User blog comment:Manapot3/Mana's VC Blog 2/@comment-2098192-20160422213902

I thought I'd just add a couple of things:

1) Card reskins (like trading) has a good and a bad side.  You mentioned the bad, so I thought I'd just point where I think it is good.  When cards are reskins of one another, the meta is more stable and power creep is not constantly in your face, so you aren't playing keep up with the jones every single event.  This effectively makes the game a cheaper for people who do premium summons for power and just enjoy collecting L/Faws mostly for the art, and who don't enjoy the feeling of their deck quickly becoming obsolete.  Really the only power creep we've seen in recent times has been nadesiko, oracle chair, hiraga for really advanced players and possibly eternal fortuna. Note that 2 of those 4 are not even summons.  The machinegun (halloween hades/gils/etc) and salvo (Atlanta/Hiraga/etc.) meta has existed since halloween of last year, that's 6 months of stability and use out of the same team, which I personally view favorably. I can buy cards if I like the art, but I'm not compelled to keep buying cards to keep team power up.

2) For premium summons cost of H/GUR is not as hard as I first though.  When I first dived into premium summons I was prepared to take a huge beating, but it appears there is an unadvertised 'bonus' rate to featured cards.  In the past (I haven't summoned in over a month now), you roughly had a 50% chance of summoning the event unit, and a 50% chance of summoning another random UR.  Watching the summon pages recently though has made me think that Mynet has possibly adjusted this hidden bonus rate (I tend to call it the pick-up rate, a term from another, now defunct game.); I'm guessing it's now 25%.

I've done a number of cost and risk analysis and VC (before the recent suspected change) is one of the cheapest mobile games I've ever played. Mynet just recently showed they want to increase the prices though, as you can see through their special summon rate % decrease (and effectively price increase).

3) This game is much more F2P friendly... if you're willing to dedicate the time.  I've played too many games where you are brick-walled hard even if you can invest the time.  Also, finding an alliance to call home, if one is relatively dedicate, reaps much larger rewards (and thus a much easier path to getting kick-started); most other games don't even offer this path.

4) free currency in this game isn't that meaningful, especailly for new players.  You need a ton of jewels just to:

a) build magic school (and level it)

b) build yggdrasil

c) buy cost

d) buy card space

e) buy castle L10

by the time you have enough free jewels to have completed with all that, it's months into the game, and you haven't done any summons at all. Stil, you cannot earn jewels by doing stuff in game, as you can in many other games. You can earn very meaningful drops directly instead here. Very few games allow you to earn such good cards via drops rather than forcing you into a gatcha or ranking. I feel this path is more friendly to f2p players overall, if they are willing to dedicate the time.

All that said, I think you've pointed out reasons why VC doesn't make a good casual game. You either invest time or money into it, but if you do either it tends to reward you fairly handsomely, relative to other games I've played. The effort:reward / money:reward ratio I've seen out of similar type mobages is much worse, and one of the reasons why I've supported the game in the past. I'm keeping on eye now on where mynet wants to take it though, as they seem intent on increasing costs to be more in line with industry standards.

On a side note:

Since you mentioned $50-100, I'd like you to point me to a mobage where you can get the final, end-game cards for $50-100, I haven't run into one yet. $320 is cheap from what I've seen of other, comperable gatcha-based anime-oriented mobages. 2-card GUR is extremely favorable compared to most 5-card systems (VC SR used to have 5-card, or 6-card system, but UR they decided to go with 2, thank goodness.). And again, worse than reskinning the card in the future, is when that card becomes obslete from power creep. They can reskin all they want, for all I care.

I like to run pull monte carlo simulations, and also model pull and cost theoreticals, and have generally found VC to be cheap by comparison (For VC summons specifically, relative to each other, box summon is at the high end, as is hyper premium, flix DX and special [well the old special, before the 5% -> 3% nerf] at the lower end of the cost spectrum.  Step up tends to be somewhere in the middle.)

Still, if you can point me a moabage where summons jump to final, end-game power for that price, that has a very stable minimal power creep meta, and very favorable free power (let's be real here:  the 5% difference in premium vs free unleashers doesn't make the biggest difference in the world), I'd be interested!