The GU team decided to drop a bit of a bomb on us this week. Not only did they spoil most of the 38 card set of Band of the Wolf, they let us know that 6 of the legends in the set will not be in packs at all but rather only attainable via use of the forge. If you want any of these legends you need to forge a shadow copy of one of the corresponding epics, and if you want shiny legends you need to craft even more.
This is uncharted territory for Gods Unchained. Not only are they incentivizing crafting, something that was never really front and center in other releases, this is yet another release were the rarities of the cards are going to get very skewed, similar to how Mortal Judgements epics are far more populous than it it's rares and worth a substantial amount less, even though they are "more difficult" to attain.
To help players get there craft on they also have incentives to craft diamond commons and Gold rares, each of which will provide you with the relevant epic for that gods legend. Bluntly, it's neat that they did this but I am not going to really include that in my analysis because it is likely far more expensive to get 125 copies of a common than 1 of an epic, and even if you want a full diamond playset of the common, it only gets you 2/5th of the way there. What I want to figure out here is roughly how much it is going to cost to make legends.
THE MATH
First off, let's talk about how hard it is to pull the epics. The most efficient way to pull an epic in this set is the $7.99 Booster pack. Unlike previous sets there is no random upgrading of a given card slot mentioned, so you cannot buy a $1.99 crafting pack and luck into something rarer. Likewise, if you buy the shiny packs you cannot get a meteorite card at all, so the only set that will really provide food for crafting is the booster pack, unless you really want to buy 100s of the crafting pack and try to work your way up.
Each of the relevant epics in the booster is listed as a 2.5% drop, so if we just assume that any of the 6 crafting epics is interchangeable with another at a 1:1 ratio (maybe you have a teammate who is also pooling cards with you or something) that means you are looking at a 15% chance per booster. Let's also mention that the two legendries you can pull from the set drop at a combined 1% rate, but I think we should also consider that a hit for crafting purposes because either of them will be something you can sell for well more than pack price or even the cards themselves on the market.
I'll also mention I am not sure how the drop rates work in this set so I may be way off here. The percentages given do not seem to be by slot but rather by the pack overall, but since there is supposed to be a guaranteed epic in each pack I would have assumed that the drop rate should equal 100% between the Epics and Legends, but they do not. if we take the percentages as they are written and try to think of it as 100%, the actual drop rate per craftable card is 9.61%, the overall to hit a craftable epic is 57.6%, and the odds for a legendary pull are 3.84%. I would need a better explanation of the numbers they provided but I'll try to do my analysis based on both versions of this.
It also bears mentioning that since the crafting period is only the 4 weeks the set is on sale, I suspect that the floor on any of these meteorite epics on the marketplace is going to be very high in the short term, and that shadow and above copies may actually get to be cheaper than the base level card. Unless the card is very, very good, and I do not think this is the case with the ones they picked, people will not want them already crafted because they won't be able to get the legendary. With all that said, buying packs MAY be better than singles at least for the opening volley, depending on what you are trying to do.
One other funny wrinkle to all this is that you have to craft the card to get the legendries. The GU team did not mention minting at all, rather that they were watching the forge activity and that is how legends would be rewarded. What that means is that getting a shine upgrade on your card is very much a downside, unless it is diamond which may still have good value. You have a 93.8% chance of pulling a meteorite from the chances we mentioned before, which means the odds of a given pack giving you either an epic you need for crafting or one of the 2 legends which can function as free roll works out as one of the two below:
(15% * 93.8%) + 1% = 15.07%
(57.6% * 93.8%) + 3.84% = 57.86%
That means you need to open around 6.63 booster packs on average to get 1 craftable epic in the first formula, and 1.72 in the other. I have to believe it is the latter of the 2 at this point, because 6 packs to pull 1 craftable epic seems insane. There is a 10% scaling pack discount but since I have no idea what it will be when I buy it, we only know for sure that packs will cost between $7.19 and and $7.99. Add all these factors up and your average crafting epic should cost somewhere between
$47.66 - $52.97 in the more pessimistic examples
$12.37 - $13.74 in the more realistic one (I hope they clear this up)
You will get some number of rares and commons with those pack cracks as well, but the odds you will get enough to craft a gold rare or a diamond common is pretty slim at lower numbers. Even a major pack cracking job, people who open 100+ boosters, are still only opening 200 rares at the absolute most.
