When it comes to Blizzard’s smash-hit digital collectible card game, Hearthstone, there’s nothing more exciting a brand new pack of cards. Whether bought with in-game currency or as a reward for a successful run through the Arena—the game’s deck-building/card-fighting challenge mode—opening card packs is the primary way to grow your collection.
Each pack holds five cards, and each card is random. With four different card rarities (common, rare, epic, legendary), along with each card having a special “golden” version, the possible combination of cards is almost endless. It was only a matter of time before somebody asked how often each card type would show up.
And that’s when Steve Marinconz stepped in. In his report for Kotaku, Marinconz documented 1,000 openings, and each card’s rarity. His final conclusions show that, while a vast majority of cards (about 70 percent) were common, the probability of opening a valuable legendary card isn’t actually that bad (6.33 percent).
What was more interesting was his documentation of card combinations. The most common? Four common cards and one rare, followed by three commons and two rares.
But what about the dream pack, one that would only contain legendaries? He calculates that the odds of opening up a pack containing five legendary cards to be at one in a million. And if you want all those cards to be golden, try something along the lines of one in every 3.2 billion.
With the biggest discount coming from buying cards in 40 pack bundles, that means you’d have to spend $4 billion if you wanted a fair shot at the most valuable pack possible. Or, you know, the approximate cost that Disney paid to acquire LucasFilm and the Star Wars franchise.
H/T Kotaku
Published: Jun 6, 2014 01:12 pm