Arena THB Ranked Draft Data

Arena Theros Beyond Death Draft Data

Finally, the wait for Ranked Draft on Arena is over with the new Magic: The Gathering set Theros Beyond Death. It's time to spend all of that hard earned gold from the past few months of grinding.

If you're only interested in my spreadsheet data, you can find it here:
THB Draft and Pack Data

For drafting, I used the Collection Drafting method. For a more indepth article on Collection Drafting, please see my article Arena Collection Drafting (THB)

Data on 21 Ranked Drafts + 50 Booster Packs

For the draft process itself, I focused on Rares and Uncommons as much as I could, then picked Commons as a last choice. Doing so netted me pretty much everything I was looking for out of this process.

21 drafts, not including opening the booster packs after, gained me the following cards:

21 Draft, standalone data, no booster packs.

After this I opened all 50 booster packs for THB that I had saved. This data is completely stand-alone, so it will show what you get from 50 booster packs, regardless if you draft or not. This is good information for those that buy the large booster pack bundles.

50 Booster Packs, standalone data, no draft data included.

Combining both the 21 Drafts and the 50 Booster packs worth of cards and calculating in all of the duplication combined, this is what I ended up with for my totals.

Combined total of 21 Drafts and 50 Booster Packs opened after.

From this we can see that I pretty much aquired the entire Common and Uncommon playset and more than half of the Rares.

At this point, the only thing you will be gaining from the draft process is 3-4 Rares per draft and 50 extra gems at a minimum, unless you decide to play it out.

You could chose to Rare Draft and play the games out at this point since you are no logner concerned with commons and uncommons. You can then take your time to build a proper draft deck and maximize winning for the extra Gems rewards.

For me, I got what I came for, so I was satisfied without playing any games.

Here are the few random stats that I received as well from the entire process:

Random Stats after 21 Drafts and 50 Packs.

I collected the Wild Card data from each of the 50 Arena booster pack opened as well:

Wild Card Random Pack Rate for 50 Packs.

Since the Wild Card wheel rate is published right in the game, it makes it easy to calculate guaranteed Wild Cards per packs opened.

This data shows the wheel rate in action:

• Uncommon WC - Every 6 Packs
  
• Rare WC - Every 6 Packs
  
• Mythic WC - Every 30 Packs

Wild Card Wheel Rate for 50 Packs.

Data on 10 Ranked Drafts + 10 Booster Packs

Lets say you just started out, or you have read my article MTG Arena: Stuck in the New Player Rut? and only have 50K gold to spend. What does that get you exactly? We'll I'm glad you have read this far, beacause I also broke that information down just for you!

This is what 10 Ranked Drafts looks like:

10 Ranked Drafts, standalone data, no booster packs

Here is what opening 10 Arena booster packs looks like:

10 booster packs, standalone data, no draft data included

And finally, here is the combined data for 10 Ranked Drafts and then opening 10 Arena booster packs after.

Combined total of 10 drafts + 10 booster packs opened after drafting

Now as an encouraging note, you will most likely get more Arena booster packs rewards than just 1 per draft, but this is the guaranteed published rate. For the first 10 Ranked Drafts that I did, I actually got 12 Arena booster packs, so my total cards and wild cards would have actually been greater than what the grand total shows.

50K Gold Comparison:
Ranked Draft vs Arena Booster Packs

Now for the controversial conversation that everyone loves to talk about. As a new player, should you spend your gold on Ranked Draft or just open Arena Booster Packs?

Well, I'm glad you kept on reading this far, because I also have this exact data as well.

Since typically newer players have less gold to start with, I am only comparing what you can do with 50K gold, since this is a nice obtainable number, even halfway through a set release.

50K Gold = 10 Ranked Drafts + 10 Booster Packs + 500 Gems

50K Gold = 50 Booster Packs

From this comparison we can see:

• Ranked Draft = roughly 90 more kept cards + 500 Gems
• Booster Packs = a lot more Wild Cards

Also take into consideration that those 50 booster packs are all completely random cards. You may not get anything you need, or you may get lucky and get everything you need. You may also get a ton of duplicates, and thus wasted gold. You never know.

With Ranked Draft, you are able to hand pick the cards you want and need first. You also get more kept cards for your collection.

Unless you just really need those few extra wild cards, Ranked Draft is still the preferred method for building your collection.

Keep in mind too that after a certain point, Ranked Draft will have less return, typically after 22 or so drafts. From this point if you still need to spend more on getting more rares, you should switch over to spending gold on Arena Booster packs, as you will get a better return on Rares you don't have, plus more wild cards.

How does this scale?

This is what nobody seems to have any data on, and I don't have the funds to just open 100 packs to find out.

As Theros continues on, I will keep collecting data on each free Theros pack that I open, but even this will only give me another 30 or so packs to gather data on, rounding out at 75-80 or so packs opened. (For ELD, I obtained 86 free booster packs from the entire season, including draft rewards and everything I got for free from the F2P Mastery Track and free codes. )

If there is anybody out there that has opened 100 Booster packs from a single set and recorded every card opened and every wild card gained per pack, I would love to see that data so that we have something to compare with for further research. Please contact me! If you have money sitting around and would like to donate it to help the community find this out, please contact me! I would love to collect this data to share with the entire Arena community so we can have this data once and for all!

What would 100K Gold get you?

We know what you get when doing Ranked Drafts from multiple sets worth of spreadsheets, not only from myself, but from others.

Speculation for opening 100 booster packs is that the duplicates would start to ramp quickly with no way to protect against this, as you would with the draft process, but you would receive twice the wild cards as shown here with opening 50 packs since that is at a set rate.

I don't want to speculate any further with any kind of projected calculations since it would leave us open to misinformation, which is the last thing I want to inject into the already toxic social media conversations out there. I'll just stick with the facts.