Right, but it's a player who knows enough about the game to decide ahead of time which class they want to play. So they either already have the book (which means they have all the cards and don't need these), or they're going off the SRD, or they're an assumed buyer of the stand-alone book that will be released soon.
And that player will be locked in to that class unless they buy a new class pack. At which point they'll have a pile of duplicate cards. Then there's the question of multiclassing, which lets you dip some cards. So will you have to buy a whole new pack just for that one or two cards?
not one or two cards; 6 subclass cards, of which 3 are relevant, and 42 domain cards, of which 21 or 42 may be relevant; having duplicates of the 18 racial and 9 environment is useful. (either way, it's shipping with 42... it's just that the second domain is only relevant if someone else is in that domain.
I see this as a way to deal with the player who overlaps one domain to be able to have duplicates. The PDF includes the card images, so... this is a luxury if you have a cardstock capable color printer, a nicety if you have a cardstock capable B&W printer, essential if you don't have a printer.
The core set has the book and all the cards for $60. When they do a stand-alone book release, it's a safe bet it's not going to be $40. It'll be $50 at least. I doubt they'll be selling the card packs for less than say $15 each. So one book and one card pack will set you back $65+. For $5 less you get all the cards. Or they sell the packs for $10, okay so one book and one pack costs the same as the book and all the cards.
So unless they stop selling the core set, these card packs will not sell. But, if they stop selling the core set, fans will freak out about the money grab.
D&D spell cards sell, and are totally not essential to play.
Spare player sets sold for WFRP3.
Special Ability decks by class sold for both D&D and FFG Star Wars.
It's a weird product that makes no sense to me.
It makes plenty of sense if you remember that
- Many players have bad handwriting and/or are writing averse
- Cards make vault management easier
- Cards can make X/session abilities easier to avoid using (flip once out)
- Most people don't have decent printers
- Most home printers are god-awful inkjets that make smeary messes on cheap cardstock
- Many GM's won't want to share cards
- Getting decent printouts is still not a given for home color printing, whether inkjet or laser
- Most copy shops I've been to charge $0.50 per page for color (UPS store, and a couple locals in corvallis; back in 2015, it was $0.50 at each of the places I used in Anchorage)
- The PDF pages are organized by level first, then domain or class within the level.
- Rogues are split across page boundaries; if you know the subclass, you can print just the one.
- The Grace Domain is split across page boundaries
To print the 30 pages of cards at my local copyshop would be $15. My costs at home on my color laser? probably about $5. Avoiding the hassle and buying a full deck? I'd be willing to pay $10.... more consistent, better color saturation, more durable (laser printer toner does, eventually, flake off)... but I'm not in the market for individual classes. I might go $15... or just do like the pregens in the intro module, and print a page of the cards for each player, cribbed from the cardbuilder webapp. I haven't played with it enough to know if it has a printable page builder hidden.
