Hearthstone is toooo expensive!

How many packs are you considering within these freebies that are available during expansion launch?

It varies from expansion to expansion, but generally speaking Blizzard has been giving away between 6 to 9 packs as freebies that players can get on release day or very quickly thereafter.

As someone who for several expansions now has opened at LEAST 140 packs on launch day, those first 80 or so packs (in every expansion in 2018) were a very far cry from the results you’re claiming here.

I have the data sheets of my results for every expansion going back to Goblins & Gnomes. For every expansion where I have followed my plan (70-80 free packs + freebies) I have had similar results which provide these averages…

Commons: 98/98 (100%)
Rares: 71/72 (98.61%)
Epics: 33/54 (61.48%)
Legendaries: 11.6/23 (50.43%)
TOTAL: 213/247 (86.56%)
DUST FROM DUPLICATES: 2,800

On launch day the pack-opening binge generally lands me close to 75% to 80% of the cards, and slow-roll crafting as the meta unfolds using dust from the duplicates gets me to 86%. I could get to that 86% on day one if I just crafted immediately, but I prefer to wait and see what matters before I spend any dust.

At 80 packs I was still only on legendary #4 (this is WITH the free one upon login)

I’ve never had a result that poor. Blizzard gives a free Legendary out, and then you get one in the first 10 packs. Are you really saying that in 70 packs after that you’ve only averaged 2 Legendaries? You’re the unluckiest sod, and you have my pity. My average is more along the lines of 1 Legendary every 15-20 packs, so I typically end up with 7-8 Legendaries from the pack opening alone and then I craft 1-2 more as the meta unfolds. More if dust refunds happen from nerfs.

not to mention my spare dust from duplicates alone being less than 2k each time.

Maybe you aren’t as aggressive as I am. I dust all duplicates, and any Golden card as well that I have all the ‘basic’ versions of. Some people don’t dust their gold extras. To me they’re nothing but fuel for stuff that matters.

I definitely dust aggressively, in fact I follow the same methods as you since if I’m not making an all-golden deck (never gonna happen) it just feels like unused resources. I’ll start my recordings anew this year with April we can compare notes at 90 packs. I’ll be opening more, but that seems to be a pretty fair spot to account for all free resources, possibly even lowballing considering bonus events throughout the expansion.

competition=top 200 and tournaments

how much gold can a regular player (who just does his dailies, not someone who gets 30 wins a day, everyday) get between each xpac? how many packs are required to get a full xpac? (the answers are given in the other topic)

because you play at rank 15, try to play at rank 14 maybe

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If someone just does their dailies and maybe wins 3 games per day, its easy to hit an average of 65 gold earned per day. That’s 7,930 gold per expansion, easily rounded to 8k with a single friend quest or a bit more playing somewhere in that four month period.

As to your definition of competitive (you know, the 0.0001% of players) no one is going to maintain top 200 legend by just completing their dailies plus a match or two then logging off.

It’s been shown to you more than once that you don’t need an entire expansion just to break into legend and climb. Stop presenting unrealistic scenarios to try and push such a fallacious narrative.

Do you have any basis for claiming that you HAVE to spend money in order to reach top 200 Legend? The only metric you’ve really presented for this is that people need a high diversity of decks in order to compete, which a number of people have proved false. Several streamers/well-known players have made it to high Legend from places like Rank 5 using only one deck, so it stands to reason that you don’t NEED to spend money in order to reach high Legend.

Tournaments are a different matter altogether, seeing as you will likely be spending money on travelling to avenues/staying in a hotel/etc. If spending money is something to be concerned about, then tournaments are a bad example. Even tackling it from the “multiple decks/diversity you need in order to attend” angle is awkward because of the Specialist format coming up.

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You and I have a different definition of being competitive then. Yes… if that is your goal I could see the argument; however, if you’re playing enough for top-200 are you spending time/money on that many other games?

I’ll start my recordings anew this year with April we can compare notes at 90 packs. I’ll be opening more, but that seems to be a pretty fair spot to account for all free resources

I’ll probably be sticking to 80 packs plus the freebies, so it’ll be close to 90 packs.

