I love card games. This love starts back when I was a kid.
My dad played cards all the time. He taught me math by playing crib and we
frequently went to tournaments on Friday nights. Then in 1994 when I was
attending high school, I discovered a little game called Magic the Gathering
and the hobby of Collectible Card Game (CCG).
Let’s pause a moment and explain CCGs. A CCG is a
collectible game where you buy a starter deck of cards to learn the game. From
there, you can buy randomized packs of cards, rarely more than 15 but usually
10 cards to a pack, to build and expand your decks to be better, stronger and
win more.
We would play every day in the school library. There was a
thrill to opening a new pack of cards and not knowing what was inside. From
there, I ventured into my all-time favorite CCG which was Star Trek. I love
Trek and this put me in control of some of my favorite characters from the Next
Generation mythos. Over the next several years, I bought into several different
card games because I could and because the art was cool and because I had to
have them.
Let’s pause again. My name is Cory and I have an Acquisition
Disorder (AD). This means that it is almost always a losing battle when it
comes to stuff and the acquisition of said stuff. You see, I am like a dwarf
... I see something shiny (like a diamond in the stone) and even if it means my
demise (the wall falling on my beared head) I cannot help but acquire the shiny
bauble (even though I am now dead).
And there is the problem with CCGs, they are addictive. The
pursuit of better cards which are hard to find and expensive to acquire becomes
all consuming. Furthermore, I person with AD will be forever in pursuit of more
in a CCG because there is always more. This lead to my burnout from card games
for the better part of 10 years. I did not believe I would ever come back. But
I did ....
Once the Giddy Goblin in Hanover opened up and I began
working there, the cards began to call out to me because of my AD. Around the same time, I discovered a little game published
by Fantasy Flight Games called Lord of the Rings. They were marketing it as an
LCG with the difference between it and a CCG being that the Collectible part of
the hobby had been replaced by a fixed distribution where individual packs of
the same name all have the same cards as well as a full play set (maximum number
of the same card) for deck-building purposes. This definitely spoke to me since
I am now married with 3 kids and can no longer afford the collectible market
like I once did. So I did the math.
Magic releases 4 sets a year and to acquire
everything, I would have to buy 3 boxes of each set and probably still need to
do some trading to get the rest. A booster box is 36 booster packs and costs
about $120. So that is a yearly cost of $1,440.
Lord of the Rings costs about $35 for a core set and
I needed 3 to get everything. After that it is a monthly commitment of $12 for
an adventure pack and a semi-yearly commitment of $25 for an expansion. This
works out to a year one expenditure of about $299 and a yearly expenditure of $194
going forward.
And the conclusion is that for less money a month, I could
acquire all that an LCG had to offer and still be able to play a great game.
But I told myself that I would only commit to one.
And that lasted for the last year because now I am
considering getting into 2 more LCGs, Star Wars and NETrunner. So I have again been
doing the math taking into account for my AD. I have not bought either yet
because once I do I am all in regardless. This will be a struggle to determine
enjoyment versus cost.
Hmmmm, What to do ...
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