A week ago, I made a post telling everyone that you're paying about a 20% premium when you're buying DO packs instead of buying individual cards, but that post just went into all the math and theory with no real packs to verify what I was saying. I decided to spend some money on 100 Divine Order packs, record my results, and let everyone know what 100 packs could potentially get you should you decide to take a gamble.
Even though buying individual cards is likely to be much more worth your money, if you're new and still intend to buy Divine Order packs regardless, you should do so by registering with my referral link!
Proof of Purchase and Spreadsheet Set-up
I bought the packs two days ago and they cost me a grand total of 0.078 ETH which was worth about 250 USD then. I decided to go for the rare packs instead of the higher rarity ones because I liked having more things to open - 100 Rare packs sound way more exciting to open as compared to 30 Epic Packs or 5 Legendary packs.
To record all my pack openings and to get a rolling calculation of my losses in real-time, I made a spreadsheet to record my pack openings. I scraped TokenTrove for a list of the last transacted price on each card of the Meteorite quality for a snapshot of the price data and did a little Excel magic to automatically show the corresponding prices of each card as I typed their names in.
Here's what the spreadsheet looked like at the end:
The recording flow was simple: I would simply key in the name of the card in the orange cells above, and the card value, rarity, and other stats would update automatically. Recording the quality of each card pull was a bit different; I simply colored the cell with a different color to show that it was of a higher quality than Meteorite. I would then later manually count these to see how many of each quality I pulled. All price values are in ETH.
Results
I'm not going to bore you with 100 images of rather unimpressive pack openings so I'm just gonna skip right to the results.
The total approximate value of everything that I opened was about 0.0590 ETH assuming that they are all of the Meteorite quality, meaning that I spent 0.019 ETH more on opening the packs than if I had bought all of these cards individually. Of course, the higher qualities do help to buffer up the difference a little, but the market for these cards is much more illiquid and does fluctuate quite a bit from time to time so I didn't include them in my calculations.
In these 100 packs, there were a total of 400 common slots and 100 rare slots. (If you don't know what slots are, do read the buyer's guide by the GU team here or read my previous post about it.) Essentially, a slot has fixed probabilities of a certain rarity card appearing in it. A common slot has a 0.1655% chance of containing a Legendary card but a Rare slot has a 1.8385% chance of that happening. Using their official probabilities, opening 100 packs would translate to an average of:
- 370 commons
- 110 rares
- 17.5 epics
- 2.5 legendaries
I actually came pretty close to those numbers with 365 commons, 118 rares, 14 epics, and 3 legendaries. I was slightly luckier than the average 100-pack pull since I did unpack 3 legendaries, which are the Finnian Fruitbearer, Arch of Amenmose, and Anagreos, Daemon Prince.
On the quality side of things, their official probabilities suggest that 100 packs should give an average of:
- 469 Meteorites
- 25 Shadows
- 5 Golds
- 1 Diamond
I also came pretty close to these average numbers with 469 Meteorites, 18 Shadows, 12 Golds, and 1 Diamond. With more golds than shadows, I was also luckier than average in the qualities of the cards I pulled.
And even though I was luckier than the average 100-pack pull in both the rarity and quality aspects, I still didn't open packs that were worth my money. If you need any more convincing that DO packs are often not worth it, here are the most valuable cards that I pulled according to TokenTrove:
Finnian Fruitbearer is the most expensive Legendary currently in the Divine Order set, and I managed to pull it. Pulling any other legendary would have led to even more paper losses. The diamond Labyrinth Guard and gold Guild Enforcer are pretty nice, but they are also harder to sell due to the illiquid market that higher-quality cards have.
Just to fulfill my curiosity, I also decided to find out which card I unpacked the most. This card turned out to be the Looting Squire which no one ever uses in their decks, with 10 of it being unpacked. Maybe one day the Looting Squire will have his day on the board.
The Thrill of Pack Opening
I'm not going to lie, my primary objective for buying these packs was to get the thrill of pack opening first, and documenting it second. In the same way that rational people go to casinos to spend money despite knowing that the casino always wins in the end, I bought packs knowing that I'd most likely make a "loss" on these packs. For a lot of the people who are in TCGs, pack-opening is a thrilling event. You could unpack a Diamond Finnian, a Gold Oddi, or even the elusive promo Rats! Even though statistically speaking, unpacking these would be akin to winning a lottery, many people still want to have a go at it hoping that this time will be their lucky break. Nothing wrong with that, but do be aware of your own limits.
With GU packs, you also need to know that every new pack opened increases the supply of the cards in the market, indirectly devaluing the cards that you pull. Buying cards on the secondary market doesn't do that and the lowered supply may lead to marginally higher prices in the future, although this could be said to be pure speculation.
Conclusion
Although I made a paper loss on those 100 packs that I bought, I don't feel bad for deciding to buy those packs. It is a way for me to support the developers of GU who have made an amazing game. The thrill of opening fresh packs right out from the store will never get old, and I look forward to decimating a part of my ETH stash on card packs when the new expansion finally comes around. Until next time!
Post Header pack images from the Gods Unchained Blog.
Some of the card images in this post are generated by GUListCreator, a tool I created for fast card list lookup and creation to write posts like this on Hive. Do check it out if you like to create content for Gods Unchained!
Finnian is a nice pull and gave you some bang for your buck and I think your paper loss will be less once the shiny card bonus is implemented in the game. Good job putting your theory to test and actually buying the packs!
Yeah haha, it's a pity Finnian just got hit with the nerf hammer. Either way, I bought them already assuming a paper loss so it's all fine 😄
You madman, you actually did it!
It's a shame Finnian Fruitbearer just took a hit, though :S
Yeah, I was quite curious why Finnian had dropped so much in value until I saw the updates from the GU team. Oh well, it's still a strong card nevertheless!
Thanks for taking one for the team and testing your theory out. If the EV ever turns positive be sure to let us know, lol.
Of course, although that's almost impossible in an efficient market 😂 Plus actually selling hundreds/thousands of common cards is still a tedious process.
Wow really nicely made.
The excel sheet is really nice. May I ask how you made it? I mean from where you get the data or did you do everything by hand?
I made the spreadsheet by myself, card prices were scraped from TokenTrove using a script manually and dumped into a sheet. The rest of the spreadsheet includes some indexing functions that help to look up those scraped numbers. I don't really want to share the spreadsheet because it's full of jank but ideally, I'd like to create a pack simulator + tracker in the future if possible.
hmm kk, I understand. Thank you for the info.
I know this feeling ^^.
NOW THIS IS DEDICATION! Nice one bro!
Thanks! 😄
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