Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015 – Vintage Champions, A New Hope Pictogram part 2, Monochrome Rey, Journey of Qui-Gon part 4, Green Jabba the Hut Classic Art, ESB Illustrated Continued

A weird day today in #SWCT land. But first on to Thursday’s drops.

Today’s Vintage looks like a publicity photo from ESB featuring our main protagonists. Kind of cool. After some tough odds at the start of this wave, the last 4 drops have been at a reasonable 1:50 with 2500 printed. This is number 8 in the Wave 3 chase. People trying to complete the marathon must be excited to be so close to the end. I’ll be happy to just finish this wave. Fingers crossed so far so good. I traded a vintage dupe I’ve been holding on to for today’s insert.

So part of the start of today’s little oddities is apparently the wrong Pictogram insert was in today’s pack. There was an update at 12:45p ET that people who received the wrong card should have the correct card by then. Today’s card is a second version of A New Hope. This time rather than just the players, chronicles the story instead.

The most potentially damaging oops that happened today was when the new Monochrome insert dropped the Gray variant, instead of going to Master Access players first was available to all players for free. Not unexpectedly the card sold out in less than thirty minutes which was about the time I noticed the Transmission and checked to see that the free pack was no longer available. It wasn’t until later in the day when it was announced there would be a special Purple version that would be released to Master Access players for real this time and that it would be included in the Award chase in addition to the Gray (you could have either card to qualify). I have to say, they did a pretty good job of making up for the error, though there were still many complaints of people who spent credits trying to pull other variant colors to hopefully trade for the Gray variant before the announcement of the correction was made a few hours later.

The fourth Journey of Qui-Gon Jinn Pack was released today. This one called a Moment of Reflection. I don’t know, I feel like this one had some promise when it launched but I feel it slowly losing steam for me and I’m not quite sure why I keep collecting it. I also don’t know that the discounted odds really mean that much when you’re dealing in the short-term. I don’t know that you can actually feel the difference between 1:15 odds and 1:10 odds or even 1:50 vs 1:40. Sure over 1,000,000 credits maybe. But not in 20,000CR.

The Green Jabba the Hutt variant dropped in today. This one actually looks pretty nice in green. No drama with this card as far as I can tell, thought the numbers show that it has fewer pulls (by 66) than the Green Leia as Boushh which now has the second fewest. Is this set already losing it’s appeal only after 6 cards?

I wonder if low card counts could possibly be due to the wildly successful ESB: Illustrated cards. A new set of 5 cards (#11-15) were released today in Blue, Red, and Green. The final numbers for Green and Red are starting to shake out. The Green Variant #1-5 top out at a little over 1000 card count each. Surprisingly low, I think, considering card counts for most Steel were at about 13k when the Smuggler’s Den deal ended (they not stand at over 20k and quickly growing). At this rate there will probably be over 35k Steel when it’s all said and done.

That’s all for today.