It is actually the most Kotomine Kirei move to insert himself as part of the plot because of his god complex I HATE HIM.

Sure there's probably some dumber stuff I want too, I'd love the Shadow Hearts games I suppose, but I feel so absolutely hollow that I don't know really.

It's just been a hard winter I guess.

I haven't talked about this because thinking about it pisses me off, but I was essentially blindsided by this requirement and it's made me really angry, because "two letters from a mental health professional" is such a fucking ass condition.

So I don't know, complicated feelings. If the price of sealed product rockets into the hundreds and the game doesn't really feel cheaper because whatever Fuwalos level staple that gets printed is like +$150, I'm just not going to be surprised.

We can see this with The One Ring or Orcish Bowmasters or Vivi Ornitier or Badgermole Cub. Cards that are ultimately incredibly strong and need to hold a set's value in lieu of pulling lotto cards.

This also makes sealed product really vulnerable to scalpers on the secondary market too.

Final Fantasy was the best selling set of all time and still Vivi demanded absurd prices, especially during pre-release. When you're a business and most of the boxes you open for in-store stock are worth nothing, you need some card you pulled to hold the weight of those boxes.

For products with smaller numbers of serialized cards and other big lotto hits, such as Lord of the Rings with its 1 of 1 One Ring or Final Fantasy with its extremely rare Traveling Chocobo alts, this can have the opposite effect, spiking prices even though a lot of product is being opened.

Brothers' War had a plethora of serialized cards of varying demand and popularity, and this helped to avoid the negative effects by keeping product prices lower and lowering the price of singles. There is still the issue that these cards make opening product for the layperson much worse though.

Magic has been doing this for years now and this greater focus on lottery products has had positive effects when implemented well (Brothers' War) and very negative effects when implemented poorly (every UB set). It isn't, I think, a uniformly positive act.

I have much more complicated feelings about serialized cards because opening more product isn't exactly always a good thing. When it comes to card prices, it is not merely a matter of supply but also how much money one invests in product and how that value is "distributed" in a product.

A move perceptive studio could have given us Keanu Reeves Kiritsugu