I definitely count “all free resources” as part of the pot, and yeah that does include free packs from special events after release date (such as the free RR brawl packs over the past few weeks). I also count the dust refunds I get from Nerfed/HOFed cards during an expansion, as I typically use refund dust to buy the next most meta relevant replacement rather than holding it for the next set.

So my 86% figure is probably more fairly described as what you get from a total from all free resources during an expansion as opposed to what a person would get only from the 70-80 free packs they could buy from free quest gold on release day. That’s always been my mental picture, but it takes too long to explain all the details so I tend to mentally shorthand it when I describe it.

how much gold can a regular player (who just does his dailies, not someone who gets 30 wins a day, everyday) get between each xpac?

Doing nothing but facerolling out the dailies? 8,000+ gold. With some smart re-rolling? Easily 10,000+. No person has to ‘grind out wins’ to earn enough gold to get over 80 free packs per expansion. A person who is grinding can earn upwards of 20,000, but that’s pretty tedious so why bother when you can get everything you need with 8K?

how many packs are required to get a full xpac?

Irrelevant. No one except (maybe) a Pro needs to get a full set of all the cards in a expansion. Holding up 100% set completion as a requirement is a false standard.

I opened 97 packs from the current expansion. Result was (including free cards):

  • 5 of 23 legendary
  • 18 of 54 epic
  • 63 of 72 rares

I have not crafted anything of significance yet, beyond 1-2 rares/uncommons. I doubt dusting my extra cards would get me anywhere close to the “typical” result being claimed above.

And in my experience, this is not that unusual a result… maybe short by one legendary and a couple epics. The expected number for 100 packs would be 1 free + 1 in first 10 + 1 per 20 for the next 90. So rounding up, you might expect 6 if you got slightly below average luck or 7 if you got slightly above average.

shakou claims you need a full collection to be competitive
i cant take him seriously

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I’ve got to see your maths on this because I ran 70 packs (avg quest gold of 52.5 * 121 days between expansion + 6 launch packs) of the new set through a set opening simulator and ended up with 67% of the entire set.

i don’t know, it depends on each player, i guess

62 (average) a day if you reroll your quests = 7502 in four months but yeah, “easily 10k+” and yes, 20k if you get 30 wins everyday (which is simply impossible)

unless you’re very lucky or don’t need much, it’s not true

rank 15 players never take anything seriously anyway

380 packs were needed before the no duplicates rule, now it’s 280ish so 70/280= 25%

Is this really how disingenuous you’re going to try and be with your math?

70 packs also gives you 350 cards.
Sure, duplicates exist, but your math is making it out to look like there are 1,400 cards per expansion that will be ticked off one-by-one as you open packs. It isn’t anywhere near that linear. The first large chunk of opened packs holds significantly more value toward completing the collection than the rest, which quickly experience diminishing returns in the form of duplicates worth only a fraction of their dust.

Good grief, man.

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So there is no point to talk to you. But still it is true, that single tier-1 deck is enough to get you to Legend rank (I did it with even shaman last month). And to take part in currently running Masters Qualification tournays you need not more than 40 cards by its rules. The rest is in your hands.

Yes - it’s easily 10K in the 4 months between every set. And you don’t have to grind to do it. Doing the quests only takes maybe 1.5 to 2 hours a week of gameplay. Anything beyond that I do for fun. The wins that naturally accrue with even modest performance during these games typically earns at least 10 more gold a day. Couple that with the inevitable special event and - boom - 10,000 gold easy without any grind to be seen… Bob’s your uncle.

I know you want to pretend things are far worse than that. But the reality is that the game is very generous to free-to-play gamers. With only minimal time and a bit of self-control, any player can get over 85% of the cards in every set for free. That’s pretty awesome.

Players can go beyond that, but it isn’t necessary. You have decided - for whatever reason - to falsely believe that you must have 100% of the cards. You’re wrong. The sooner you accept that you’re wrong about that, the happier you’ll be.

Believe it or not, I’m trying to help you. If you can’t let go of your false opinions then that’s fine. But it is my hope that illustrating the facts in this discussion allows other forum members to avoid the self-created bitter stew of bad opinions you’re choosing to braise in.

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If you started near the beginning, then yes, it is more than possible to get 80% of each set for free. The later and later you start Hearthstone, the more impossible this gets without spending money.

