Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think you have it backward. When people see that excess packs are being burnt, they'll be more likely to buy future packs knowing that if there are too many, chances are that they'll be burned until the supply matches the demand.
They big problem with CL is that there were so many sales and promos that actually sold the packs for WAY less than the $4.00 in store price. This caused a massive over printing of the cards because they were so cheap, and now we have a huge hole to climb out of.
Riftwatcher prices should not skyrocket short term, I'm talking long term, a year or more from sell/burn out of the set.
Seeing Riftwatchers burn WITHOUT a sale or promo is about the only thing that will give me any confidence to buy any Rebellion packs, unless Rebellion has a built in burn/expiration right from the start. I'd also like to have a guarantee that the Rebellion prices will not be sabotaged by fantastic sales like they did with CL. (Basically what you're proposing here for Riftwatchers)
For most of what you're saying, you won't hear much argument from me. I voted against or rallied against every sale they had for CL. I've written extensively about why the team should purge kickstarter sales methods from their company DNA. I was also a lonely voice begging them to reconsider the CL print rate when it was just a rumor that it might 10x untamed. I voted for both the CL and the RW pack burns with glee.
That said, CL was overprinted on the first day and it would have happened if there was a sale or not. Too many people thought packs would sell out in 15 minutes and they'd be able to turn around and scalp them for instant riches. Once that didn't happen and demand died, every subsequent sale just made it predictably worse.
On the other hand, RW aren't overprinted. If this proposal passed, by the time it goes live there might be 500-600k packs left. Add that to the 900k already sold and you get about 1.5 million packs. That's untamed.
But what it could do with 500k packs is undo a lot of the damage from CL sales and overprints. Clearly the following math is weird because there's different BCX burns for different rarities of card but let's look at the 200 bcx for a dumb extreme example.
200BCX is 40 packs of cards. That means in the most extreme example, we'd be burning 40 CL packs worth of cards to add one RW pack to the world. 40 * 500k RW packs is 20 million CL packs worth of cards burned. Thats basically all of CL and its reward cards gone 😂
Clearly that can't happen for a myriad of reasons but let's average it way down to 50 BCX burned because some will be legendaries and epics. that means 10 packs of CL burned per RW pack brought into the world. That would be 5 million CL packs melted by adding 500k RW packs. That could matter greatly. By definition, A LOT more people have and are disenchanted about their CL cards value than have RW cards and packs.
Raising the value of CL and making it less of a swamp could raise morale and make people more willing to reach into their wallets for rebellion. I don't think RW has that same effect on so many players. I mean, you're a top ten holder of RW packs but would I lose a bet if I said you have more wrapped up in CL than you do RW?
I did some math and on average across all rarities, you would burn 13-14 packs worth of cards per RW pack. I hadn't looked at it from this perspective, and I have to say I'm not so against the idea now.
And yeah, I have a lot more in CL that RW. But that hadn't crossed my mind until you mentioned it. I'm here for the long term like you, and always try to vote in a way that makes sense long term. On principle I'm generally against anything that just shifts value around in the ecosystem from one asset to another. Which is why I'd much rather see a situation where the excess cards get burnt for a new asset instead of using a current pack set.