Tag: starter

Destiny 2 Players Are Roasting Its New ‘Starter Pack’ [Update: Bungie Deletes It]
The hardest thing about Destiny 2 is getting any of your friends to play it. Fans of Bungie’s ambitious and imaginative sci-fi shooter have long hoped for a simple on-ramp that would make it easier to get lapsed players and newcomers back into its universe. Destiny 2’s new “Starter Pack” might sound like exactly that. Instead, it’s a pricey bundle of random items that fans can’t stop dunking on.

Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build

Season of the Wish went live today with an exciting trailer and new missions revolving around collecting dragon eggs to win over an old enemy. But players also quietly noticed a new DLC add-on on PSN, Xbox, and Steam that went live alongside the latest update. It’s called the Destiny 2 Starter Pack, it costs $15, and it’s one of the more ridiculous microtransactions I’ve seen. Contrary to what its name might suggest, the Starter Pack does not include any expansions, missions, or story content. It’s just a random assortment of stuff meant to “supercharge” players’ arsenals. Here’s what’s included:
- Traveler’s Chosen
- Ruinous Effigy
- Sleeper Simulant
- Exotic Ship
- Exotic Sparrow
- Exotic Ghost Shell
- 125,000 Glimmer
- 50 Enhancement Cores
- 5 Enhancement Prisms
- 1 Ascendant Shard
Image: Bungie

Those first three items are all old Exotic weapons that have been in the game since 2019 or before. They are mostly fine but only synergize with specific builds and can all be acquired from the Tower kiosk without too much fuss. The ship, sparrow, and ghost shell are purely cosmetic and completely dependent on personal taste. In my opinion at least, the ones in the Starter Pack are far from some of the game’s better designs.

The materials, meanwhile, are pretty stingy. Glimmer is Destiny 2’s main in-game currency, earned by doing anything and everything. Cores, prisms, and Ascendant Shards (what players lovingly call “golf balls”) are for focusing engrams, rerolling gear, and crafting new items, none of which is particularly helpful for new players, nor very meaningful in the quantities offered. It’s not even enough to fully masterwork a new piece of armor. It’s a bizarre array of accouterments to buy for more than the cost of an entire season of the game.

“I’d say this is pay to win, but really it’s just a waste of money,” wrote one player on the Destiny subreddit. “Pay to lose.” Another wrote, “This is pathetic. 3 mid exotics, a few crap cosmetics and some materials is not worth that much. A real starter pack would be guns and old DLCs.”

There are three broad obstacles to players getting back into Destiny 2. The first is that most of the story is no longer in the game due to content vaulting. The second is that Destiny 2’s “New Light” campaign remains pretty barebones and offers no real direction with end-game activities. And the third is that despite ostensibly being free-to-play, all of the expansions are paid and unlocking access to everything is still quite expensive. Shadowkeep, the underwhelming 2019 expansion, is still normally $25. The Starter Pack just adds to the noise, confusing players with misleading descriptions like “Fly between destinations in your new Exotic ship.” Narrator voice: Exotic ships are just custom loading screen animations.

The Starter Pack also comes in the context of layoffs at Bungie amid the delay of 2024’s The Final Shape expansion and reported revenue shortfalls. At a time when the studio is apparently desperate for money, the $15 bundle just underlines the gulf between players and whoever is leading Destiny 2’s monetization strategy. It’s one thing to milk whales, but as Destiny 2 players are pointing out, the new Starter Pack seems squarely aimed at taking advantage of new players who won’t know any better. In the words of one of them, “This is some mobile game shit.”

Update 11/29/2023 6:09 p.m. ET: Bungie appears to have removed Destiny 2’s controvertial Starter Pack from storefornts, including Valve’s storefront. “Notice: Destiny 2: Starter Pack is no longer available on the Steam store,” reads an update on the Steam listing. PlayStation Store listings, meanwhile, return error pages.

Screenshot: Valve / Kotaku

In addition to roasting the microtransaction on social media and Reddit, some players had also attempted to review-bomb the bundle and change the Steam tags for it to things like “psychological horror.”
Ethan Gach

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November 29, 2023
Disney Lorcana’s Rise of the Floodborn isn’t just the next set, it’s another half of the game

Ever since Disney Lorcana launched on Aug. 18, curious friends and family have wasted no breath asking me their most pressing questions: What’s it like? How does it compare to Magic: The Gathering? To the Pokémon Trading Card Game? And why the hell can’t I find any product in stores? It’s complicated, I say. The game is quite good, and compares favorably to both of the leading trading card games on the market. Product is hard to find because, well… people are very eager to try and turn a buck on collectibles these days. Also, spooling up the manufacturing capacity to compete with the two global revenue leaders in all of tabletop gaming is hard. Quite hard, in fact.

