Just a short reminder that Card Hunter went into release version yesterday. After a short panic of not being able to get into the game, which turned out to be caused by my own stupidity (I tried to log in with my e-mail instead of my username), I was able to play without problems. Only minor lag on release day, I count that as a good release.

I didn't have much time last night, so I only played through the tutorial (the high-level demo plus the sequence of low-level adventures that finishes with you having a full party). I'm looking forward to playing more tonight and over the weekend. I got all the pizza I bought during the beta back, so I'll follow my own advice and subscribe to the Card Hunter Club as well as buying all the treasure hunts as value bundle.

As I wanted to support Card Hunter and spent more money on pizza than I would consider strictly necessary, I have then to think what to do with the rest of it. I might buy a few figures, but that is just fluff, and as beta player I already received 9 extra figures for free. So ultimately all choices come down to buying items in one form or another. I can transform pizza into gold and buy items directly for that gold, but at the start of the game I wouldn't recommend that method: The price of items in gold depends on the level of your characters; if you have only low level characters, the higher level items receive a huge price multiplier which makes them unaffordable. At the level cap that goes away, but buying epics and legendaries for gold still is rather expensive.

Depending on how much I play, the Card Hunter Club might actually be the most cost efficient route to more items, which is why I recommended taking it for at least 1 month. Due to my extra pizza I'll probably take a longer subscription here. 1 extra item for every battle adds up quickly, especially since the extra item has a guaranteed rarity equal to the best guaranteed rarity of the treasure chest. So any adventure that says "guaranteed rare" or "guaranteed epic" for beating it will net you another rare / epic from the club membership.

The final option is buying treasure chests for gold or pizza. They come in different flavors. The cheapest ones sell for gold, but have only two items with no guaranteed rarity. That is actually an option very early in the game where having more items gives you more options for deckbuilding. But in the long run it means spending your pizza for commons of which you'll soon have too many of anyway. So the other extreme might be preferable if I think of the long term: Epic chests for 150 pizza each, which actually have a good chance of containing legendary items as well. Pricey, but any epic or legendary you get is likely to get used for a long time, and you're unlikely to have too many of them anytime soon. On the other hand many of the items I'll find in those epic chests won't be usable right away, because they'll be of higher level and have power token requirements that my characters can't fulfill yet. Nevertheless I'll probably buy a few of these.