Hello, I am a new player, I am probably about an hour in, and really enjoying myself. My thought was I'd like to "buy the game" to show my support for a good product, so will get the monthly membership thing. I wanted to ask about the "basic edition" pack for $25.. As I am still new, I don't have a great understanding about how what it says you get will affect game balance. I find often times you can generate a pay to win situation, and while I am not opposed to giving good developers my money, I hate when I spend money and strip the difficulty (fun) from a game I was enjoying. If I plan to stick with this game for a while, is the Basic Edition worthwhile? Will it give useful things, and will it hurt my experience by wrecking balance? Thank you much for your insights.
The Basic Edition is very worthwhile, if you appreciate the art and sp content, as it gives you extra figurines & adventures. The only thing in the BE even close to an actual benefit from paying is the club, and that gives you an extra item per chest - which really only matters if you're into serious item grinding, otherwise it's just helpful in that it might give you more deckbuilding options (you will need to switch loadouts for some adventures - better be prepared). I'd recommend it, and I usually have the same outlook on F2p and fun like you seem to.
It speeds items/cards collection. No game balance is affected. So if you get rewards for completing a quest or pvp fight, you will get one more item (of nice quality). It effectively almost doubles your best items gathering rate. It helps a lot with treasure items which you would sell for gold and then use gold to buy other stuff. But all this can be done without paying, it just takes almost twice as long.
Well, paying for free is a bit faster than "twice as long." Remember that the smallest treasure chest contains two items, so the bonus item is at best speeding your item collection by 50%, not 100%. Blue Manchu made it a bit harder to calculate this because of how rarity is affected, though. (But in the example of two-item chests from battle, all items are of completely random rarity, so it's still not too extreme.)