But the thing I end up talking about the most in these casual conversations is the fact that there are lots of gaps in the design of Disney Lorcana — holes that very clearly need to be filled in with new cards, new mechanics, even whole new decks to play with. With the release of Rise of the Floodborn, at least some of those holes are beginning to get filled in.

I’ve spent some time with its two new starter decks — both Amethyst and Steel as well as Amber and Sapphire — and they’re every bit the match for the three starter decks that came before. In fact, they fit into the metagame like a key fits into a lock… almost like they’d been designed that way.

My favorite of the two, Amethyst and Steel, is a hefty, brawling thing with a slower ramp-up than my previous favorite, and The First Chapter’s breakout star, Amber and Amethyst. Played right it’s almost as effective, so long as you have enough patience to pad out a few early rounds just dropping ink. But once you get Madam Mim and Merlin cards bouncing back and forth, earning lore left and right, it’s satisfying to then start taking a few big swings with Tiana, Celebrating Princess or Kronk, Junior Chipmunk. Keeping everyone protected with a few sets of Mouse Armor, it’s possible to cruise to a mid-game win nearly unopposed.

Image: Ravensburger and Disney

Image: Ravensburger and Disney

On the other hand, my 13-year-old daughter prefers Amber and Sapphire. Also a slow burn, this one’s a team-builder that accelerates surprisingly fast in the mid game thanks to Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs. The Dwarfs vary in cost from two to five ink, but the more of them you get on the table the more powerful they become individually when challenging. It’s a terrific little swarm of charming ruffians, buoyed by none other than Christopher Robin, Adventurer, capable of snagging four lore each round — so long as he has enough friends in play beside him.

Adding these two starter decks to the game, however, does more than just open up two new ways to play. Each 60-card deck in Disney Lorcana must be built from either one or two different colors, and these starter decks are split more or less right down the middle. Amethyst and Steel, for instance, includes 29 Amethyst and 31 Steel cards, respectively. With just a few booster packs — maybe even the ones that come bundled in with each starter deck — you could easily round each of those stacks into two 30-card half decks.

Paired with the other three decks sold at launch in August, those 10 half-decks give you 45 different combinations.

Are all 45 combinations of decks going to be as viable as the five starter decks that the game shipped with across its two launch sets? No. Absolutely not. There are gonna be some real bad matchups in there, to be sure. But until you mash ‘em up together and play them against another deck of cards, you won’t know. And, once you do know, you’ll have a better idea of how to augment those decks to make them better. At its best, the game is intuitive enough that you’ll discover unique maneuvers and combinations at a steady pace. It’s a starting point, and an entrée into the larger world of collecting and building decks for competition.

The bottom line is that Disney Lorcana is growing, just like Magic and Pokémon started growing more than three decades ago. Rise of the Floodborn includes more than 200 new cards in all, effectively doubling the number of cards available with which to build and play. It’s a great game, and its complexity is building at a speed that even its youngest fans can keep up with — and, at $16.99 a starter deck, at a price that many people can afford.

Just don’t you dare pay a penny more than $16.99 (plus taxes) for those starter decks.

Grab a deck or two, maybe all five starters if you can find them with the reprint launching around the same time, and get started learning the game. Quit worrying about the outlandish prices being paid for shiny, sexy cards online. Stop confusing these things for bitcoin. It’s a card game, one with a massive fandom and a healthy momentum behind it. It’s going to be a long journey, one that gets even better as it rolls along.

Disney Lorcana Rise of the Floodborn’s two new starter decks arrive at local retailers on Nov. 17, with a wider release on Dec. 1. They were reviewed using pre-release physical copies provided by Ravensburger. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

Charlie Hall

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November 12, 2023
Michael King looks like a starter, will he be one in 2024

BOSTON — When the Yankees’ rotation suffered a few injuries back in spring training, Michael King pitched himself as a replacement to Aaron Boone.

But with King so dominant in relief and fresh off a stress fracture in his throwing elbow, the suggestion was — excuse the pun — a non-starter.

“He was coming off the repair of the elbow, so he was trying to get into the rhythm of his delivery and feel confident,” pitching coach Matt Blake told the Daily News. “We knew what we had in the bullpen and we had some general guidelines we wanted to kind of hold him to as far as multiple innings, multiple days off, three innings, three days off, that type of stuff. We didn’t necessarily want to put him into the rotation at that point just because we had bodies in the mix and we had names that we felt comfortable with. We didn’t want to necessarily move him away from what we knew he did really well.”

