I personally like the way they are doing it now. For people wanting to check out the game for the first time, there is the ~$20 Duel Set that gives you everything you need to play in a single box. If you like the game, you can then buy into the
RAP and pick and choose which planes you want to game with.
With the old Deluxe sets, you had to drop ~$70 just to try the game out (unless you had a friend that had it). That was a huge buy in just to sample the game. It also caused issues with veteran players as well. If they put new paint jobs in there (like they did on the last reprint of the Deluxe set), veteran players had to pay for a full duplicate of the game materials just to get those four planes (making them about $17 a plane).
In the new system if you go from the Duel Packs to the
RAP + Planes, you are only duplicating the A damage deck (which it’s good to have a few of anyways) at no additional cost (the Duel Packs are pretty much the same price as two Plane Packs).
In the Giant
KS, Ares did try and offer a Complete Starter kit. They offered the
RAP and 4 planes from Series 1 as a “Rookie Bundle ”. I’m not sure how many of those they sold, but I picked up several of them to offer on the
AA site, I just got to get them added to the store
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