somewhat related but having alt paint job ships as prizes would be cool... way better than tokens and more useful than coins...

Getting back to the original theme

Limited edition ship would be ok only if it was a a different paint job to a standard ship.

Any ships and cards that cant be bought by every one would kill the concept of level playing field.

We and all build any list we what and we all have access to the same cards

...yeah? Just wait until you see the slot machine you get yo put the coins in!

I could go for a limited edition paint job that contained only cards that have previously been printed elsewhere, but with alt art.

Any limited edition cards, pilots, or ships that were unique to the limited edition would be BAD.

Ditto for things being rotated out of production. The game is balanced around everyone having equal(ish) access to everything.

somewhat related but having alt paint job ships as prizes would be cool... way better than tokens and more useful than coins...

Not really, at least seeing people's buying habits in my x-wing group. There's a bunch of people, maybe half of them, that only buy one of the factions, with the exception of expansions that have cards they want. Those players would end up winning a ship they never use. Even me, I buy everything but I play Scum 90% of the time unless I feel like running TIE-Ds or TIE Bombers, I've played Rebel 5 times since wave 2.

Everyone uses tokens. Also those coins are nice paper weights for your damage deck (granted you only ever need 1).

I could go for a limited edition paint job that contained only cards that have previously been printed elsewhere, but with alt art.

That would be cool; then you could have squadrons that were differing colors if you were a non-painter.

I refuse to support games with limited edition/exclusive prize ships. So I hope not.

Sorry, perhaps "Limited Edition" was a poor choice of words. They would not be special editions and/or only available to some, but rather ships would enter production for a period of time and then be phased out of production.

For example, the Rogue One ships would be available for a year, then "retire" when Episode VIII comes out to be replaced by ships from that movie.

Or, as an alternate question, what happens when there are several dozen ships in production at once? Can FFG and FLGSs continue to produce and stock huge volumes of ships? Hopefully, when this game reaches the 10 year mark, there will be up to 100 ships available. . .

It's still an issue. Imagine if x7 was only available for a year and you wanted to get into the game after. You either know buy the market up copies on ebay or play at a disadvantage to older players.

As for local game stores, if they can't stock it all at once I'm sure they can order it for you. If anything, if you do buy at local game stores I bet the owner would love you if you preorder stuff in advance. Knowing how much to order can be a pain.

Well, theoretically, if the x7 is not available there is something that functions in its stead and within the balance of the game, so you are only out of luck if you insist on flying Defenders.

Trust me, I would love to see this game in 10 years with 100 models still in production. But also, at that point, if they are selling 2 HWKs per year, would it make any sense to retool the die? Those things do wear out, eventually.

You only retool and reprint when you run out of stock, if a ship is not selling it's not running out of stock and does not require the costs of reprinting. If it does sell out then there is demand and a reprint makes sense.

With ffg having there own online presence it makes no sense to retire, stores don't have to stock everything.

The ONLY way this functions is to restrict competitive play to only currently in print ships (i.e. Standard format in Magic). Otherwise, you're basically telling new players to **** off and not bother.

The problem with this is that this is a miniatures game. I'm much less inclined to buy a ship if I'm not even going to be able to use it after a while. Half the fun of X-wing is seeing new life breathed into old ships by the upgrades in new packs. Like how Rage magically got a lot better with the announcement of Inspired Recruits.

This game cannot survive without access to the complete catalog. Alt-Art is all that can be limited release.