Limited Utility

Hail and Greetings once again.


The Mage Knight revival is still going well, enough so that I'm still a bit surprised about it.  Today I wanted to talk about a part of the game that's a bit more obscure:  Limited Edition figures.


As I've talked about before, there are four basic rarity tiers for Mage Knight figures, Weak-Standard-Tough 'generic' figures and Unique 'leader' figures, plus some special cases.  But there's also a 'fourth level' for a lot of the game's generics, known as Limited Edition.


The vast majority of these 'LE' figures were given out as tournament prizes or convention exclusives, with prices to match.  But on top of the collectability and bragging rights attached to these elusive warriors, they are also 'named' unique figures that tend to be very much worth including in an army instead of just hiding in a box or sitting on a shelf.  I haven't encountered a game breaking figure, but there is a lot of power to be found if you're willing to put forward the effort to find them.


Just about all of these figures have deeper dials and better base statistics right off the bat (joke generics got joke LEs), plus a special copper (or bronze) paintjob in place of the yellow-blue-red rank indicator paint.  On top of that they also tend to have extra special abilities that can really change the whole dynamic of the figure. 


Take say, the Knight Immortal's Standard Bearer.  The generic is designed to be a fairly wimpy combatant that can give your formations the ability to move an astonishing 12 inches compared to the usual 6 or 8.  The Standard Bearer is a specialist figure with decent combat stats and a shallow dial.  Now take the LE version, Ashell The Driven, that keeps the lovely 12 inch Forced March and adds more better stats, a deeper dial, and Pole Arm.  For the uninitiated that means anybody that moves to base contact with this seemingly fragile figure just got smacked with a flagpole to the tune of a click of damage and losing their action.


Or say, the LE Impaling Golem, Cerberus.  The Impaling Golem is already a really nice figure with good stats and wonderful ranged attack abilities including multi-target attacks and the ability to ignore defensive powers.  Cerberus gets the LE stat bonus, plus Bound, giving you a figure that can either move at double speed or jump around (hence the ability's name) and wreck the enemy with it's nasty range skills.  We wouldn't see something this powerful outside of Unique figures until the advent of Uprising and the 'series end' power level that came with it.


All of this power comes at a price.  If you didn't win these bad boys in a tourney or get them at a convention, your only real hope is online stores, and a lot of these command a premium.  That said, since this is a 'dead' game, the prices are actually very reasonable, especially compared to what these fetched while the game was active and in production.  There are a lot of figures that I'd have sworn would never go for less than $30-$50 on auction that I've nabbed for under $10.  Even a lost game still has its advantages, eh?


Now if Sinister boosters did something similar.  Freakin' chase figures...