Hail and Greetings again!
Things are slowing down just a bit, since there's a few schedule conflicts. Nothing I can consider serious, since we all had a blast playing and most of us are waiting for reinforcements to arrive anyway. I hope my camera reappears soon, I'd love to post a few pics of the battles. But it can't be changed for a while yet. Therefore, I have decided to go ahead and talk about the various expansions for Mage Knight, at least up to 2.0 to give a bit more background.
The expansions will be listed in chronological order, with a separate list for the Dungeons spinoff to be posted after the 'main' list.
On Rarity: Mage Knight until 2.0 used six rarity tiers, with 1-3 acting as something like 'common,' 4-5 like 'uncommon' and 6 being somewhere between 'rare' and 'very rare.' There is a lot of overlap, and the rarity curves can be fairly wild. Rarity 6/Unique figures are few and far between, though not horribly so. Your average booster usually has two common figures, two (later just one) uncommon figure and one rare (with that rare having a chance of being a 6/Unique figure). The mix is a bit different for MK Dungeons, and there is a Rarity 7 (incredibly rare and valuable chase figures, only seen on one original expansion and one 2.0).
Rebellion -- Welcome to Mage Knight Rebellion. This is the set that started it all. Despite being the first release, boosters and starter sets are still widely available, and just about every figure is still quite viable for games, right up to 2.0. "The Big Four" started here (Atlantis Guild, Black Powder Rebels, Elemental League, and Necropolis Sect), with a very good figure spread and representation along the entire rarity curve. Knights Immortal, Orc Raiders, and Mage Spawn also started here, but were restricted to higher rarity levels, with the bottom line being that you usually just got one figure from one of those three in any given booster, two in starters. This could be very frustrating if you were trying to collect just one of those factions. Draconum also started here, but were all in the highest rarity tier.
Lancers -- Notable for introducing large base 'cavalry' figures and elevating Knights Immortal and Orc Raiders to major faction status, including lots of 'common' figures making it much easier to collect and build armies for them. Draconum also got a generic figure, and most everybody got nice beefy uniques and more specialists to work with. Sculpting and painting was somewhat improved as well.
Whirlwind -- This is where things started to heat up. Twelve new special abilities were introduces, as well as the new Shyft faction. The Shyft were notable for being teal lizardmen with dreadlocks and having the ability to use Mage Spawn in formations. Everybody who didn't get cavalry figures in Lancers got one here, including Mage Spawn Ogres riding war yaks. Sculpts took a bigger leap up in quality here, though at the price of having more delicate parts on some figures (I'm looking at you, Standard Bearer).
Unlimited -- The 'new' starter set, Unlimited was a major step forward, combining and updating the rules and special abilities into something more unified and compact (though still very simple and to-the-point). This set also reused generics from Rebellion and Lancers and updated the models to a new standard both in sculpts and painting, while adding in a new set of unique figures. Also notable for using green bases instead of the black seen in every set before. Boosters and especially starters good a lot of extra little goodies, mostly in the more of 'lore card' bookmarks and clicker rings. Ironically, this is hardest set to find intact starters for, despite having a very wide release and lots of product.
Sinister -- Hmph. A very good set overall, with the introduction of yet another faction (the Solonavi, notable for being made from translucent plastic), plus new 'dual faction' figures for more flexible army builds (Zombie petards!) and very nice uniques for everybody. This is where the smaller boosters became the norm. Unfortunately, a lot of the good parts of this expansion is marred by the inclusion of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, rarity 7 chase figures that were extremely rare (to the point that I have never seen one in person). This was bad enough, but WizKids also decided to hold a contest with ridiculously awesome prizes for whomever could get all four Horsemen together. This resulted in loads of people (mostly idiot rich kids) using their disposable income to buy whole cases of this expansion, searching for the blasted things, and dumping them into the secondhand market or outright tossing them out, making this the hardest overall set to collect now. I hate the Apocalypse faction for this reason alone.
Minions -- A more stable release, with no chase figure nonsense. Everybody got more 'flavor' figures to expand the roster. Unfortunately, 'flavorful' doesn't always mean 'good' and there was a lot of meh-level generics here. There were a fair few bright spots, with the uncommon figures being actually fairly nice and a set of awesome dual-faction Draconum being released here, plus some generic Solonavi.
Uprising -- The last gasp before 2.0. This set is actually very awesome overall, with more dual-faction generics, including Orcs with chainguns (!) and Knights Immortal using Atlantis Guild guns to create some really great figures. The overall power level exploded upward, and to make things even better, the usual roster of a uniques was replaced with dual-faction Heroes, allowing for all sorts of flexibility and crazy awesome ideas. As a final hurrah, Uprising was very good, and actually gave us a lot of hope for 2.0. Boy we were wrong.
Conquest -- Not so much an expansion as a rule set for using much bigger armies and a basis for creating narrative campaigns. The rules for using multi-dial figures and larger 'titan' figures was collected and made more cohesive here, as well as the rules for castle figures. Four siege engine titans were released, as well as three 'warlord' uniques.
There were also a good number of large individual models released, like chariots, dragons, and tanks.
Mage Knight Dungeons -- Started a new spinoff game, something like a cross between Mage Knight proper and a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon crawl. It wasn't a bad game, though I found that tossing out the tile-based dungeons in favor of dumping lots of crazy terrain down worked a fair bit better, while retaining the Dungeons ruleset with some tweaking. Notable for introducing the Heroes faction, most figures being a Mage Knight spin on traditional adventurers. Also lots and lots of Mage Spawn. Heroes were all unique, but every booster had one unique inside (very rarely two, a Hero and a unique Mage Spawn, usually just one or the other), making for a very different rarity curve. This would be constant through all three MKD expansions.
Pyramid -- A second starter set, with the Heroes being dual-faction this time around (making this better for players more interesting in the core game). As can be expected from the title, there was a heavy Egyptian slant, especially in the unique Mage Spawn (the Jackal Guardian pretty much walked out The Mummy Returns), though for some reason, every generic mage spawn is a slightly tweaked palette swap of the generics from Dungeons. Whether this was a cost-saving measure or a big joke at video game dungeon crawling (or both) is somewhat unclear.
Dragon's Gate -- The final major MKD expansion. The emphasis was on 'lost races' Mage Spawn, including 'Drakona,' ancient evil Draconum that counted as Mage Spawn. For some reason, Heroes reverted to single faction here. Uprising balanced that a bit, however. The hardest of the MKD boosters to find but still not hard.
Heroic Quests -- A pair of special sets, each coming with a team of dual-faction Heroes and an Altantis Guild 'master adversary' unique plus scenarios and maps. These are very much worth getting, especially for the powerful uniques here that fit in just fine with regular armies.
And there you have it, and quite a mouthful at that. I hope it helps, and All Your Clicky Base Are Belong To Us!
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