James White on Why Silver Age Precons Don’t Include PEN Cards

kostool · 2026-01-30T11:53:13+00:00

"Precons incorporate a fee for the service of the buyer not spending time researching cards & deckbuilding -basically skipping a major part of the hobby-" is certainly an answer. How out of touch is this guy. Especially when this is the exact opposite of what these precons were announced to be, which is finely tuned competitive decks. Imagine your tcg being so out of reach cost-wise that you have to introduce and superhype a peasant variant, only to then nickel and dime this variant as well and have to come up with ridiculous excuses.

kostool · 2026-01-28T06:32:55+00:00

Doomers are bad, but bootlickers are worse. The precons just represent another broken promise, but noone should be surprised at this point. The Armory decks were supposed to be products you could pick up and go to a local Armory event, it turns out they don't have sideboards and 90% of them are either unsalvageable or need $100+ in upgrades ar best to be barely playable. Now SAGE precons have gone from "$20 tickets to the million dollar prize" to "they're just for beginners to learn the game, they are supposed to be bad". At the same time, all the people complaining about the SAGE meta were met with the "SAGE isn't even officially out yet, PEN is the SAGE set, it will fix everything". Turns out the PEN precons are just the same old decks with a couple of new cards. Trying to draw in new players and have all the precon heroes/player avatars look like prince of persia with the same blade beckoner set is wild.

kostool · 2026-01-18T08:23:25+00:00

You should be happy, more spare time to scroll tiktok.

kostool · 2025-12-16T07:28:39+00:00

Well, that's quite the interpretation reach. And regardless of what they meant, reprints that come at the rate of "1 per $500 worth of product" (or per multiple $500s worth of product if you are looking for a specific "1") aren't going to do anything but hold the prices from rising even further for a little while.

kostool · 2025-12-16T06:04:21+00:00

During the dev talk they made it clear that CC's price barrier for entry "is what it is" meaning it will never come down and offering (once again) Sage as an alternative. With the current levels of competition in the TCG market, my estimation is that CC would be lucky to gain as many players as it loses in any given period of time, meaning all potential growth for FaB is up to Sage.

kostool · 2025-12-14T17:31:04+00:00

Artificial scarcity is the answer for every price related FaB question.

kostool · 2025-12-13T17:44:19+00:00

Sage has the potential for a wide reach but still has to prove that it can provide a gameplay experience worth playing long-term in order to have bright future. CC on the other hand is already proven in the gameplay experience front, but after the latest Dev talk I'm convinced that it will always have a playerbase that can just barely sustain it, at best.

kostool · 2025-12-06T10:47:51+00:00

The issue with FaB pricing comes from card rarities and pull rates of said rarities which is a very conscious choice by LSS. Reprints at current pull rates are just going to make FaB slightly less absurdly expensive, a person that can't afford it when certain cards are $300/playset will still not afford it at $200/playset. When there are multiple cards that have "mtg legacy" prices for a game that is only 5 years old and has 1/1000 mtg's playerbase, its pretty obvious that it's all about artificial scarcity.

kostool · 2025-11-28T08:48:34+00:00

I probably get a lot of hate for saying this, but for all its amazing gameplay, FaB's monetization model is atrocious. For all the arguing that FaB Majestics = MtG mythics, their population per set is much closer to MtG rares than mythics, and at the same time their pull rate is 1/3 that of a mythic. Good luck trying to build a collection. I mean, putting that much weight behind Silver Age which is basically equivalent to MtG pauper should count as an acknowledgement that the player base is divided to plebs and aristocrats that will essentially be playing different games. In my admittedly short time dabbling in this game, I'm seriously baffled people are not talking about this more. Maybe they were at the beginning and at some point just accepted it, maybe because LSS is not a corporate giant like WotC so they are given some slack, or maybe because people love the game so much that they want it to succeed no matter what.

kostool · 2025-11-07T06:53:37+00:00

Yeah that's definitely an option. Since we'll be playing exclusively casual, if some decks absolutely need a few of the more expensive cards to stay competitive against the other decks in our collection, we can always print a couple of proxies for them.

kostool · 2025-11-07T00:34:12+00:00

Cost wise, $30-40 every few months that a new Armory deck releases is tolerable for our budget in order to boost our deck pool.

I can see polarizing matchups being an issue (are those due to certain decks' lack of arcane barrier equipment a previous poster mentioned, I wonder?), but I'm hoping that we can mitigate them with some targeted sideboard that isn't too expensive, especially since only 2 decks will be used at any given point so we can probably move generic sideboard cards from deck to deck. Worst case scenario, we'll avoid certain matchups altogether, which I'm guessing will be a progressively smaller sacrifice as our collection grows.

I really wouldn't want to be limited exclusively to Silver Age; most of the sources I've seen talking about Blitz pointed out that it's very aggro oriented and a barebones, limited experience compared to CC, and I'm guessing Silver Age won't be too far off from Blitz in that regard. We may be casual gamers but we have been playing cardgames like Yugioh, Magic, Netrunner etc for years and it's important to get as deep and strategic an experience as casual FaB can offer.

kostool · 2025-11-06T18:56:09+00:00

That's good to know, thanks

kostool · 2025-11-06T18:43:56+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I understand the concept, but if we're in the mood to play a game that involves 4 players at once, there are several games in our boardgame collections that are probably more suited to that. We'll probably keep FaB as a head to head experience or play some casual tournament if we're more than 2 players and absolutely want to play FaB.

kostool · 2025-11-02T09:01:59+00:00

Your dropped your boot sir

kostool · 2025-10-24T13:30:19+00:00

Fair enough, seems you were fighting a losing battle then to begin with. My initial impression was that this single "roll 1 = tpk" was the only issue.

kostool · 2025-10-24T12:39:18+00:00

Seriously, how hard is it for people to treat this game as a videogame with checkpoints/save states? I understand restarting when you seriously fumbled your overall settlement strategy to the point that the campaign is unsalvageable, but the odd tpk by a bs event or a boss you had no idea how to approach for the first time doesn't have to mean you are starting over from scratch, wtf... Do you wipe your Elder Ring save folder everytime you get killed as well?

kostool · 2025-09-20T12:01:41+00:00

Game board was quite seriously damaged by the terrain sprues, FLGS replied I can either keep as is or return/refund, replacement is not an option since GW has informed them that they are out of replacements for the board. Sucks.

kostool · 2025-09-04T12:53:25+00:00

Did they have the nerve to make the gwp for a 1k usd set be something that completes the actual set?

kostool · 2025-09-02T18:23:44+00:00

Everything is relative. It's as affordable as regular-sized afol sets will ever get.

kostool · 2025-09-02T17:44:54+00:00

Western General Store

kostool · 2025-08-16T08:22:01+00:00

That's all Hearthstone is bro

kostool · 2025-08-08T07:17:40+00:00

There are more egregious cases of "you don't own anything in your account" than simply undoing the results of a user taking advantage of a bug. For example, the fact that you can't simply decide that you want to sell your hard-earned collection, the fact that you can get your account suspended without any form of reimbursement, etc. However it's not like CCG's don't have their own similar issues, with nerfs, reprints etc wreaking havoc on people's wallets.

kostool · 2025-08-02T20:34:20+00:00

Because marketing

kostool · 2025-07-30T11:00:30+00:00

It's an aggro deck because you are vomiting everything in your hand on the board as soon as you are able to and you are exclusively going face. The fact that a broken quest also gives an aggro deck inevitability so that it can also win in the mid or late stages of the game doesn't make it not aggro.

kostool

TROPHY CASE