I'm forking this from a discussion on BGG. Someone brought up the point that many of the upgrades in Wave 2 are exclusive to one blister pack or another--if you want three tournament-legal copies of Expose, that will cost you $90. If you want to outfit a flight of A-wings with Daredevil, you would need to buy $75 worth of Imperial ships to do it. If you want a pair of Engine Upgrades for your Bounty Hunters, it will cost you $30 worth of Milennium Falcon.

And so on. I think going forward many people will be borrowing or trading or proxying or even forging cards, because acquiring additional upgrades in excess of the number of ships you want is prohibitively expensive. To put it another way, I would bet the people in FFG's audience who think that $30 per copy of Expose is a reasonable price are a tiny minority.

But there's an easy solution: FFG has an existing relationship with print-on-demand suppliers. They could feasibly print and ship a "Wave 1 Upgrade Pack", containing copies of each of the generic upgrade cards from that wave, and I bet they could do it fairly inexpensively.

I would pay probably $5-7 for such a pack, depending on the number of cards in the wave. If they included 2 or 3 copies of each upgrade, I would pay $10-15, which is the cost of another expansion pack to me--but I bet FFG's profit margin would be a lot higher on upgrades than on minis.

This seems like a win-win: X-wing players get tournament-legal upgrade cards at a much more reasonable price than they would by buying additional expansions. FFG gets a set of new products for the X-wing line, with no additional development costs and a drastically better margin than the full expansion packs. And they could be sold even to players who are otherwise "saturated" with product; I'm very unlikely to buy more ships from Wave 1, but I would buy a couple of packs of upgrade cards tomorrow.

What do you all think?

The idea of extra card packs and pilots etc. has been discussed here a few times now and from what I can tell the concensus is positive toward buying packs like this.  Print on demand weapon, astromech and pilot cards would be useful to keep costs down so yes I would pay for these if they didn't produce physical packs.

Personally I would prefer to buy physical card packs instead since having to buy decent paper and use up my wife's printer ink is a headache :)

This sounds like a freaking amazing idea!! Bravo!! I would definitely do that tomorrow!

I doubt I would buy POD packs unless that was the only way to get cards (and I hope it never is).  I would much prefer and would happily pay for released sets of upgrades and additional pilot cards though.

I'm not a fan of POD as I'd rather have FFG produced, nice cards, than print them out myself.

I'd also prefer released packs so that I could get them from my FLGS instead of being forced to go direct to FFG.  My FLGS provides me with a place to play and a ready pool of plastic-crackheads (Ooops!  I mean gamers!) so I would prefer to leave them in my purchasing loop.

Jim

You would not print these cards out yourself.  Print on Demand means Fantasy Flight prints out the cards when you order them.  

Read about it here:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_npm_sec.asp?eidm=59&esem=1

I fully support this idea, and I would add that if they made packs that included all the upgrades so far, they could also throw in a couple extra astromechs and maybe another ship modification. This would undoubtedly make some upset that you "had" to buy the POD release to get them, but would be cheaper than the current setup as you have pointed out.

Carist said:

Now that I have been properly educated (THANKS!), I amend my position.  Yes, I'd be interested in pod cards, especially since I could get them through my FLGS instead of direct from FFG.

Jim

I would be interested in PoD upgrade, pilot, etc.. cards.  Also would love a "token pack" with extra shield, stress, dmg, etc… tokens.

flvolunteer said:

This, except replace "would be interested" with DO THIS NOW.

Yes, PoD sounds great (now i know what it really means) even with a few extras to entice people.

Sounds like a good idea, thought I suspect FFG may be reluctant to do that, since there is less incentive then for you to purchase their more expensive expansion packs, which include them.

Appears to me they are following the GW model, where the good options are limited, and you have to pay dearly to obtain them.

It won't be an issue for casual games, with friends, but will be if you want to play in official tournaments.

I do not have any experince with PoD.  My only concern is that not all casual gamers would be in tune with it and it could create a disadvantage to those that know about it.

FFG already has a precedent for releaseing card packs as they did multiple times with Wings of War.  I would definately be in favor of that.

I am new and so far really like the concept especially since I am a WoW/WoG player.  I do see not including more upgrade cards or selling an upgrade pack as a major drawback especially since the upgrade cards that come in the expmasion packs are not unique to a specific ship.

Sounds like a good idea to me…..I would buy a upgrade pack of cards

I would definately purchase PoD products. Actually, I already know what I want - Stealth upgrades for every ship I own! 

POD is not for me. I'm old school. If you don't buy the kit, you should not be able to get the goodies that go along with it.

I may be in the minority here, but to me,  this is a Minitures game that uses Cards. It is not a Card Game that uses some Minitures. If you want the cards, buy the kit.

magadizer said:

I'd be fine with that, but I'd hope the new cards were doubled up in the packs so we didn't have to get full bunches of all the current cards for each copy of the new ones we wanted.