yeah To be honest I probably would have only bought a few myself but since I missed the boat on the red LTD i figured this was my chance.
Sure, but there's a huge difference. Red LTD was strictly a single-print-run, never-to-be-redone limited edition, while blue LTD is a "buy all you want, we'll make more" unlimited edition... I will likely be able to buy this next month or next year without hassle.
Wait... You're probably referring to the red LTD giveaway for buying a brick, aren't you...?
In deed I am sir. Indeed I am on a similar note, If i understand correctly the red ltd. decks were never actually for sale but for special give away's only. Can anyone elaborate on this for me or direct me to a thread with that information. Thanks guys.
Just like the Bicycle Black Ghost 1st Edition and the Gold Arcane, the LTD deck was made in a print run of 5K and never offered outright for purchase, just as a promotional item or contest prize. Unlike those other two decks, however, the LTD was part of the regular "buy X amount, get this deck" prize tiers only during the 2010 holiday season - there's been a few limited time offers since then, but no indefinite listing on the prize chart like the other two decks. The only rare premium decks that E made available for sale were the Red Artifice and the Sultan Republic Treasury Edition.
The Artifice was made in a lot of 5,000 of which 3,000 were made available for purchase, limit one brick per person (many people created multiple accounts to circumvent this) - it dragged their servers down to a crawl for several hours, and a large percentage of customers never got a chance. The remaining 2,000 were made available in the same manner as the Gold Arcane and BG1E, as tiers for purchasing a certain amount of merchandise, as giveaways as part of a promotional sale or as a contest prize.
The Treasury deck was unique - only 2,500 were "made available" (implying that more may have been printed without actually saying as much), and they were originally only being sold to people who successfully figured out the clues built into the original Sultan Republic deck to find the link to buy this version. However, many people either stumbled on the link by trial and error (E uses fairly consistent URLs for their products) or they discovered it when someone else leaked it. After a short while, E made these available for general sale with limits on how many could be bought - I think the limit started at three decks and went down to two, again with some people circumventing the limit by creating multiple accounts. At this point, they're simply unavailable. Also, you should know that because they decided to redesign the regular Sultan Republic deck, those are no longer being printed beyond the initial print run, making them de facto rare in the same way as the blue Artifice v1 deck is before the v2 model was released.