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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. *There may be some discrepancies or calculation errors, I found a few cells while moving everything over to Kaldheim this week that were off. It's close enough. Fixing the screenshots as I go. 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!
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This is the first set that I finally started playing all of the draft games on. While my methods for collection drafting haven't changed, I actually spent time to play if what I had was able to build a somewhat playable 2 color deck. A few games I didn't bother with, but most of them I played out. I was able to do 1 premium draft and 19 quick drafts. I waited until the set was over since there were a lot of extra free packs to gain, and I wanted to show fully what F2P gets you. I ended the set by opening 74 M21 packs, followed by 15 packs from ELD, THB and IKO. The other 3 sets are only mentioned in that they will reflect in total wild cards earned after all of this. Card stats themselves will only reflect M21. Since there wasn't much else I wanted to get past 20 drafts, I cut my spending short and saved my gold for the rumors of more full art lands being released, which they did with the Unstable lands that I purchased. I got far more enjoyment out of those than the 3 quick drafts worth of vaulted cards I would have received. I ended up using several cards from M21 for the Mono White Lifegain deck: Selfless Savior, Speaker of Heavens, Swift Response and Basri Ket. I also used the new rotation proof Arena only card Hallowed Priest. I do purchase the mastery pass each set, for free from past gem earnings, and this set was no different. I used MTGAHelper as my tracker to help figure out what I did and did not have while drafting so as to avoid duplicates as best as I could. Collection Stats I wanted to change things up a little this time because it might help better show what total amounts of cards you can obtain from the free-2-play path. I typically show my collection stat articles right after I finish drafting, but this time I waited until the set mastery was completed since there were more free M21 packs rewarded this time, and those do add up over time. I want people to see just how much of a collection you can obtain, even if you have to wait a while to get all of the free packs. Free is free, don't ever overlook that. If time is your enemy, then money is your solution, so waiting out the set mastery is probably not for you. Patience will be rewarded in the end. I did of course buy the mastery pass, but I bought it with gems earned from previous set drafts that were all free. The point of that statement is that once you get the gems rolling in, you can play for free indefinitely and afford some free upgrades. Packs and stats included in the mastery pass I will be including in these stats as well because they were all free for me. I also did a Jumpstart even as well, but didn't record any of my cards since it wasn't for M21 nor did I get any wild cards for doing so. The extra 15 other booster packs from the mastery pass will be mentioned solely for reasons of showing total wild cards when all is said and done, but the cards themselves won't be part of these numbers since they are not specifically for M21's collection data. I am going to leave out most of the gameplay related stats, which you can find in my M21 Post Gameplay Stats article. These stats will focus on collection stats and wild cards only. M21 Booster Pack Stats 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.  M21 Draft Stats For M21, I completed 19 quick drafts, and 1 player drafts that I got for free with a mastery pass token.  Total Stats These stats also include 18 M21 ICRs obtained through daily gameplay and other free event rewards as well as the above 74 M21 booster packs and 20 drafts. Wild card data includes the additional 15 other packs opened via mastery pass rewards.  
