If you haven't been hit by this troubled economy, you're lucky, but for the rest of us, deciding on the forty dollar Wrath of the Lich King vs. the seventy dollar version can be a tough call. Let's take a look at the Wrath Collector's Edition and see if all these goodies are worth the thirty bucks. Out of the box, the set comes with the game on a DVD, a 208 page "Art of Wrath of the Lich King" art book, a behind-the-scenes DVD with over an hour of developer interviews, the official game soundtrack with 21 songs, a mouse pad featuring a map of Norhtrend, a pair of World of Warcraft Trading Card Game March of the Legion starter decks, and a pack of exclusive CE cards, and most importantly (to me) a exclusive in-game pet: Frosty, the baby frost wyrm.
Let's talk about Frosty, as to be honest with you, I am all about the non-combat pets. Frosty is big, I'd guess he is the largest non-combat pet, almost to the point of frustration. Depending on how big your monitor is, Frosty is likely to get in the way quite often as you try and navigate Northrend. Even on the 30" beast of a monitor I play on, I feel like I'm shooing the cute little bugger away half the time. I'd hate to pass judgment on the little guy after only a day, but part of the appeal of a novelty pet was it kinda followed you around passively, and I feel like Frosty wants to perch on my shoulder pads and can't quite figure out how to. He's no Murky, but he is cool.
According to iTunes, the Wrath of the Lich King Soundtrack will run you ten dollars, and has an average rating of four out of five stars. I've had it in since I installed the game, and as I tend to keep my WoW music low anyway, it is nice to have this soundtrack filling my office space. The disc begins with a song you'll remember from clicking on the orb in Magister's Terrace, remastered and updated for Wratch of the Lich King. Very epic, very fun to listen to, I'm satisfied with this adding ten of the thirty dollars value onto my tab.
Whether you've played the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game before (like me) or you've never tried it, the cards are really cool to look at, and have a great sense of the online game, and even grasp the humor that many of us love about WoW. The exclusive cards were a pair of Foil Death Knights, one Human and one an Orc, and from what I am hearing among the TCG forums, they're being viewed as a little on the weak side. I am just a sucker for foil cards though, so I'm happy to have them. Papa Hummel's Old-Fashioned Pet Biscuits rounds off the set, an in-game item that lets you enlarge a non-combat pet to ridiculous size. Here I am QQing over Frosty, imagine Frosty on a biscuit!
The Wrath of the Lich King mouse pad is not soft enough in my use of it, it has a hard plastic coating of some kind, and I don't like how my mouse slides on it. The Art Book on the other hand, is a must have. Yes it is a novelty, yes I probably won't look at it much after the first month or two, but in six months I'll pick it up again as we start to master Raid Content and say "Oh look, I just killed that!" The art is beautiful, and if you figure you'd spend twenty or more dollars on this kind of book in a store, I can easily add another ten dollars to the value of this edition.
So here we are, for me, the mouse pad is useless, but I am infatuated with Frosty the over sized non-combat pet. The Art book is gorgeous and if we assume it is worth ten dollars, the soundtrack another ten, and ten for either Frosty, or the Trading Card Game items you're getting a real nice bang for your buck with this set. The only thing I was disappointed in with this set, was the absence of a World of Warcraft Miniature figure from that new game. This is like a sampler of fun WoW products, and it seems like it would have been a perfect way to get people excited about that game too.
Oh well. Which one did you buy?
