As we know recently with Song of Summer, Winds of Winter, and now War of the Five Kings, packs are starting to get scarce, and people are hiking up the prices as a result.

I've been following War of the Five Kings on Amazon, and it's since doubled in price and hung there for awhile. I wonder what will be next.

I see this going two ways once this gets bad enough: Either FFG reprints the packs, or rotates out the early sets.

An official word from FFG would be nice, since regionals are coming up.

The official word from FFG back when the LCG model was created was that nothing would ever rotate out and that once the cards were unavailable form their warehouses, that was it. I don't think you can blame FFG for people jacking up the retail and/or resale prices. That's like saying it was FFG's fault that certain rare cards were going for $30 a pop on the secondary market in the CCG days. They don't have a whole lot of control over it.

Considering that Regionals Season starts in roughly three weeks, I think it's safe to say that the tournament rules we have today, updated less than a week ago, cover FFG's current official stance. Cards from those sets, except for the two that are banned, are going to be legal for the foreseeable future.

Black and White Ravens aside, is there really anything so power, necessary, or fundamental from those cycles that they create an unfair advantage for those who have them? What are the cards in those cycles that make it necessary to either keep the entire set in wide retail availability or banned from competitive play entirely? Wouldn't reprinting select cards in the next deluxe expansion make more sense than banning or rotation?

Personally, in terms of a "rebirth of the CCG," I'm more concerned with the steep power-creep curve we're beginning to see than the availability of the earlier CP cycles.

ktom said:

I think the season cycle is still one of the strongest. There really are some powerful cards there. Obviously season ravens, carrion bird, wintertime marauders,every houses refugees, samwell tarly, renly baratheon, game of cyvasse, tommen baratheon, northern cavalry flank, ice fisherman, jeyne westerling, maester of sun and the summer/winter agendas still are the most seen ones in tournaments.

Since they have been reprinting other sets it would make sense if they continued especially the season cycle.

ktom said:

I'm not saying it's FFG's fault. I'm saying that knowing a little more about the future of the game would be nice before I drop 20 or 30 dollars on a pack I only need 1 card out of. If that is their official word, that is fine.

