Wrapping it up for Eye of Judgment(sic)

So I originally posted about how I liked Eye of Judgment(sic). Soon after that it sort of fell of my radar. Nothing particularly wrong with the game, but the AI is sort of "meh", nobody I knew was interested in playing, the card supply frankly sucked, and I could just feel the "Stay away" vibes rolling off the so-called "internet community" at large.

The cards are about twice as expensive, per card, as a Magic card. I probably feel fairly strongly that Magic cards should be the "gold standard" for your Collectible Card Game (CCG) pricing, but I cut them some slack and figured the problem was both Sony and WOTC needing their cut. But lately they've been rumbling about the new "set 2" coming out in March. I was starting to think "Hey maybe I should haul out the EoJ cards and play a few rounds."

Then today I saw this blog post. So to play with the Set 2 cards you have to buy a software update from the Playstation store, and then buy the cards at the standard 2x MTG price. They are (rather obviously) not saying what the price for the totally useless PSN update will be.

I think this will kill it. I don't think EoJ was actually doing well in a market where very few games survive. Paying the price premium was annoying. Adding some other Sony charge is just silly. Look, any obstacle you place in the way of *selling cards* is stupid. Charging for the digital content of Set 2 is exactly that - it's a convenient excuse for me to quit following the entire game. Whoops!

So, anybody have good CCG recommendations for 2008? :-)