SO WHAT SHOULD A LEGENDARY COST?
I'm just going to assume the cheaper evaluation of these numbers is correct at this point. So on balance, any of the 6 craftable legends should average out around to around $62.04 - $68.89 each and leave you with a playable shadow copy of a given epic that likely retains very little if any value outside of playability. That is also including the fee in gods to craft it, assuming gods are worth around $0.27 or so. Flux is basically next to free so I'm not assigning cost to it.
This feels high but about right. If we go look at Winter Wanderlands the average cost of the legends all netted out to about each, but that is being held down by 2 very bad legends that are trending to be worth less than woodcutter imp. If you wanted to open booster packs until you opened 6 legendries in that set, you would very likely have to spend far more to get them than even the $60-70 estimates for this set. The value you open in those packs would be propped up by opening copies of winters Bounty and Woodcutter, but then again Band of the Wolf also has legendary cards worth getting.
IN SUMMARY
So is it worth opening packs to craft legends? I think so. I believe these legends are going to have a scarcity to them that will rival Wanderlands but probably not Lights Verdict, and I do not think you are going to be getting any deals on the open marketplace. I also think that most of them are pretty decent overall. Reios is probably my top target as I think the card is in many ways just generically good versus something like Orcish Elite but pretty crazy in it's own list, and Giramonte will likely be it's own deck entirely and worth owning. Argus is big enough for 3 that I could see it happening as well. Chira, Gama, and Divya all have a reasonable seat in their own lists, but none of them really excite me so I'll probably get my play copies and move on to something else, though obviously if you open 5 of the needed epics you craft it while you can.
As a last thought, if you are going to play the crafting game there are a few things I would recommend.
First, I absolutely would monitor the marketplace. A pack is 7-8 dollar, that is the cheapest you can buy a crafting epic for with a big roll of the dice. If the average cost to hit a crafting epic really is and commons and rares go for an average of a dollar thanks to the crafting pack, that means any of these epics listed for under may be a discount. I could imagine it going 2 ways, either players sell epics under premium as they are just trying to get funds to get the other epic they need to complete a playset and people who jump can get discounts, or epics sell at a premium for the initial few days and a smart seller can play the pack lottery quite a bit. It reminds me of when Divine Order first hit and I was able to crack $100 in packs and immediately sell what I pulled for $150 to do it immediately again, and that was with average pulls. May not be the case here, but it's good to watch.
Second, again watch the marketplace but to see where the legends settle pricewise. I treated them all as a 1:1 exchange in this analysis but we know that will not be the case when the dust settles. I do think most players are going to at least try (and should) snag a playset so the value will be there early on. That being said if you notice Divya starting to sell for $30-40 a copy it will be a strong sign to stop looking at that card and focus on the other legends. You should also note that during the 4 weeks we can craft them, there literally is no reason you should be paying more for the epics than the following formula
(Legends Marketplace Cost + .7 gods) / 5
Anything more than that and you should just buy the legend outright.
Lastly, get a copy of Eiko if you plan on playing this game for the long term. She honestly looks like Blade of Whiteplain to me, under-costed and over powered and fits into every deck that might want it. I would not be surprised if she got knocked down in power before the set is locked just like Blade was, but that card also proved to be a ridiculous powerhouse even after the nerf. I plan on doing a full set review in the near future but just off the bat if there were one card in this set I would say you need, it is not something you are crafting.
Thanks for reading. I would love to hear your comments below or on Reddit about this, and if you like my writing make sure to give me a like and a free tip down below so I know I should keep writing more.
