Hi.
I recently registered on these forums and had a bit of a look around the FFG site, and I noticed these living card games separate from the collectible ones, which intrigued me. You see, I played lots of CCGs at one point and I really enjoyed them to begin with. I only really played with friends and we were all getting similar amounts of cards, and so no-one had any absolute killer decks.
After a while, some of my friends became a bit more "hard core", and started buying single cards for ridiculous prices and making unbeatable combos, and it all got a bit dull for me, being a player who prefers to design a deck around an interesting theme than a particular combination of cards. So I stopped playing for a while, and most of the games I had played died out.
Then I went to university and a friend got me to start playing CCGs again, so I went out to buy new cards and started to bet my head around new rules and eventually became horrified to find that with all the new expansions and all the new kids playing CCGs, the unbeatable combos had moved from an annoying aspect to the only way the game was played, and the new expansions were designed to form these ridiculous and from my perspective unfun combinations of effects and new special rules. So, I founds that the games I liked playing were the ones that had been discontinued, simply because noone seemed to have such complete collections and there weren't so many cards that combinations had become over-powerful.
So, what I'd really wanted to ask is, has making these LCGs non-collectible altered things in any way? Has giving everyone the same cards meant that there's less emphasis on getting hold of rare expensive cards and combining them into unstoppable combinations, and is there any problem with power creep of the new expansions and combinations?
PS I'm sorry I've written so much here, but I wanted people to see where I was coming from
Oh, and I don't mean to offend anyone, I know there's people who like to play the best cards and enjoy that, I'm just saying I don't like to play that way, and I don't think it should be the only way to play.