I really like the re-printing select cards idea... but again, I'd like an idea that FFG is going to do this. Are they going to reprint not just the ravens, but the excellent summer/winter cards as well? Or are they going to try to have power creep swallow them up? If neither of these happens, then yes, they will create an unfair advantage, or at least an advantage based on $.

~~~~
As far as specific cards...
Pyromancer's Cache, Castellan of the Rock, and Tommen come to mind immediately, only because don't dabble much outside of Lannister.

How about Fancy King Renly? Gilly? Summer Champion? I dunno much about what else is out there. Ire had some good ones.

Or maybe that the balancing factor of Summer and Winter is the idea that it's opposite is floating around somewhere. As the cards get more and more rare, you will see less Summer and Winter, and the agendas will get even stronger.

-Here's an example. Martell comes out with an amazing event. Something like pre-errata Prince's Plans.
-Martell Summer can use Open Market to recur this event.
(This is later in the game's life, when Summer and Winter decks are more scarce, and there are less Carrion Birds floating about.)

Why would I not play this deck in a competitive environment? I get free draw, a 2 card combo that gives me extreme advantage, and almost no penalty to running this agenda.

Oh, I can't afford it... that's right.
This is where the CCG aspect comes in.

Even though some of the other cycles are still floating around, eventually they will phase out, and the same thing will happen.

If FFG does end up not doing 3x reprints of A Clash of Arms and A Time of Ravens and they go out of print, I would hope that FFG rotates out those sets out. If the sets are not available, but still legal, that just seems to me to go against the spirit of the LCG model. It's not like you can't be competitive without cards from those cycles, but it would be frustrating to play people who are using cards you can't get anymore. That just seems to close to the pitfalls of the CCG model that we're trying to avoid.

I think we could rotate out A Clash of Arms with fairly minimal effect--we lose out on the Fury plots, Pyromancer's Cache, and really only a handful of other cards people use a lot, but we also eliminate the only two banned cards--but as others have pointed out, A Time of Ravens has a whole lot of very important cards.

Ire said:

The season cycle is strong but it doesn't have any restricted or banned cards either. Only one card has received a nerf via errata (Carrion Bird). Reasonable balanced cycle over all. Aside from stock issues for 4 of the CP's I don't see why they shouldn't reprint this.

alpha5099 said:

I don't have a link to the original press release from when FFG switched the game to an LCG, but it said that the reason that some cards only had 1 copy per pack was because they wanted to keep a rarity system. They just didn't want the system to be as bad as it is in CCGs. So, having limited quantities of some cards IS in the spirit of the LCG model.

Still, I would guess that FFG never expected the card game to get as big as it is, which is why stuff is now selling out. So, we'll just have to wait and see what they do.

sWhiteboy said:

Equal access can only be considered at a particular point in time. Is it unfair that Ford doesn't sell the Model-T anymore, even though there are some people that would like to buy one?

I respect that they can do whatever they want, and never reprint these cycles...

Looking at the shelves in our store, they have rows upon rows of the north & kings landing cycle. Obviously they havent sold as many as they thought they would, as the big buyers had already bought 3x of the original printing.

ffg might be seeing the same thing, sales might not be as good as expected to warrant reprinting the rest...

if they decide not to reprint... well, im not sure how that sits with their LCG vision. i would have to be in favor of rotating those cycles out, but i hope it does not become a habit...

ktom said:

The only problem I see here is that FFg is running events where the prize support involves something many would like to have an equal chance of winning. If some people do not have an equal access to the cards they need to win these games then how is that fair?

I've been waiting to buy these packs just in case they get reprinted. There is a lot of fun stuff in there that I would like to try out, but only 1x of a lot of unique cards makes it hard to pull the trigger. Even if they had just done 2 copies of everything in the older packs I would have gotten them.

Wrecking Ball said:

You can ask the exact same thing of any CCG Ever. its not.
The question here is, does that fall within FFG's vision of what they want their LCG's to be?

I would hope not, but i hope for alot of things.

ktom said:

I wasn't around when the LCG model was first announced, but the literature FFG currently produces to promote their LCG clearly states that equal access is a part of their mission statement:

"LCGs® have no rare or promo cards that need to be chased. This ensures that games are determined by a player’s deck building skills and play strategies, rather than who spent the most money in pursuit of hard-to-find ultra rare cards. The fixed format means that every player has equal access to every card needed to build his or her deck ."

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_npm_sec.asp?eidm=14&esem=1

Obviously the LCG still doesn't have rare cards in the way Magic and other CCGs maintain rarity, but if the first two cycles go out of print without being rotated out of the card pool, that'll be something of an academic distinction. Right now, it's nearly impossible to find several older packs, including A Song of Summer and The Winds of Winter. Those packs recently showed up on eBay, the first time I've seen them available in many months, and they were marked up to something like 30 dollars. Prices are only going to get higher, and it's only going to make it harder to find those packs.

ktom said:

QFT I have to agree here. But that is going to be more and more of a problem as the card base gets larger and larger. You either have heavy power-creep, or you don't have demand for your product *shrug* No CCG/TCG/LCG company has been able to stay rotation free very long without heavy power-creep, it is just the nature of the beast.

Also, it gets more an more imposing for someone new to get into the game, if you need to buy $1,000 of cards (and rising).

But, like Social Security, that time isn't here yet so we might as well ignore it

However, I don't think the Model T comparision isn't the best - unless you are talking about power creep again. No one would be missing out on anything in competative racing w/o 1920's era product. You would be at a disadvantage not having different packs.

rings said:

Actually, I think that time is about here...I'll start another thread about it.

As someone who started playing within the last year, I would hope that they will be reprinting any old sets that go out of print. At the same time, I don't have an endless budget to spend on the game. I would have never gotten into this game if it were a CCG. The whole appeal was that my friends and I could all compete without spending crazy amounts of money.

When faced with buying old chapter packs versus new releases, I tend to go with the new ones because of the power creep mentioned by others. There are always more cards that I want from the new chapter packs than any old one. For someone new to the game, it's hard to get caught up on the old cards when new ones are coming out every month. I would personally be happy if they would release chapter packs at a slower pace than they are currently coming out.

I do think that a great way of handling the out-of-print cycles would be to release a deluxe expansion with 3X copies of the best/most used cards from that cycle and rotate out the rest. Old players can still use the cards they bought in the first printing, while new players can catch up easier. You would also avoid the problem of certain chapters being more sought after than others.

The only problem I see with doing this from a business perspective is it completely eliminates the value of any unsold chapter packs in that cycle. But otherwise it would allow people to buy an older cycle at an overall lower price-point, catch up on cards that they've missed, and keep competitive balance while not forcing too many cards out of rotation.

Zap Rowsdower said:

I've killed men for less

jack merridew said:

Again, this is coming from a new player. I like having more time to experiment with the new cards before additional ones come out. One of my favorite things about this game is that there are very few cards that I see and think "I would never use that in a deck."

ROWSDOWER!

"I wonder if there's beer on the sun."

alpha5099 said:

I think I should start designing a MST3K card game. Balance in card design would not be a focus. Might have to steal basic concepts, such as "plot" cards. The objective could be to make your opponents lose their sanity from making them watch bad movies.

alpha5099 said:

Glad I'm not the only person that came back to this thread for this.