New Data Projects... incomplete. Here is a little preview of some data points I am working on to help figure out when to quit drafting. This is going to show the point of when your common/uncommon duplicates are each crossing the line of dupes vs what you got to keep. Since I focus on drafting for my collection and not really caring about the wins, I want to make sure I get the most for my gold. I don't know how accurate it is at this point, as I stopped working on it to focus on other things, but this is the gist of it. The red/yellow lines reflect the drafted uncommon cards. You can see that about 18-19 drafts is when you start vaulting more uncommons than you keep. The two blue lines represent the drafted common cards. I am not sure why both are goign up, this is where I stopped playing with this chart and went on to other things rather than complete fixing this chart. I'll probably work on this more during Zendikar Rising. So, to look at the uncommon lines crossing, this is the point when I would say stop drafting and open all your packs purely for the rares. If you still have gold left over to spend on this particular set, then buying packs would be a better value for the rares only, especially with the duplicate protection. Since this chart updates with each new draft completed, it will continually show you when you're getting close to that point and when to stop. Drafting will still reward you with more overall value with gems and extra booster packs though, but if all you are after is rares then this is where you would stop drafting and start opening packs.  In Conclusion... I am going to try to get these stats related articles down to a minimum so they are easier to maintain and give all of the relevant facts without having to ramble on about them. I am continually tweaking my spreadsheets with each set release, and even during the set when I find something that is off, or a new stat to track, or even just a better way to show the data. I hope you enjoyed what you saw. Your takeaway is that this is what you can expect from a daily F2P player with 4 wins a day, every day, and a mastery pass. I almost didn't make it to the end of M21. I was so burned out the last couple of weeks of play and hated the stale meta. I was about to quit for a week and then realized a few days ago that I had calculated my spreadsheet end date using the wrong date. I used the release date of Zendikar Rising for paper, and forgot to subtract a week for Arena. So at that point I had only a couple of days left, so I powered through. I then realized since I was expecting to have one more week, I didn't have any of my spreadsheets finalized, or my new fresh one cleaned and ready for Zendikar Rising, or any of my collection stat spreadsheets ready to go for the new set. I got it all going and am ready to close out the old stats for M21 finally. I started M21 with Azorius flyers until quick draft started, played about 19 drafts, plus 1 premier draft that I had a free token for, and then switched over to mono white lifegain. I tried mono green stompy a little but it just wasn't going fast enough for me. For the first time since I started playing, I decided to actually play my draft games out in order to earn the gems so I could save a few dollars on the mastery passes going forward. Even though I was only rare drafting for my collection, I still managed to win enough games to pay for the next two mastery passes. It's unbelievable how many wins I got just by pure luck of the opponent having worse luck than I was. All of the FNM @ Home events helped add a lot of value to this set release as well, I made sure to participate in every one of those. Core Set 2021 makes the fifth full set I've been tracking via spreadsheet, with the help of MTGAHelper to verify my statistics. My spreadsheet didn't change too much since the Ikoria set, though I made a few tiny tweaks here and there, added a couple extra columns to track additional data as well as continued tweaks in the large draft and pack opening spreadsheets. All stats started on 6/25/20 and ran through 9/17/20, when Zendikar Rising was released. I was able to get one extra daily grind in for M21on release day, just before the big update. While I strive to have accurate stats, due to decimal places, and sometimes missing a cell or two in my spreadsheet, totals may not fully add up, so don't try mathing them. If you are interested in all the raw data, please let me know and I can share the spreadsheet with you. Total Gameplay Stats
These stats are from all types of gameplay, including daily gold farming in the play queue, ranked draft, events, ranked BO1, and just play testing decks for fun in the play queue. The larger loss ratio was due to the oppressive decks circulating in the meta. I quickly recognized if I was going to have a chance in the first few turns and conceded early on if not. Most of these decks play way too long for daily grinding, so I was not going to wast my time only to lose to them.
Daily Gold Farming and Individual Daily Deck Stats My daily routine was to win a minimum of 4 games per day in the play queue, and complete a daily quest if able. I played more on occasion, but usually 30-60 mins a day was enough for me if I already met my daily minimums. These stats are only for games played in the play queue during my daily farming routine, or events that allowed either deck. These are the main two I used during this set release and does not reflect other decks I played throughout. Mono White Lifegain
Azorius Flyers (various versions)
Gold
Gems
ICRs
Ranked Draft I only do ranked draft for the cards, gems and booster packs. For the first time since I started playing, I actually played all of my draft games if I had something I could actually build a deck out of. For Arena, I do what I call collection drafting. You can more about that my article for Arena Collection Drafting.
Booster Packs
Cards
Wild Cards
In Conclusion I only made a few small tweaks to the spreadsheet this time around and it seems to be working even better. It's much more accurate and finely tuned for every little bit of data that I want to track. I hope everyone enjoyed their journey through Core Set 2021. Until the next set...  TL:DR version
This week starts preview season for the new Magic: The Gathering set Zendikar Rising. As with past sets, WotC have 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 8/31/20. Jace Pack Bundle: $49.99  What's in it? The Jace Pack Bundle is the same as past pack bundles, with a slight discount on bulk packs plus some fun extras thrown in for "free".
