Random packaging pioneered by WoTC with Magic, then followed up with their D&D minis and now everyone is trying to suck more $$$ out of us RPG fans by making everying "random".

Big corporation greed showing little concern for the long time fan/players of the game.

VERY bad form Paizo!!!

This idea was a brilliant one, until they tried to make it into a collectible card game. I was completely ready to buy this until I looked at the price and smelled something fishy. Then I looked at the fact that each pack contains "randomly selected cards" and groaned in frustration. The full 110-card set would have been perfect...but I have absolutely no desire to try to "get 'em all". I want the confidence to know that what I buy is what I want. A smarter move would have been to make "kicker packs" like potion and wand packs or a magical weapon pack. This....ugh, I just don't know. I guess it's good for a person who wants to randomly stock their dungeon...

At first, I was pretty turned off by the idea of a 'random' aspect to these cards. As a GM, I have no need for a 'random' or 'collectable' distribution format. I'm going to distribute the treasure I want to distrubute on pretty much any factor other than what card's I happen to own. I ranked this item at 1 star out of 5.

I'm going to pump this up to a 3. Here's why. I still don't like the randomness and I'd still prefer a complete set. The good news: there's going to be a complete set (at least, that's the word), so I'll get what I really want there. That's not so important as the real idea behind the booster packs, which is their disposability.

With my item pack 1, I'm a little hesitant to use them, since I've only got what came with the pack. If I want to give them out to players or write on the backs, the boosters give me that possibility without feeling like I've defiled my precious cards. So I THINK that's what we're looking at here, it's just a question of whether that's worth $3.75 to you.

The Idea of being able to have nifty cards that the DM can "pass out at the table" to help get players to view their treasures as more than filled in slots on the paper is an excellent one. I would love to be able to ask my players to hand me the card for the "potion of Heroism" or whatever they want to use instead of saying, "oh, I think I remember you used that two encounters ago, but I see its till on your list, so I'll have to pretend you still have it, but erase it right now." Only to miss the player fudging the system by re-filling the slot while I take a bio-break at the next session. Back in 1992 I had a very similar idea with various colord poker chips and game tokens for keeping track of potions and the like, and then had index cards made for the really cool weapons and armor that my players were hauling around. I thought maybe this would be a good replacement for what I lost in the flooding we had here several years ago, but as soon as I saw the words "booster pack contains xx random cards" I immediately blew this off as a no sale. Give me a whole set of 110 cards in one shot and maybe some 10 cards "boosters" for weapons, potions, wands, staves, rings, and then armor that aren't a total crap-shoot and we may have a deal. Especially when those notes on the back start making dagger A way cooler than dagger B and the rogues just want to filch it from the wizard that got the lucky draw.

The card mix is horrible. I bought 4 booster pack and only recieved 5 cards that we not duplicated. Second off, If I wanted more of what was in item pack 1 I would have bought a second item pack 1.

I will wait till the third expansion comes out before I buy any more pakcs.

I have to say, I'm a bit disappointed with these. I bought a booster box at GenCon and my first "surprise" was to discover that all of the cards from the original fixed deck are in here as well as the new ones, so net result is about 50% new cards. It would have been nice to know that in advance (I now have 4 sets of the plate armor...). Second, the mix on these is horrible. Out of 12 booster packs, there were at least 3 pairs of packs that were almost card-for-card identical and there were at least 3 other packs in which the foil card (and why do we even need foil cards?) duplicated one of the regular cards in the same pack. Woot! Two more sets of magic platemail! The old art is great, the new art is fantastic, but the mix REALLY needs to be addressed in future expansions.