I think most of us can agree that prestige missions involving supply packs are not a whole load of fun. You buy some cube icons from Vatel, you trade it for some prestige. And you lose a bunch of crowns.

I was thinking, instead of a crown sink, how about supply packs being a material sink? They could be inherent recipes (like those in Shadow lair/Krogmo alchemy machines). I imagine newer players would rather go looking for materials than dumping their crowns, while older players have a whole load more materials than they have any real use for. It wouldn't have to require specific materials, perhaps 20 0-1* mats for a Compact supply pack, 2-3* for Standard, 4-5* for Deluxe. Or using token prices as some sort of value system, where 2* mats would be worth 2 units for purposes of supply pack crafting, 3* being 5 units, 4* being 10 units, and 5* being 20 units.

Of course, if you created a supply pack, and then there was no prestige mission involving them, well... they are intended for use in the clockworks. You could bring them down to the clockworks as pickups (and open them in a similar manner to lockboxes). Based on which one, they'd give you varying numbers of vials/pills when used, or being based on which tier you're in (or only being able to bring Standard packs to depths 8 and lower, and Deluxe packs to depths 18 and lower).

What do you guys think?