From this we can see there is $60.72 worth of value here. If you don't care about the cosmetics, you still get a small discount on booster packs as well as the single inclusion of the Jace, Mirror Mage card, still totaling at least $54.24 in value. Is this a good buy? Yes, if you're one who buys at least 50 virtual booster packs for real world money. Nahiri Play Bundle: $49.99  What's in it? The Nahiri Play Bundle appears to be keeping it's increased value that was raised in the M21 Play bundle by adding more draft tokens. This is a good trend to see.
From this we can see there is $66.20 worth of value here. If you don't care about the cosmetics, you're still coming out ahead with $59.71 in value if you were going to be purchasing these items anyway. Who is this bundle for? I see this bundle targeted to those who don't have a lot of gems or are just starting out in the world of drafting. I would think that if you draft a lot, and you're one to purchase the draft tokens with gems, then you are typically able to keep the gem rewards going, even on a bad run of luck. That said, you are probably someone who has enough gems saved up to get the Mastery pass and draft for free from your previous set's gem winnings. If this is you, then this is probably not a bundle you need. Is this a good buy? Yes, if you're one who buys the mastery pass and draft tokens each set release. No, if you already have enough gems banked from the previous set release. Buy Both Bundles: $99.98
Are both bundles worth it?
If you are planning to buy the pack bundle already, and want the play bundle too, then this is an excellent buy. If you only want the booster packs and dont need the draft tokens or mastery pass, or you can get those for free with your gems, then don't bother with the play bundle. In Conclusion... I hope you found this helpful and informative and it helps with your purchasing decisions. It's been a while since I last updated this series. I had become upset with the game after one too many crashes causing me to lose all of my stuff I spent many hours gathering in-game. With the latest Wastelanders update that came out a few months back, I started playing daily again and falling back in love with the game. Ikoria came and went quickly. Even though it was a shorter set, clocking in at only 71 days, with all of the Covid stuff going on, game stores closed and delay for the paper product, it seems like it just went by without a thought. As we're going into week two (as of the time of this writing) with Core Set 2021, I am hardly seeing any of the signs of Ikoria anymore, mainly all of the mutate decks. Speaking of residual Ikoria, the only thing I ended up really using from it on a daily basis was Skycat Sovereign in my daily Azorius Flyers deck. I played around with some of the other cards, but nothing that I played for my daily grind. I had a really exciting and fun to play Slitherwisp flash deck that got nasty if the engine could get going and also built the awful cycling deck that I refused to play before of absolutely boring gameplay. I had one mutate deck, but it was missing a few rares that I didn't want to craft since I wasn't going to be playing that daily. I generally stick to fast aggro so I can either win quickly, or concede quickly and move on to the next game. The fun decks are saved for playing with friend in direct play. I was pretty excited for this set. I loved the art and style of the showcase cards, though since they were only on the mutate creatures, I didn't end up getting any of the card styles since I didn't play with any of them much. I did get quite a few in my paper collection and they look really slick in the card binder. Ikoria makes the fourth full set I've been tracking via spreadsheet, with the help of MTGAHelper to verify my statistics. My spreadsheet didn't change too much since the Theros set, though I made a few tiny tweaks here and there, added a couple extra columns to track additional data as well as changed and fixed a few things in the large draft and pack opening spreadsheets. All stats started on 4/16/20 and ran through 6/25/20, when Core Set 2021 was released. I was able to get one extra daily grind in for Ikoria on release day, just before the big update. The accuracy has greatly improved as I build in a few check cells to make sure I tallied up certain fields correctly.
Total Gameplay Stats These stats are from all types of gameplay, including daily gold farming in the play queue, ranked draft, events, ranked BO1, and just play testing decks for fun in the play queue.
Daily Gold Farming and Individual Daily Deck Stats My daily routine was to win a minimum of 4 games per day in the play queue, and complete a daily quest if able. I played more on occasion, but usually 30-60 mins a day was enough for me if I already met my daily minimums. These stats are only for games played in the play queue during my daily farming routine. RDW (THB)
Azorius Flyers (various versions)
Gold
Gems
ICRs
Ranked Draft I only do ranked draft for the cards, gems and booster packs. I really don't enjoy the format on Arena, and really only have fun drafting with a group of friends. For Arena, I do what I call collection drafting. You can more about that my article for Arena Collection Drafting.
