Pictures of new product for Madness Day! Because that’s what’s really important today, right L5R players? Not some silly greeting-card-company holiday, right? (P.S. Please don’t ever show this post to my wife and/or mother; you probably don’t want to show it to yours, either; I’ll just tell them it was P’an Ku taking hold of me anyway).

So, without further fanfare, here’s what Coils of Madness looks like:

Fudo is, by the way, on the opposite side of the booster box bottom from P’an Ku, so you can pick which Celestial gets to peek out of the opening in one side of the booster box top.

So up top there in the picture is a booster box, and everything else is from the tin (the cards from the tin are inside):

“But Chris,” you might say,” your photography is really shoddy, unlike your writing which is the soul of wit and clarity! Can’t you get someone else to do it?” Well, no, you’re stuck with my pictures. Also, with regards to my writing … flattery will get you everywhere, as they say, and I do thank you for your kindness.

As you can see from the photo, the Egg of P’an Ku and the set title on the lid of the tin are raised. That’s a plastic insert holding the cards. The tin also comes with the 64-page story book, the certificate of authenticity, and a rules update insert (nothing major we don’t already know about). Remember, there are nine cards that are not in the tin (the non-Unique Fallen Personality for each faction) – I repeat this because the back of the tin repeats the erroneous marketing copy that it contains a playset of all of the cards from Coils of Madness (the proper information is available here). So the tin has playsets of 138 of the 147 cards from Coils.

The booster box is, as you can probably tell, the same size as the Emperor Edition Gempukku booster boxes. It’s 36 packs of 7 cards each (Coils of Madness wrappers are worth 2 koku). The booster boxes do have the 9 non-Unique Fallen Personalities (I haven’t done the math to get the particulars, but you should basically get a playset of them in a box), but none of the cards that are not Ivory-legal. So the tin will likely be “get now” for Emperor Edition, but then the booster boxes can continue to sell as EE winds down without players having to buy non-legal cards.

Of the 7 cards in the pack, five are non-Uniques and two are Uniques. One of the five non-Unique slots is always a full-bleed. I’d say that the full bleeds tend to look a little better in person than they do on the web, because (at least for me) the part of the art behind the text box contributed more to the holistic view of the card, instead of just being completely cut off (Colonial Dojo still looks terrible as a full-bleed though; nothing was going to save that). Sometimes, one of the Uniques is foiled – the first time we’ve had L5R foils in years. It looks like there’s a foil every three packs or so. If you’re curious, here are a couple of foil photos – the don’t really convey it well, but you can at least see which parts of the card have the foil treatment:

There’s a very light sheen across the whole card, with only card elements (frame, icons, clan/card type logo) strongly picked out with the foiling.

Finally, there were the four “mystery” card numbers – the full bleed versions of the nine non-Unique Fallen were numbered 1 through 9, but the normal versions were numbered out of 13. The other four cards were, as suspected, created cards (tokens, in the common parlance, but not tokens at all if you want to get technical):

The created cards are for Matsu Nimuro, Komori Miyano, The Egg of P’an Ku, and Hida Renyu, respectively. And check out the new treatment!

So, there’s the last of Coils of Madness. The boosters boxes should start showing up in your FLGS tomorrow (May 13), with the tins hitting retailers two weeks later (May 27), and Coils tournament legal on June 12.