Yes - it’s easily 10K in the 4 months between every set.

any player can get over 85% of the cards in every set for free.

Yes, certainly you can get 10K in the 4 months between each expansion. But to catch up, instead of being able to use that gold to get most of the newest set, you want to get cards from the other current sets. So 85% of a set is a bit ambitious, but with 60-80 packs of an expansion, you’re looking into getting anywhere between 64% - 75% of a set, and that’s before crafting. This is what I’d say is a fairly functional collection of a set: you might be missing a bunch of legendaries of epics, but you are set elsewhere and would craft a few cards to fill in the most important gaps in your collection.

You can still get into a set with only 40 packs from a set - for the longest time I had only 40 MSG packs opened for 57.38% of the set, earned from their time in Standard before they rotated out, and only missing a couple of the cheap cards that might be useful. But I don’t go out of my way to craft cards unless I actively use it in a deck (and preferably able to be used in more than one).

To experiment, that is to say playing between multiple decks and switching cards in and out, with some trashy cards for fun, realistically you’d be spending a couple 100 dollars, across all the sets. No way do you need to spend $200 on a set, when that might be better split across 4 sets you don’t have much of.

As someone that started in Aug 2017 and spent a couple of hundred for deck variety and Wild, my set completion for the last 6 expansions is at around 81%. For Rasta, I felt no difference between opening 67 and 85 packs besides an extra legendary or 2. That being said, I have had decent legendary luck in terms of rolling more good ones than bad: though the Un’Goro legendary rate was pretty low, I have opened 3 meta quests, Tarim and Kalimos. Someone else might be really unlucky and have opened Voraxx, Paladin Quest and Clutchmother, and couldn’t do a thing about it, because that’s all they’ve got in their 60 or so packs.

So the point is, Hearthstone is pretty expensive, but I guess once you’re at the point where you can save everything for the next expansion, you can survive mostly F2P, because having 60-100 packs of an expansion gets most of what you need and you have accumulating dust resources to craft anything important you’re still missing (but perhaps not fringe or meme legendaries).

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You expect me to believe you are opening legendaries at almost twice the average rate every single set? 11 legendaries on avg. will take 220 packs to open, 9 will take 180, your 2800 dust is enough to craft one, almost two. Thats not 70-80 pack averages, stats confirm it. Either you’re making up numbers to support your claim or you should buy a lottery ticket!

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Yeah, unless you crafted like 10+ epics or something, these stats are indicative of well over 100 packs for a set. One of my sets with 144 packs opened has 98/68/27/11, with crafts.

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J2U was my best pack opening ever, and I saw numbers similar to Riddlers “70-80 pack avg.” (more dust, similar card count) after 160 packs, and even THAT was an above average opening!

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See my above post…

"I definitely count “all free resources” as part of the pot, and yeah that does include free packs from special events after release date (such as the free RR brawl packs over the past few weeks). I also count the dust refunds I get from Nerfed/HOFed cards during an expansion, as I typically use refund dust to buy the next most meta relevant replacement rather than holding it for the next set.

So my 86% figure is probably more fairly described as what you get from a total from all free resources during an expansion as opposed to what a person would get only from the 70-80 free packs they could buy from free quest gold on release day."

Hopefully that helps contextualize it. I count all the free resources I use towards getting the cards in the 4 months of an expansion. The 70-80 + free opening day packs are the biggest chunk of it to be sure. The opening day spree typically gets me to between 75% to 80% of the set. After that it’s a slow crafting drip to 86% using duplicate dust and whatever other free crap comes my way over the next 4 months.

So, you admit that your numbers require more resources than 70-80 packs to achieve and are, therefore, irrelevant to the discussion for all intents and purposes?

That doesnt bode well given the point you’re trying to make. Include ALL resources used to obtain your 85% set collection, or stop providing disingenuous numbers. You are being intentionally misleading in your comment, thats a 200+ pack per set average collection size, not 70-80. So drop it already!

“85% is easy with only 70-80 packs” is, by your own admission, false. So stop stating it as fact! Even inccluding things like HoF refunds, I’m not seeing “freebies” accounting for the equivalent of ~150 packs for a single set, let alone the 450 for a year.

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