Booster Packs
Cards
Wild Cards
In Conclusion I only made a few small tweaks to the spreadsheet this time around and it seems to be working well now. It's much more accurate and finely tuned for every little bit of data that I want to track. I hope everyone enjoyed their journey through the lands of Ikora and meeting all the great beasts and other fun mechanics. Until the next set...  Will Core Set 2021 bring good value for this set? Lets find out!
WotC released the mastery pass information early again. While we don't know what levels we will get what rewards at, we can look at past mastery mass tracks to have a pretty good guess. This will only be needed to figure out the break even point. Total value can still be obtained if you plan to complete the entire track. How long is Core Set 2021? The length of Core Set 2021 (M21) is longer than Ikoria, clocking in at the typically stanard time frame of 90 days. The Mastery Tree is 90 levels total, with level 91 and beyond giving out uncommon ICRs, the same as the previous mastery passes. M21 runs on Arena from 6/26/20 with it's last day being 9/23/20. The release date for Zendikar Rising on Arena starts 9/24/20. The paper release for M21 starts the weekend after. For active players, I am still recommending the same model of playing 4 wins per day to maximize your gold farming ability without running into burnout. Doing so averages out to 1135 XP per day over the course of the week. With 90 days of play, you should be at Level 102. This gives you plenty of time to reach the final level of rewards. Here is what this looks like calculated out:
In fact, to be more accurate, we can use MTGAHelper's excellent Mastery Pass Calculator to figure this out for us once the new pass goes live. Where do the values come from? All values have been carefully traced back to actual money that you can spend in the game through gems, or using gold to gem conversion rates. Everything in the game can be traced back to an actual dollar amount at this point in time. Even individual random cards, which includes ICRs. For more information on real world Arena values, please click on my article HERE. Free Mastery Track Lets start by looking at what is available for free from the basic set mastery track. Ikoria free mastery track includes the following:
So all of you F2P players are getting $49.98 in value for just playing the game. That's excellent value for zero dollars spent! Paid Mastery Pass Now, lets see what the paid mastery pass gives you for this set. M21 mastery pass includes the following:
This gives us a combined total of $186.93. Thoughts on the M21 Mastery Pass. Lets say you aren't interested in the cosmetic items. You are still getting $42.09 in value for virtual items at just under $20 worth of gems. This is still a pretty decent value for any active player. One change from this pass over previous passes is that the older booster packs offered this time around are still all in standard, and will be for the next full rotation. Also they are including the current M21 booster packs as well, bringing the value up even more. I really don't see anything negative about the pass, even if you are only interested in the non-cosmetic items. Is the Core Set 2021 Mastery Pass it worth it? Typically I would add in a few various Yes, No and Maybe comments here. Because all of the booster packs included will still be legal in the post-rotation standard, as well as the increase in gems over Ikoria, and the included premier draft token, this is an excellent deal. The cosmetics are just the icing on the cake.  With Ikoria wrapping up, I have reached the end of the mastery pass. With the exception of the random uncommon ICRs past level 80, I won't really be receiving any more cards for my IKO collection, nor will I be receiving any more booster packs. As a Free-to-Play (F2P) player, let's take a look at what all I received this set. I won't bore you with a long rambling blog story, but will instead just get straight to the stats. I got a kick start with free drafts using my free Theros draft token, free Ikoria draft token, and the token included with the mastery pass. Before we get too far, my mastery pass was paid for from last set's gem earnings, so it was free for me. I went ahead and played the token drafts while I waited the two weeks for quick draft to start. I saved all Ikoria booster packs earned to open until after I had finished quick drafting. I went ahead and opened booster packs from older sets that I received from the mastery pass. Once Ikora quick draft went live, I did 19 back-to-back drafts, bringing my self up to 22 total drafts. I only rare drafted and selected cards that I didn't already have, and then skipped playing the games. Yes, I get a lot of flack for this, but I don't care. While I do enjoy playing draft in person with my friends, I don't enjoy playing draft with strangers online. You can read more about Collection Drafting HERE. Since Ikora was a much shorter release period, I stopped at 22 drafts and started saving for M21 quick draft. I used MTGAHelper as my tracker to help figure out what I did and did not have while drafting so as to avoid duplicates as best as I could. 