Robot Claw – Page 317 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Highway Robbery

May 10, 2017

On May The Fourth – aka “Star Wars day” – I purchased this:

Don’t let the size fool you. It’s a single pack of Star Wars trading cards. Not just any cards though, the premium ‘High-Tek’ series from late last year. Here’s the inside of the box:

Topps spares no expense on packaging do they? Here’s how big that single pack is:

Now here’s the evil truth: this single pack cost me $60. Sixty dollars. Sixty dollars! Also it was on sale (due to Star Wars day). It’s normally $75!!

So let’s look inside:

Eight cards. Eight. $60 for only eight trading cards. Admittedly they’re all plastic, but there’s only 8 of them, and they all look sameish, and all feature characters of dubious interest.

I could go into lots of detail here about how the all-plastic nature of the set is actually a negative, or how these cards themselves aren’t even as good as the plastic chase cards in the Aus/UK Rogue One set (which was $1/pack!) but there’s really no need because they cost me $7.50 each and that’s highway robbery!

So why so expensive? It’s because each pack contains an autographed card. Here’s mine:

Yes dear readers, that’s the actual autograph of Jett “George is my dad” Lucas, legendary non-actor who played youngling Zett Jukassa in Episodes 1 and 2. I’m sure you remember his blink-and-you-miss-him character fondly.

Now instead of $60 for 8 cards, you could think of this as, say, $5 for 7 cards and $55 for this dudes autograph. Except the auto itself goes for about a tenner on eBay.

In short, this product is a total ripoff. Not worth it by any stretch for the cards themself, with an autograph of extremely questionable worth as my reward. I was taken for a ride by Topps 🙂

Am I bitter or regretful? Of course not! To be honest I didn’t expect much going in, so in that sense it lived down to my expectations. Plus the gambling factor can’t be denied: I could have found this:

Or an autograph by Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels, Daisy Ridley etc. Autographs by these main characters sell for $1000+ on eBay, and that’s the reason like a product such as this exists. It’s not even the most expensive SW trading card set!

So a total ripoff, which had a small chance of being amazing, but made a good blog post anyway 🙂

Lego Bridge

May 7, 2017

I got two similar-but-different kits for Christmas last year. I made them both today. First was this one:

I’d never made one of these miniature scale Lego architecture kits before and to be honest had dismissed them as an ‘executive toy’.

But it was a fun build and looks pretty good once made, especially considering the small size. It was easy and took only a half hour or so to make. But is Centerpoint Tower really black?

The other kit was this one:

I’ve got a bit of a love-hate relationship with nanoblocks. I like the tiny size of the blocks themselves, but feel the engineering needs some tweaking to increase the adhesion between individual blocks when assembled. In other words, these can be too fragile!

They’re also a bit fiddly to assemble. The bridge here in particular was trickier than it should have been and when I accidentally dropped and it exploded I had to start again almost from scratch! Eventually though, I got it done and here it is:

That’s a normal sized Lego minifig for scale.

I like how both kits felt the need to include boats on Sydney Harbour and the nanoblocks kit even went one step further to use the right colours for the ferry. These were quick and simple fun, but here’s hoping my next Lego Harbour Bridge will be some massive technic model 🙂

Quick Plays

May 5, 2017

Some of my recent posts have been too long so let’s keep this one short!

These are the two Planeswalker decks released with the new set Amonkhet. Each of them includes a few exclusive cards (including unique versions of the Planeswalkers) and a couple of boosters. The idea is you use the boosters to tune the deck, but I played as-is.

The decks are simplistic, big on creatures and games tended to turn into beatdowns. That said both decks were fun enough, although Liliana beat Gideon in every one of four games. Her deck seems to utilize the new mechanics better as well.

A good pair of decks for new players, or to introduce the Amonkhet set, but in my opinion not near as much fun as this next release…

I like duel decks in general. I think the price ($20) is right and the decks usually contain a good mix of unusual cards and are reasonably well matched.

This set though exceeded my expectations. Both decks are very heavy on spells (one has only 13 creatures) and the R/U one in particular is a combo deck that even includes cards with the hilarious ‘storm’ keyword!

They’re not greatly matched (Lovisa lost all but one of five matches) but they’re fun to play, which is what counts surely? I would have very much liked to play both of these with an actual other human player, and it’s been a while I’ve thought that of a duel deck. Recommended.