Last night Achroma released their First Realm Report on YouTube:

It was great to see next content from Achroma after quite a long period of radio silence. Troy went over a palette by Antinomy93 (link to his blog here), a couple of Achromemes, and then covered the thing we’d all been waiting for: a review of the new Booster packs/boxes.

The booster boxes can already be ordered from Five Realms Gaming (and you can get a discount with the code dracotemple on checkout).

First off, I do love the symmetry of the design here, with some very carefully chosen characters from chroma and achrom from the 4 realms. The packs contain 2-3 commons, 2-3 uncommons, 1 rare or legendary, and maybe 1 additional realmless rare/legendary or alt art.

Boxes come in at £99 per box (or £89.10 with the dracotemple discount) for 24 packs, each containing 6 cards from Chapter I, or 144 cards (69p per card). For context, unlimited edition boxes used to sell for £20 for 40 cards (50p per card), and limited editions sold for £60 for 180 cards (33p per card), so this does represent a slight upturn in pricing, especially considering the distribution is fairly random.

That being said, I am really looking forward to trying out these boosters in draft format. This would be a format where each player gets some boosters, and used the cards they draw to build palettes without realm restriction. With no supporting draft sets, you’d need 5 packs for 30 cards, and 6 to give yourself a bit of flex in deck building. With some supporting cards, such as some characters and events from across the realms, you could probably get away with a 3-4 pack draft, meaning a box could support around 4-8 players depending on the format.

The first pack Troy opened on air was peculiar. It had 5 objects from Rise of the Realm Runners, which in draft wouldn’t be particulary useful in a pack with no characters other than Double Trouble. The second pack had 3 cards from Rise of the Realm Runners too, though did at least contain 2 characters.

Given that there are 256 cards from the first 4 releases, and only 120 cards from Rise of the Realm Runners (so 32% of cards in Chapter I are from RotRR), I was surprised to see it so heavily represented with 8 out of the 12 cards being from RotRR. The chance of there being 8 RotRR cards by chance if they were evenly distributed is only 1.4%. Therefore my suspicion is that RotRR will be over-represented in the booster card pool. There are a lot of good cards in RotRR, so there’s nothing wrong with this per se, but as that expansion doesn’t have any common or uncommon characters or locations, it will likely be necessary to support draft with some character staples that all players have access to, especially to provide a target for objects.

In other news, Troy also said that there will be a brand new promo card, but wouldn’t say anything more on that. My interest is piqued.

I am really looking forward to trying out this new product from Achroma. It’s been a controversial move for sure, but it’s a great way to facilitate tournaments, and so hopefully grow a bit of a community of players. I for one will be running a local draft tournament at my LGS, and can’t wait to report back.

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Next time you’re ordering achroma products, please use the discount code dracotemple at checkout on the achroma webstore for 10% off all orders, including pre-orders. By using this code, you are also supporting me, as I also earn commission on any sales made using this code.