Holy crap if you get colored pencils and like the control of normal pencils you will LOVE them! Colored pencils are life, they're my favorite medium, and my better examples on my art thread were in colored pencil. As an early investment, you can't beat the 24 tin of prismacolor softcore colored pencils. You get all the basic colors, in 1-2 shades each (red, orange, yellow, blue, green, purple) and some neutrals (two browns, black, white, but NO gray for some reason), and a few misc. tints/shades like pink, navy blue, a couple dark greens, a weird but pretty lavender color...overall a nice starting set for around $25. They're very expensive, that's for sure, but they lay down color like smooth butter, but give enough control for tiny little details, and layer BEAUTIFULY...with practice, you can layer so many colors to get tons of depth and dimension to any drawing.
I've had my 24 set for about 5 years now and have used them very heavily, but to this day I've only had to replace one. I now have a giant 132 tin set and it's absolutely magical...I think it's well over $200 retail price. Funilly enough I told her all I want for my 16th birthday are colored pencils; don't waste your money too much, I just want a 42 tin, MAYBE a 72 if you think that's not too much....and lo and behold she gets me the 132. She even told me she was going to get the 200+ but they were out of stock. I wanted to cry. My mom may be stubborn sometimes (all the time) but the fact that she was willing to spend that much on me meant the world to me.
But yea, long story short, COMPLETELY worth the money. If you take care of them, they'll last decades and the big tins come with so many fantastic shades of every color under the sun...I literally have over a dozen shades of blue from my big tin alone, and buttloads of gray in warm, cool, and french varieties. It's amazing, and I definitely recommend it. A word of warning though: NEVER, and I mean EVER put white over black/gray colored pencil. It will turn blue and you will cry and be very upset that you turned an almost perfect drawing bright blue with one tiny stroke of white.
(oh and as I side note, I haven't forgotten about the drawing requests everyone made...everything's just spiralling downhill recently as I now have two months to read 3 500+ page books, work 30 hours taking care of tiny donkeys, write two 3 page essays, finish a 5+ minute flash animation all by myself, and deal with everyday panic and hustle and bustle. @_@ just when you think everything's goin' good, it all goes crazy)