(Some people on this forum think there should be a lower proportion of rares in the set. That would help me because I have a small budget, but I have an alternate suggestion and a question to go with it. There's a bit of discussion before I get to my question so please bear with me.)
To Jeff Donais,
As a ccg player, I'm sure you're familiar with how hard it can be to get enough of certain rares to fill out your particular deck design. If you need four copies of XXX rare, you have a challenge to get them. This challenge is utterly dependent on the structure of the rare card. Why is it rare? Is it rare because it has a good, utilitarian design that would help almost any deck? Or is it good because of an extremely potent, but specific game mechanic?
As an example of the first way a card is rare, Zapped Giants or Saltwater Snapjaw are rares that would be good and helpful in almost any deck. Everyone wants good allies that are almost invincible late game or a way to get more ability cards to their hand. However, that means that there are a LOT of players that will want 2, 3, or 4 versions of these kinds of cards for their deck. This is a huge problem. A more extreme example is the epic, Magni Bronzebeard. You probably would never need four copies, but if every alliance player wants 1 copy for their deck (how could he ever not be helpful generating 1/1 allies?) the card would be almost impossible to trade for.
Now, the second way a card justified as rare is to be extremeley potent, but specific in use such as pyroblast or flamestrike. These are fantastic cards for a mage (fire mage in the case of pyroblast) but are no help at all in building a deck for your night elf druid or orc hunter. Well, that person with the druid or hunter deck can just trade pyroblast to someone with a mage deck for a powerful druid or hunter card. That means someone playing a fire mage deck has a real chance of getting three or four pyroblasts for his deck without needing to buy several boxes of boosters. Also, the players who don't want pyroblast and get it in a pack can easily trade it for something they do want.
So we have powerful utilitarian rares that every player and collector is trying to get versus very powerful, class or deck style specific rares that some people really want 4 of but are trading material for others. There are HUGE consequences for a CCG if the designer (you!) focuses on one type or the other. I used to play Decipher's Lord of the Rings CCG. In their first few sets, they made most of their rares in the utilitarian style. This created a game culture where maybe half the rares were highly sought after cards that every player needed 4 of and the other half were seen as useless both for play and trading. In later sets, they focused on the specific use but powerful type of rare and had a much healthier trading culture. They were able to make their players happier, have a wider variety of effective strategies and play styles, and increase player trading without reducing the proportion of rares in a set or hurting the company's bottom lane.
So my question is, Has the design team for WoW CCG made a conscious decision to tend toward one type of rare or the other?
I'm sure you can tell where I think they should go.
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