22 IKO Drafts + 46 IKO Packs Totals This data includes just the drafts and saved booster packs that were opened immediately after, as well as a couple ICRs I had obtained up to this point.   All Packs Earned All booster packs were all earned through the set mastery, mastery pass and free codes, and one daily deal using gold. These stats include both IKO and older packs combined. I could extrapolate the IKO only stats on request if anyone wants that info. I have massive spreadsheets with all of this hand-tracked data on it. I have per-card stats for each current set, but I do not track individual cards for previous sets while playing and tracking the current set. For previous sets, I only track the numbers, such as how many rares, commons, wilds, vault status etc, but not the individual card names. Older set card names are irrelevant to the current set's stats. They do contribute to the overall wildcard count and wheel track, so this is why they are included as card counts only. I will have another article comparing IKO only pack openings against each other in various amounts and against drafting, you can see my previous article on this subject for Theros HERE. This future will include total set collections based on opened packs only. Older packs were all opened as I received them. IKO packs were only opened after I finished drafting, and subsequently after receiving each one. I will have a All Booster Pack Stats These booster packs include all packs opened during the IKO set release. There were  Total IKO CollectionAfter drafting and opening packs, I still acquired another 20 booster packs. Here are the collection totals for the full amount of everything IKO that I acquired. These numbers also include ICRs acquired via daily play, event and mastery pass rewards. 
I believe I have run out of stats to ramble on about, so this will conclude this set's collection stats for myself.
My plans for M21 are about the same. I am on track for having roughly 110,000 gold by the time M21 quick draft goes live. This, plus the draft token from the M21 mastery pass should afford me another 23 drafts. Since there appears to be a lot of re-prints and other not too exciting stuff with M21, I may cut it short and just start saving for Zendikar. There is also Jump Start to think about too, so I may save some for that, though that will all be mostly for Historic, which I don't play as much.  I finished up my last day of Theros Beyond Death with a good morning run of several wins to a few losses. This is typical for my daily gold farming grind.
I was not super excited about this set, but then again I am not really into Greek mythology. Some of the mechanics were cool, such as devotion and all of the extra enchantments that came along. Anax was the only card I played out of this set on a daily basis. I migrated from Cavalcade from Throne of Eldraine over to the current RDW build for Theros. I did build some janky stuff and had some fun with other Theros cards, but nothing competitive like RDW was for me. This is the third full set that I have tracked complete stats for, having tracked Eldraine Stats as well as M20 stats. Lets just jump right into the info! All stats started on 1/16/20 and ended on 4/15/20. This equals a total of 91 days of gameplay. There may be a few discrepancies here and there, as sometimes I forgot to tally a mulligan or who conceded, or who went first, etc. It's close enough though. Don't look too harshly at this, it's still a lot of data that was collected. There's bound to be tiny errors here and there. Total Gameplay Stats These stats are from all types of gameplay, including daily gold farming in the play queue, ranked draft, events, ranked BO1, and just play testing decks for fun in the play queue.
A change for the new spreadsheet will be to track seconds. Time was rounded up or down to the nearest minute for the tracking of this set, so I feel a lot of time was not accounted for. Daily Gold Farming and Individual Daily Deck Stats My daily routine was to win a minimum of 4 games per day in the play queue, and complete a daily quest if able. I played more on occasion, but usually 30-60 mins a day was enough for me if I already met my daily minimums. These stats are only for games played in the play queue during my daily farming routine. Cavalcade 3.0
RDW (THB)
I did play several days with a RDW variant with some other less used cards, and while I think it had good bones to it, it just wasn't as strong as the current RDW T1 meta deck. Ranked BO1
Gold
Gems
ICRs
Ranked Draft I only do ranked draft for the cards, gems and booster packs. I really don't enjoy the format on Arena, and really only have fun drafting with a group of friends. For Arena, I do what I call collection drafting. You can more about that my article for Arena Collection Drafting.
