With the game ending, I've been thinking about picking up everything I might ever want for the game before the stuff becomes impossible to find. My thinking is that it's going to become a game where I pre-make a deck for each faction, and then my opponent and I (or multiple opponents in pairs), can simply pick a deck and play. In order to do this, I obviously need extra cards, and at the moment I have an extra core (my fourth) on order, and I picked up a second copy of Legions of Death (mainly for Backlash and STC Fragment). While I own all the battle packs from all three cycles, I've only opened and played with cards from most of the Warlord Cycle so far, and this is at the root of my question for the fine folks here...

Assuming I'm going to make a deck for every faction, what battle packs (beyond my 1-of-each) would it make sense to pick up? Put another way, which packs would people say contain cards I'd want more than three-of to complete a deck for each faction?

To be clear, I'm not talking about tournament-caliber decks for every faction, but good, solid, fun, playable decks. Thanks in advance for any input!

If just one deck for each faction then one of everything and 3 cores is all you need. If you want to build decks for multiple warlords of the same faction then you might need more copies of some cards but it will very greatly depending on what warlords you chose.

Really? I haven't played enough to be any good at deck-building yet, but I'd have thought some cards would be good or versatile enough that you'd want them in-faction, and then again in one or both allied decks. Stuff like the various Neutral cards, or Doom, or Ammo Depot, or similar. Is that not the case?

It really comes down to what decks you want to build.

For example, take Tau. Aun'Shi generally doesn't run many allied cards, because his ability doesn't work on non-Tau and the allied factions don't offer him that much in terms of other support. On the other hand, if you want to run Starblaze, you'd have to look at what you're doing with AM, and possibly double up on any of their good cards. For Shadowsun, there's a wide variety of builds - some which will use a lot of allied cards, some which won't. So there's really no blanket rules.

I'd say the best thing to do would be a) decide which Warlords you want to build, b) work out which ones need a lot of allied cards, and then c) decide whether it's worth it to you to buy extra packs to accommodate that. Using the example above, if you just want to have any Tau deck, you could just pick Aun'Shi. Then you've only got to worry about whether there's any cards in that deck that you absolutely have to have in other decks as well - which you could avoid with specific deck building, if you want to.

If there's specific decks you want to build, that might make it easier to recommend extra packs to buy.