (all from one set... just as a quick example).

And the people that do buy lots of the set will probably not need 3-4 copies of said UR character.

The reason that I hate ultra rare characters is that I have no need for em after the 1st copy that I pull. For example I have 7 copies of the ultra rare Ibuki, and I pulled em out of the extreme rivals booster packs and never traded for 1, and I probably opened like 30-50 boosters from extreme rivals. Honestly, that feels like getting the shaft whenever I open an ultra rare Ibuki or most other characters for that matter when it could have been a decent rare or even another ultra rare card instead of getting the same sh*tty card with almost no trade value. Remember that after someone has 1 copy they'll probably won't trade you for your copy. EI:after people have enough of a character card, the trade value on that card drops a lot. I would rather have hard to get UR character only attacks like Kasumi Suzaku and Bird of Prey cause I'll need a playset of those and won't feel that bad when I pop em open, and i'll actually want to play the rare characters that I get just to use some of thier cool finishers.

In general, I just hate ultra rares in general cause they are soo hard to get. but thats another discussion.

Perhaps the solution then is to go bac to the way characters were displayed before. As in, less characters, more support for them. Although I can't see that being a popular choice considering people will always want to see their favourite characters come out quickly.

Generally, I just want pulling characters to actually matter again. I mean, between Sets 9 and 10, whenever I've pulled a character it's gone into a box. Whereas before, they went into a folder. Now just the promos go in there. If people don't want to be seeing UR characters come back, don't you think that more promos should start being printed than 2 per month?

Viewtiful_Joe said:

I don't care. Bring back stacking characters. As of now, the following characters can be stacked in B3 Standard :

-Ken

-Zangief

-Vega

-Kyo

-Mai

-Felicia (Version 2-3-4 are legal, even)

-Morrigan (Version 2-3)

-Alex (He's in Set 11 and his promo's legal for B3)

-Guy

-Rock Howard (Released in Set 11 and 8)

-Terry (Released in Set 10 and 11)

-Balrog (Released in Set 11, allegedly, of course)

* * *

That's it by my count. A staggering 12 characters, BARELY over a single set.

sir_shajir said:

First the same thing happens when you pull the jank UR's OVER the good UR's or even R level cards. God packs need to become more prevalent and UR Characters NEED to come back so that FEWER cards you want multiples of occupy the UR slots making them *GASP* easier to obtain.

In the Case of Shajir 6 of your UR Ibuki's came from buying that store's collection.

the way i saw it there were always two problems with SR character cards. First, the SR version of the characters were often times the better versions of said character; aside from a few exceptions like rare cassie. This means that in order to get that truly competative character, espcially early on in the game, you either had to bust it i a pack or grab a very solid promo character. The second problem is that by having SR versions of characters, STG limited the number of characters that could be released within a set. If i remember right the first SF and SCIII sets only had four characters each. The most recent sets had like 6-7 characters each. On contrast though i do have to agree that it is far too easy to pull a character card in apack these days and it can get rather frustrating.

GeneralReaction89 said:

Yeah... please return to your facts, scrap them and do the actual research. twoheadeddragon.com/ufs/index.html is a good source.

Set 1 SF / SC : 6 per (4 starters, 2 only available through boosters)

Set 2 SF / SC : Same deal except with no Starters

Set 3 SF : 4 characters (Worst offender, as the set is generally regarded, in terms of characters, to be complete crap) / SNK : 16 characters

Set 4 SF / SC : 8 per

Set 5 SF / SC : 5 per (again, one of the worst offenders)

Set 6 SC / SNK : 5 for SC and 11 for SNK

Set 7 DS / SF : 14 for DS and 7 for SF

Set 8 SF / SNK : 14 per

Set 9 DS / SF : 11 per

Set 10 SC / SNK : 11 per

Set 11 SF / SNK : Unknown yet, sources say 11 per (as of Wiki so take it with a grain of salt, although you can definitely see a regulation)

From a quote from Steve Horvath talking about set 12, we'd be going back to the 8 character per set format, but take this with a HUGE grain of salt because I don't have the exact quote. It was aroung Gen Con 2008.

