[bubbafry]

I just received my Paulson samples today and they are fan-freakin-tastic, definitely blow the Nevada Jack Clay samples out of the water.

Anyway, I've been putting a lot of thought into this too (maybe too much!). I will probably only buy a nice set of clay chips once or twice in my life. I don't want to spend $1k and be pissed in 2 years because I don't have enough purples or something and won't be able to get more Pharaoh's Club chips. I agree tourneys are the easy part. It's no problem to adjust your starting stacks and blinds to match your chipset. As you mentioned, the biggest problem is when you want to play limit, because you need a large quantity of 1 or 2 denominations. I think I'm going to skip the 25c and $1 chips so I can buy more of the higher denoms, and then just use $25 as 25c and $100 as $1.00. I really would like to get all the different denoms and have a complete set (especially if they have different shaped inlays), but my practical side tells me to just buy more of fewer colors. When I play tourneys, I also like to have lots of chips (35-40) to start. This is what I'm thinking right now:

blanks - 200
$5 - 200
$25 - 325
$100 - 200
$500 - 75

With this setup for tourneys <= 10 people, I could do either T1000 tourneys (starting with 5 x 20, 25 x 16, 100 x 5) or T2500 ( 25 x 20, 100 x 20). Blanks could be used as $1000 if necessary, but probably not needed.
Tourneys with 11-20 people (probably less common for me but you never know), I would probably have to do T1000 and use the blanks as $5's and have the same starting stacks as above.
For limit cash games, whatever the basic unit is, I could either add in the blanks or use them as 2x basic unit. For example, 1/2 limit, $1 would be my basic unit and I would use my blanks as $2. Since I have $100 x 200, each person at a 10 person table could get $1 x 20 and $2 x 20 = $60 or 30BB (which I feel is plenty for a home game), plus some quarters for the blinds. This way I can avoid using $5's which I think are difficult to use in 1/2 games. For 2/4, I could use the blanks as $4 and give everyone $1 x 20 and $4 x 20 = $100 or 25BB which might not be ideal but still plenty comfortable for a home game. Any limit that uses 25c as the basic unit would be no problem because I have plenty of $25's and could use blanks as 50c if needed.

Anyway, those are my long-winded thoughts. If anyone notices anything particularly bad about my breakdown or has any ideas for a better chip breakdown for a flexible 1000 chip set, I'd appreciate the input.