Supernova: Opening day taste
Despite the bulk orders I'd placed arriving tomorrow, I bought four boosters at a local shop while out for lunch this afternoon. It's my U.S. heritage of conspicuous consumption on display.
I'm reasonably pleased so far.
All bases and figures match up, no broken flight stands, though one card was mildly bent and another had a tear a quarter of the way through it. (The latter's a first for me, and hopefully not something I'll be seeing more of.) Early horror stories concerning bricks and cases have been running rampant, and those are among the complaints out there.
Among the alien generics - pieces I'm hoping to be able to build useful forces out of - I was pleased:
Kree Colonel V
Badoon R & V
Skrull V
Which add to the Skrull R, Badoon R and Kree V I came home with from the pre-release to get me off to a good start out of a combined 6 boosters. As noted back on the 28th, two of the generics I brought home from the pre-release were ones I traded for. I'm expecting that only the Skrulls will end up being tough trades -- more people want to hold onto those -- while the others (the Badoon in particular) will likely find people looking to trade them for other pieces.
Among the remaining REV pieces I pulled:
Bulldozer R
Thor R
Vance Astro R
Weapon Alpha R
Doc Spectrum E
Kang E
Nocturne E
Sunspot E
Super Ape Mikhlo E
Jubilee V
...not ideal, but I'm not going to complain about it with respect to four, random boosters.
Nocturne, Sunspot and Jubilee are pieces at the foot of my want list for the set -- and even then only for completeness and the possibility that someone I end up playing with wants to have them available for a theme team.
Fortune smiled when it came to Uniques, at least in terms of the general 1 in 3 odds as I pulled two:
Karnak
Super Skrull
...which were also two of the ones I definitely wanted.
As for the cardboard elements:
Bystander: Jane Foster
BFC: Damage Control
Feats: Squadron Supreme & Toxic Burst
So... for four, random boosters, this looks fairly good.
It has me thinking that my approach to DC sets (especially seeing as how there'll be two of them in '07, with only one Marvel one) may very well turn to a brick, playing in the pre-release if possible, one or two marquees and maybe another sealed match or two, then trading beyond that point. With new case prices haven risen recently and my being much more laid back with respect to DC sets, I believe that's how I'll approach at least February's Origin and (approximately) October's as yet unnamed DC sets.
Seeing what fortune brings, making some trades on the fly and perhaps trading some of the voluminous excess from earlier sets should be fun. I don't know if I'm at the stage where I'm sufficiently laid back enough to do that about a Marvel set, though.
Tags: Supernova
Comments
I don't know. I guess I came in late enough to miss Tony's oft mentioned 'Galactus debacle', but there have been plenty of debacles since. I can see how WK has trouble holding its fan base.
My guess is, though, that the secret of HeroClix success lies largely in cheap overseas manufacturing, and if WK tried to change that process so they'd have better quality control, they'd price their boosters right out of their target market's reach.
Ahhh, it's all conspicuous consumption, as you note, anyway.
Random booster picks can swing either way, as we've seen. The balance of rare-, uncommon- and common-tier clix appears to be holding within boosters based on my pulls so far and what I saw from others in the pre-release.
Bricks appear to still be the biggest crap shoot in the hobby, though some of the case reports suggest similar chaos exploding into the case level. ::sigh::
The most frustrating thing is that we know they can do each element correctly -- they've done it in parts along the way -- but nothing ever appears to stay "fixed."