But more injuries left the Yankees’ rotation short-handed again in August, so King — a starter in college and the minors — circled back. This time, with Boone short on options, King received a shot as an extended opener. That has blossomed into a traditional starter’s schedule as he continues to build up.

“He’s obviously run with it,” Blake said Thursday before King totaled 4.2 innings, six hits, one earned run, one walk, eight strikeouts and a season-high 87 pitches in his latest start.

The Yankees lost the game, the first of a doubleheader against the Red Sox, 5-0, but King looked sharp despite some inefficiency. He even pushed to stay in longer when Boone went to pull him from the game. Much like the spring, the skipper didn’t bite.

“I told Boonie regardless if I give up 15 or I’m scoreless, I’m not gonna go down without a fight,” King, sounding like a true starter, said afterward. “He wouldn’t let me. I tried my best. I think I might have had a little hesitation, but didn’t fully get there.”

Michael King’s 7th and 8th Ks. pic.twitter.com/JdKsa9jbTS

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 14, 2023

King has now logged at least four frames in his last four starts, totaling 18.2 innings and three earned runs over that stretch. He has also tallied 26 strikeouts and just two walks over that span.

Most importantly, his body and arm are handling the new role well.

“I’m feeling great,” King said. “It’s nice to be on that routine. That’s the main part of my body recovery that I feel like I missed out of the bullpen. Gotta be up every day, you know? So in the rotation, you can have those days to recover, get a full bullpen in between starts and go out there.”

King added that mixing his pitches has allowed him to have success, but he mentioned that he’s been leaning on his fastball more as a starter.

Blake has been impressed with King’s ability to limit hard contact, control counts and induce whiffs as a starter. Boone, meanwhile, said that King has done a nice job of maintaining his stuff as he goes, and that it’s looked similar to how it did when the right-hander was coming out of the bullpen.

“He’s taken to it well so far,” Blake said. “As he’s built his pitch count, you can see him getting in the flow of the game pretty well. And I think he’s using his whole arsenal well — [to] both righties and lefties — and attacking the zone.

“He’s kind of found a nice rhythm there.”

What initially started as an experiment born out of desperation has now given the Yankees something to seriously consider this offseason and next spring: should King be a full-time starter?

That is the pitcher’s goal, and the Yankees have some uncertainty in their rotation that works in King’s favor as he prepares for a few more starts this season.

In an ideal world, the club will start the 2024 campaign with Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodón, Clarke Schmidt and Nestor Cortes in the rotation. But injuries hampered Rodón this season, and Cortes has yet to begin a throwing program after reaggravating a rotator cuff strain.

Boone said that Cortes is close to starting his program, while Blake added that, as of now, the southpaw is not expecting surgery.

Even if the aforementioned names are all healthy at the start of next season, the Yankees will still need a fifth starter, as well as depth, with Luis Severino unlikely to return in free agency. Randy Vásquez and Jhony Brito are also internal candidates after arriving in the majors ahead of schedule this year, but King appears to be the preferred choice.

He would also be a cost-effective one for the Yankees, as King is making $1.3 million this season. He is due for a raise in arbitration, but that bump would be nothing compared to the price of high-end external options like Blake Snell, Aaron Nola and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

Boone said that King’s 2024 role is “probably technically to be determined, but we all believe he can be a starter.”

“He’s probably, in a lot of ways, confirming that in what we’re seeing as he’s continued to build up here these last few weeks,” the manager continued. “Michael’s in a really good spot in that he’s proven himself at this level, obviously, out of the bullpen. But I think he’s also showing us now that — I definitely believe he could be a successful starter. So we’ll see. We’ll see where the next few weeks take us. We’ll see where the winter takes us and how we look going into next season, but right now, he’s putting himself in that starter mix.”

Blake endorsed that sentiment as well, but he also noted that King’s versatility could be “huge” for the Yankees next year.

Even if King were to begin the season in the bullpen, the team now knows that he can handle a starter’s workload in an effective manner at the major league level. If injuries hurt the Yankees again in 2024, King’s experience in the rotation will come in handy.

With that said, he expects to fight for a rotation job next spring.

“I’m more just taking it day-by-day now,” King said, “but in this offseason, I think I’ll definitely build up and be ready to come in to compete for a starting role.”

Gary Phillips

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September 14, 2023