Clix Conundrum

This shouldn't be a long post, as I won't be revisiting Mutations and Monsters in detail in this post. I'm just trying to look at how the experience of collecting it has gone, along with better determining where things stand as I look at the 2008 sets.

The set hit the streets the day before Thanksgiving, and the holiday along with the UPS shipping (UPS considers Black Friday to be something of a holiday, and will only deliver and significantly move high priority/air shipments that day and on weekends) conspired to see me wait until the following Monday for my delivery. I'd gone straight in for what I'd hoped would be a kill by getting two cases up front -- which is just 8 clix more than what we used to get in a single case under the pre-Avengers system. While in general I did well with the distribution, and even pulled above the statistical norm of 6 uniques/case, as with Justice League and Avengers I still ended up short by one Super Rare. Much as was the case with Justice League it turned out to be the one Super Rare that is more sought after than its fellows: Apocalypse. Though all manner of odd trades are possible, it's unlikely I'd find someone willing to trade an Apocalypse for any other, single Super Rare in this set, so my extras of Hulkbuster, Mastermind, Cassandra Nova, cosmic zombie Wolverine, zombie Iron Man or Silver Savage would not be likely to get me an Apocalypse... and I'm loathe to try trading 2:1 for him at this point.

This past Monday I played in the second sealed event (week five) of the nine-week M&M tournament series and didn't manage to pull an Apocalypse. At this stage I have no reason to buy any more boosters from the set -- it would be flatly stupid to do so in pursuit of one, super-rare piece. So, I'm essentially considering the booster-pullable portion of the set to be wrapped. Should one come to me in a trade or some other fashion, that'll be fine, but in the meantime I'm calling my set completed.

Despite being so mutant-heavy it was a fairly solid and enjoyable set which I'm still working my way through using. Next Monday night we have a 2007 event -- build a team of up to 20 characters, up to 2007 pts, using pieces from sets released in 2007. That should give me a good shot at using whatever pieces I want.

As predicted, the appearance of 6th element items (the Feats, Battlefield Conditions, Objects and Event Dials) made them individually sufficiently rare that one would be guaranteed to still at least be looking for four of them after buying a case (20 boosters), and depending upon extras of individual ones pulled and the desirability of having various items in multiples, even two cases of boosters is still likely to leave someone who likes to have multiples of Feats, Objects and some of the bystanders feeling rather anemic. The distribution of these within bricks and cases, though, seemed to be about as well done as they could manage, so those concentrated buys (along with considerations for discount pricing) remains vastly superior to any thoughts of buying loose boosters.

Speaking of pricing, the two cases, after all discounts and shipping were applied, yielded a per booster price of just under $7.19. Were I to buy them locally at a retailer they would be $10.99 + $0.66 tx = $11.65 per booster. A difference of $4.46.

While I still (minorly) lament having bought in at this depth without having come away with a truly complete set, I nonetheless am glad I went the way I did. Many of the extra cards were desired, and the set had several pieces I considered to be generic, and so would want to retail to build forces of: Brood, Cuckoo, Miek, Korg and Warskrull. While the last is a Super Rare (and I did end up with two of them) the first three are Commons and the fourth an Uncommon, so many of the boosters with familiar faces had one or more pieces that still went into my main collection rather than in with the extras.

As I look ahead to Crisis, a DC set, so far I'm left with less of a clear path. At the moment there are no pieces confirmed or even strongly rumored for the set that are generics. Indeed, two that were initially very likely - Shadow Demons and Thunderers - were pointedly removed from consideration because of a decision that straddles the line between the sadistic and the moronic: They were kept out of the expansion but one of each will accompany the Anti-Monitor in April's Anti-Monitor Action Pack.

So, instead of including them as commons in a set, where many of the collectors would be waiting to assemble large groups of them because that's how they appeared in the source stories in the comics, and so they would retain a value above their fellow Commons, a single one of each has been put in an Action Pack. A more obvious Lose:Lose move is difficult to conceive.

The decision on how deeply to buy into the set remains very difficult, especially when one knows that even buying two cases will not guarantee all of the pieces, but will most assuredly guarantee hefty numbers of extras in the Commons, Uncommons, and generally 1-3 extras of each of the Rares.

Well, it's hardly a life or death matter, or at least not until the next credit card statement...