In reply to Seppo.

Congrats on getting a set! I checked at a local store yesterday, and it sounded like they'd sold out on release day. (And were charging more than MSRP, so no big loss on my part).

I had no idea that there was a One Piece trading card game, which I guess is a good illustration of that idea of fragmented audiences and increasingly specific niches. And One Piece isn't a "small" IP by any measure!

I'm far enough out of the loop that I don't know what the "normal" prices for these things are, so I wouldn't have thought $8 for booster packs was unusually high. Maybe the Disney IP lets them price booster packs similarly to other collectibles, which people go nuts over?

I'm more intrigued by the game than the collectible aspect, although obviously the license is a big part of the appeal for me. Once they come out with Disney Parks-themed sets, I'm going to be hooked. It looks like there's some depth to it and just enough novelty to set it apart from Magic.

The mechanic that's most interesting to me is using almost any card for mana/ink, instead of a pool of land cards taking up space in your deck. It's one of those changes that would've seemed incidental before I started playing deckbuilders, and seeing how much of the strategy was devoted to cycling through cards.

The other that seems thematically appropriate even if it doesn't turn out to be huge in terms of mechanics: songs. It's a neat idea to have a character "sing" a spell instead of having to pay the mana/ink for it. There seems to be several mechanics that I think of as "Splendor-like," where you're trying to come up with engines that let you play cards for free.