​TL:DR version

• Kaya Pack Bundle - Yes, if you're one to spend at least $50 on virtual booster packs.
• Niko Play Bundle - Maybe. The value is there, but if you draft a lot, you probably already have a ton of gems to get all of this for free anyway.
• Both Bundles Combined - Maybe. It depends if you need the Play bundle or not based on your drafting experience and gems banked.

Last week started preview season for the new Magic: The Gathering set Kaldheim.

As with past sets, WotC has released pre-release bundles on Arena prior to the new set launching. Are they a good deal or not?

Just like with the previous bundles, they are offering a bundle purchase of both bundles and throwing in another pet. I will go into depth on each bundle separately, and then discuss both bundles combined at the end.

Pricing and value information is all found on my main Arena site. All values shown are as of 1/12/21.

I really didn't change much in this article at all. It appears the pack and play bundles have stabilized in their offerings and have been the same going on 3 sets in a row now.

I was kind of excited for Zendikar Rising, but barely a month into Standard, I realized I couldn't stand the format any longer. I love Magic, but seeing the same few decks over and over again, I needed a change. So, I moved to Historic.

Now in Historic, I thought this may be different, but I quickly found that I see the same few Historic decks over and over again... but it's somehow different. I think the difference is that I am able to build what I want, and not be confined to a format of cards that don't care how I want to play. I don't play control, I don't care about killing all your things, I just want to be as aggro as possible and play a bunch of creatures. It's what I like. So, I gravitated towards one of my favorite tribal groups, Elves!

With the move to Historic, I kind of lost the interest of collecting the new set, knowing that I already have a powerful enough deck, one of which didn't even use any cards from the new set. I used my premium draft token from the Mastery Pass, and I did about a dozen quick drafts total. This was down significantly from the 20 or so I have been doing for the past year's worth of sets.

I was taking it kind of slow this set. Since I don't draft to win but instead draft to collect, I didn't always have a very good pool of cards to build a limited deck from. I played what I could, or just conceded the draft after picking out all my cards if I had nothing to really build a deck out of. Either way, I gained a lot of gems from some of my wins and a few extra prize booster packs in the process too.

Zendikar rotated out of quick draft, and by the time it came back, I had completely lost interest in getting any more cards via Draft. I had enough gems for the next two set's worth of Mastery Passes, and I had enough wild cards to not care about not having all the new cards anymore.

Flash forward to when I finally hit the last booster pack from the Mastery Pass, it was time to open all those packs I had been saving. I decided to just open them all when I had all the free ones that I was going to get to make it easier to keep track of. I didn't need anything from the packs, so I just let them sit.

After drafting and opening packs, I cleaned up and added some new calculations to the spreadsheet. I am working towards automating as much of it as I can. My goal is only to plug in the draft and booster card counts and my daily play info, and the spreadsheet will calculate the rest across the various sheets into a nice neat easy to read dashboard of interesting stats. As crApple likes to say with product revisions, "This is the best one yet!"

I manually track everything and double check my data using MTGAHelper.

Gameplay Stats will be my Arena Post ZNR Gameplay Stats article that will be written shortly before the next set release.

So, after 12 ZNR drafts and after opening 82 free ZNR booster packs, here is what I ended up with. Keep in mind all of this was free, I only spent gems for the mastery pass (which I obtained from previous draft winnings) and gold was spent on drafts, cosmetic items and the gold/gem daily deals. I did not buy any packs with gold.

​ZNR Booster Packs

All booster packs were free, earned through set mastery, mastery pass, codes and draft rewards. I did not purchase any packs this set.

These packs were tracked independently from the draft, so all numbers reflect what can be expected if you only opened 74 booster packs for the current set and nothing else.

ZNR Draft Stats

I completed 1 Premium draft with a token from the Mastery Pass, and 11 quick drafts using gold.
​

Total Stats

I did not include the ICR count or ICR vault progress in these stats, realizing that I need to add that data into another dashboard from my daily play sheet. But the majority of those cards are not from the current set anyway, so the increase would be quite small.

Wild card data also includes the additional 20 non-ZNR packs obtained via the Mastery Pass.

What's Next?

I didn't get around to messing with the Cards Kept vs Dupes data points since I didn't do much drafting this time. We'll see how I feel when Kaldheim comes out. There's quite a few cards in there that I would like to use for Historic.

I will also be adding some more daily gameplay dashboards to use with my Post Gameplay articles. This will help display more interesting data points of how much goes into playing this game.

As of now, I am just maintaining the sleeve gallery and adding up my stats. I'm not going to say I'm bored of Arena, I enjoy waking up and getting my morning games in, but I am not as excited as I once was. We'll see where the year takes me.

I am excited for Kaldheim. There's a lot of elf cards that I will be adding to my new elf tribal commander deck, as well as other elf decks for modern, historic, etc. 

... that viking etched showcase art! Can't wait!