I for one miss the ultra rare character cards. I don't see you can complain about haivng options for the same character out of the set. Unless your more or less only playing the stats and not the character. Personaly I like to see variety in characters. And stacking I agree is nice. One of my favorite things is to stack every version of Talbain makes for good times.

What I really hate is that now, around half of the foiled cards in a box are Rare Characters, and most of them you only want one, and all the repeated ones are hard to trade. I just opened a DS02 box and I got like 15 character cards (3 Victors, 0 Talbain LOL), 6 of them in a god-pack, and most of the other rare/UR cards, I already got them.

The only good part is that it is very easy to have at least one copy of each character, and that would change if there were UR characters again. However, I'd rather have a hard time getting 1 copy of the character I wanted, than struggling to get 3-4 copies of the UR non-character highly playable chased card. Specially attacks: most of the latest attacks worth a **** are UR, like Feline Spike, Tsurane Kiri, Ira Spinta, etc.

So yes, I would like to go back to UR character cards (and maybe a Rare version of the same character in the same set as well), and then make the only other UR to be character-only cards. Or just forget about making UR cards all along, that is a terrible idea anyway.

Highly playable, non character-only cards should have a good mix of common, uncommon and rare status.

All the characters should've been Super Rares.

GraveLord said:

So then not everyone could play ibuki right thai lol .

I'm with Tagrineth on this one. Yes, it was a pain to trade for UR Dhalsim/Vega/M. Bison/Cervantes, but once you acquired one copy, you were good to go- no pesky playset required. In this sense, it made the game less cost-prohibitive for new players.

As it stands, there are so many characters to choose from when designing a deck. So why re-introduce UR characters? For one, tradability. The aforementioned characters weren't overly easy to acquire, and this usually led to what is, in my opinion, the best interactive part of CCG's- sitting across the table from someone, and trading weapons. UR characters served as facilitators and *gateway* cards that granted new players either the leverage they needed to acquire cards for a competitive deck, or gave them a solid character that they could build around.

Granted, such cards still exist, but there is a certain degree of paranoia involved in potentially trading someone the Feline Spike you know they're going to use against you every week. UR characters didn't perpetuate that mentality, because hoarding them did little good.

I know there has been a lot of grumbling lately about the diminished stature of *god packs*, and how they consist of 4+ character cards. There are also quite a few promo characters, and the schedule seems to churn out 2-3 a new ones per month. Part of the issue seems to stem from the glut of characters- I think that if the promo schedule were delayed slightly, there might be less apprehension toward UR characters being brought back into the mix.

Homme Chapeau said:

hutziel (promo and ds2 version)

anexceries (Ds2 and promo)

14 charecters still isn't a lot.

Homme Chapeau said:

^5

I miss the UR's. Sure you don't stack all the time, but there is and have been some really good stack decks; Start Over Rose (back in block 1), currently the UK Talbain build, 6hs Akuma(s), Felicia...

I miss the stacking mechanic and would like to see it back. With this, I'd also like to see a reduction in the characters per set and for UR characters to return. 5 or 6 characters per set would be fantastic!

In a perfect world, I'd love to see UR slots solely as characters/character only cards. That would make collecting them far easier. Why not simply move the entire non-starter deck, characters per set roster to the UR slot? It would make UR's unique, would stop much of the Feline Spike/Defender/Addes concerns (greater availability, these being moved to R slots). The dedicated players would still UR hunt for character-only's and stackable characters and it would increase the interest in packs.

As an example, Flames of Fame has 17x UR's and 11 characters (in rare slots). How about:

Decrease to 6 Characters per expansion.

Two versions of each character per expansion.

BOTH versions as UR's (12 UR's).

One character-only card per each character as UR's (6 UR's).

This would provide 18x UR's as opposed to the current 17x UR's in Flames of Fame (for example), decrease the frequency of characters, still provide FFG with lucrative "chase" UR's in the character specific cards, revitalize the Character Stack mechanic and (hopefully) balance out the distribution for the players.

If all the characters are UR that doesn't solve anything, especially if there IS a plan to encourage stacking, because then playsets of the UR characters WILL be needed... and you bet people would hoard them (remember Blue Cody?).