Booster Packs Disclaimer/Discrepancy: While I attempted to kept meticulous track of each booster pack I opened, I appear to have a discrepancy somewhere. I have record of opening 97 packs on my pack opening spreadsheet. I show that I obtained 100 packs on my daily stats spreadsheet. I don't have 4 of the non-THB mastery packs that I show opened on the pack opening spreadsheet, which would give myself a total of 101. I'll have to be more careful on IKO when tracking all of this. So, here is what I do have.
Cards
Wild Cards
Wild Card Rates This data is for the 97 total booster packs that I tracked opening.
In Conclusion I've made some drastic changes to my tracking spreadsheets over the past 3 iterations and have honed it down to something I think works very well for the data that I am tracking. I only made a few tiny tweaks to it and I am ready to start tracking data for Ikoria! I hope everyone enjoyed their journey back through the plane of Theros are are ready to see what's next as we travel to Ikoria!  Ikoria is the Land of Behemoths, but will be we be receiving monstrous value from this set's mastery pass?
WotC released the mastery pass information early this set. While we don't know what levels we will get what rewards at, we can look at past mastery mass tracks to have a pretty good guess. This will only be needed to figure out the break even point. Total value can still be obtained if you plan to complete the entire track. How long is Ikoria Lair of Behemoths? The length of Ikoria is even shorter than Theros Beyond Death, clocking in at only 71 days this time. The Mastery Tree is 80 levels total, with level 80 and beyond giving out the uncommon ICRs, the same as the last two mastery passes. Ikoria runs from 4/16/20 with it's last day most likely being being 6/25/20. The release date for Core Set 2021 starts July 3, Paper pre-release and Arena play generally begins the weekend before. For active players, I am still recommending the same model of playing 4 wins per day for maximizing your gold farming ability without running into burnout. Doing so averages out to 1135 XP per day over the course of the week. With 71 days of play, you should be at Level 80. This gives you exactly enough time to reach the final level of reward. Here is what this looks like calculated out:
In fact, to be more accurate, we can use MTGAHelper's excellent Mastery Pass Calculator to figure this out for us once the new pass goes live. Where do the values come from? All values have been carefully traced back to actual money that you can spend in the game through gems, or using gold to gem conversion rates. Everything in the game can be traced back to an actual dollar amount at this point in time. Even individual random cards, which includes ICRs. For more information on real world Arena values, please click on my article HERE. Free Mastery Track Lets start by looking at what is in the free path of the mastery track. Ikoria free mastery track includes the following:
So all of you F2P players are getting $43.48 value for just playing the game. That's excellent value for zero dollars spent! Paid Mastery Pass Now, lets see what the paid mastery pass gives you this set. Ikoria mastery pass includes the following:
This gives us a combined total of $183.17. Thoughts on the Ikoria Mastery Pass. Lets say you aren't interested in the cosmetic items. You are still getting $40.82 in value for virtual product at just under $20 worth of Gems. This is still a pretty decent value for any active player. Although... Keep in mind that when Zendikar Rising releases in the late summer, that 13 of these booster packs will no longer be used in Standard, which is about $14 in value. This still leaves us with $26.72 in value. The mastery pass costs us $19.85 in gems. This is barely worth it at this point from just a product perspective, but it's still in the positive. It may get worse... For those that have been playing for a while and like to draft or open lots of booster packs, then those 20 extra booster packs from older sets may be worth nothing to you at all. This brings total value to $19.13, which is not a great buy if all you care about is virtual product only. I didn't really get back into Arena until the end of RNA, so while my collection of GRN and RNA are low, and I have less WAR than M20 and beyond, I already have crafted anything I needed from these older sets, making anything I open in those packs rather worthless for me. I am also in the same boat as a lot of active players in the past year in that for M20 and newer, I have nearly the entire playset for all of these sets, so I won't be getting much value out of these booster packs either. The only thing of value at this point is the duplicated protected rare slot from those booster packs, and the vault progress from all the useless duplicates, neither of which I care about at this point for those particular sets. If you love cosmetics, then this is always an excellent value. You will get your cosmetics for the latest set sooner than waiting on them to show up in the store later. Also, it appears that from what we have seen so far in the store, this is a much better value on cosmetics. Think of it as buying most of this set's cosmetics at a discounted bulk rate. Is the Ikoria Lair of Behemoths Mastery Pass it worth it?
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