The Lycian League: super rare

Friday, July 10, 2015

Feature: Booster 1: Warblade of Heroes Box Opening

Our Cipher orders arrived earlier this week, so it's high time we get on with our first box opening. In addition to the Warblade of Heroes booster box we also ordered a War of Darkness starter deck and 25th Anniversary sleeves. We made our purchase on AmiAmi prior to the game's availability over Amazon; AmiAmi's base price was the most competitive online at the time, but once shipping is factored in it only becomes worthwhile if you're ordering additional products (or multiple boxes) on top of that.

Whether Amazon is worth your money now that there's several import services getting in on Cipher depends on your order; several Amazon sellers are offering free shipping but charging ~$70 per item, while AmiAmi is doing EMS shipping that will generally work out in the range of $30~36 depending on how many items you order and their combined weight, but only charging ~$40 per box. So if you're ordering multiple boxes, AmiAmi will generally work out as a better deal than buying through Amazon--two boxes on Amazon is ~$140, whereas on AmiAmi that would work out to ~$110. But if you're only ordering one, Amazon is better suited for that.

Our promo for the box is "Princess of Nohr, Corrin (♀)." Each Warblade of Heroes box comes with a print of either Corrin (♀) or Corrin (♂).

Each side of the box contains eight packs, with ten cards in each; depending on which card is the Rare or Super Rare, there are either 5 blue and 5 red cards in each pack, or 4 of one color and 6 of another. Each side contains six Rares and two Super Rare or higher cards.

Our first Super Rare was actually a signed Super Rare+! "Angelic Advocate of Affection, Caeda."

Our holos broke down as follows: "Eldest Pegasus Sister, Palla" (R), "Middle Pegasus Rider, Catria" (R), "Youngest Pegasus Sister, Est" (R), "Princess, Minerva" (R), "Angelic Advocate of Affection, Caeda" (SR+), "Gentle Flower of the Shepherds, Sumia" (R), "Pegasus Knight Paragon, Cordelia" (SR), "Wellspring of Youth, Nowi" (R), "Demure Dancer, Olivia" (R), "Man of Flower's Fragrance, Inigo" (R), "Sweetest Assassin, Gaius" (SR), "Guardian of Rosanne, Cherche" (R), "Exalted Strategist, Robin (♀)" (R), "Princess of Ylisse, Lissa" (R), "Chosen Warrior of Hope, Owain" (SR), and "Stoic Swordsman, Lon'qu" (R).

Overall the total value of the box's contents ranges from $70~$92 depending on whether you're looking at averages or peak highs for each card. Caeda and Cordelia together pushed up the cumulative value immensely. The pulls were about as blue as you can get; 11 blue holos and 5 red.

All of our red Normal and High Normal pulls.

All of our blue Normal and High Normal pulls. In total we're 14 cards short of having every nonsigned card in B01.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Price Guide: Week of 6/21 Through 6/28

The following is a price guide for the week of 6/21/2015 through the week of 6/28/2015, comprising the primary high-rarity cards from B01: Warblade of Heroes. Rather than relying on auction sites to determine prices, the prices given below are based on averaging the day to day most expensive cards at Card Kingdom's Akihabara branch, at Grand Panda Canyon in Akiba, and at Cardbox Japan. Future guides will include additional retailers' in the price averages; at this time Card Kingdom and GPC are two of the biggest shops in the secondary market, with Cardbox being secondary to them, and web stores have yet to seriously adopt Cipher. In general GPC's prices are slightly higher than Card Kingdom's. The timeframe for the weeks given below is more limited than it may appear; Cipher launched on the 25th and the first price lists from a shop came out on the 24th, while the week of 6/28 ends on the 1st of July. 7/6/2015: Finalized prices for the week of 6/28 ending on 7/1 are now up.

Although most of the cards that made this list are Super Rare or above, the promotional cards "Prince of Piercing Principles, Chrom" and "Stoic Prince, Marth" are also included; unlike most promotional cards, these are not alternate artwork reprints of existing cards, but have a unique skillset and low availability. Chrom was given out to participants at official demo events of Fire Emblem Cipher, while a holographic print of Marth is packaged with the Japanese special edition of Fire Emblem: Fates. The difficulty of acquiring these cards and the small number distributed is driving up the price more than their skills.

"Knower of the Future, Lucina" is the breakout hit of the set, consistently outdoing other SR-rarity cards and coming out of this week at 1600 yen per card. Her signed SR+ print is currently the most expensive card in the game, averaging at the currency equivalent of over $50.

To convert from yen to US dollars, the quickest and easiest way is to introduce the decimal point two spaces in. So 400 yen becomes $4, and 4500 yen $45. However, this is only a pneumonic device, and should not be substituted for the real exchange rate. The real exchange rate of the yen is not 100 yen to $1 as is often thought, but is closer to 80 yen to $1 and fluctuates frequently. To get a truly accurate conversion, use either Google Finance's currency conversion or another financial exchange service.