Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2015 Recap – New Set: Card Trader Illustrated, Gold Classic Art Lando, Bounty Chewbacca, Final Journey of Qui-Gon Ginn, Stormtrooper Die Cut, Work Together to Increase Locks

A somewhat complicated, new set called Card Trader Illustrated arrived today. This is another set with its sights set squarely on the big spenders… or as the Reddit community might have you believe also a way to ensnare cheaters with emulators and  unfair trading partners. Either way, at 500k and 900k per box (I’ve read there were supposed to be 10 Golds in the 500k pack but I haven’t seen any confirmation and I haven’t seen how many total cards come in the box) for one or two guaranteed inserts respectively, is a bit over the top for the average free-to-play player. Also, except for the Red variant, the odds are not given and cards are limited to the unknown quanity of boxes sold in 48 hours. It will probably be more clear once the 2nd card drops. One other thing that is clear right now is that Gray will be the most common variant. There is a higher chance to land a Gray variant because it’s separate availability in 5000 credit packs (at 1:125 odds). If I paid 500,000 credits, I would be a little disappointed if I pulled a gray.

We got the Gold variant of the Lando in Disguise Classic Art 2 card today. A little change from the preview few weeks when the Green variant dropped second. Topps is mixing it up, I wish they would mix up the drop times some more and not make them so early in the day on the West coast.

The Bounty today is Chewbacca. The 3rd Lightside character in a row and two more to go to finish the marathon.

The 10th and final Journey of Qui-Gon Jinn card dropped today: “One with the Living Force.” The award will be given out this Tuesday, October 6 at 10am PT.

The Die Cut card today is the Stormtrooper. The Master Packs must not be selling very well or the odds are too tough as they went on sale later in the day for 7500 credits.

The 4th Yavin in four days dropped today. It’s called, “Death Star Schematic.” What would really be cool is to actually get a Death Star Schematic drop, thought it would probably cost many hundreds of Resources.

Finally, there was something interesting today. A new pack was introduced but no new insert associated with the pack. The Community Chase: Lock Pack is designed as a way for the community to “vote” or “gift” extra locked card slots to the whole SWCT community. Buy opening a Lock Packs (2500 credits, 5 points), making trades to unique users (1 point), or buying a credit bundle (50 points), if the community can raise one million points every one will get the extra lock slots. I supposed its like buying war bonds. I’m going to do my duty by making more trades for my hoard card, Mas Amedda.

I wanted to respond to the Star Wars Trader Blog which basically had negative view of the Lock Chase event. In short saying

• Topps is putting value to a functional part of the game that had no value and there for changing the nature of our relationship (in a negative way) with the game.
• By charging 2500 credits for essentially nothing, they are trying to scam us out of credits
• and there’s no way for the community to chart the progress of the chase.

It’s a good article. You should read it.

He or she makes some valid points but I have a slightly different take because I think I see the game differently. I see the challenge at face value. Sure they could probably just change some lines of code and give us 100 locks quite easily (many have pointed out that Bunt already allows that). I think they decided, why not encourage more trading by making it a trading challenge and try to make it a game. In general, I think people want the ability to lock more cards to reduce the number of stupid trades people get for cards they have no intention of trading. People have worked around this by creating secondary accounts to hold those cards they don’t want to trade (the propriety of this is subject to debate as well, but it’s generally allowed if trading is not “excessive” or deemed cheating). The flipside to this, of course, is that it is antithetical to trading to have too many locked cards because it limits the receiving party their ability to counter an unequal trade.  Again, alt accounts are used by many traders solely for trading. They stock the trading account with a few mediocre cards and try and trade up knowing the trading partner must accept (sometimes by accident) or decline but usually has no ability counter. So from Topps’ perspective. If they want more trades to happen they want to remove more locked cards not add more. A compromise, let the community work toward getting more locks. That comes to the second point. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy those packs. I think they’re basically there to encourage people to trade. This is not anything new. They are more or less just like those useless packs they release during a Monument chase. It’s there as a count down timer. Finally, by not showing the progress (though they still might) then the community can’t really fail. I’m sure because of all the packs that dropped today (see above) and the packs that will drop tomorrow, there will be enough points in credit bundles purchased to make a huge dent in the million credits need. Then all the trading that happens on a daily basis (I like at least 10-20 trades to different people a day for my hoard card). I highly doubt they will take this away from the community.

Good hunting.