![]() ![]() ![]() At a retail cost of 200 gems apiece, that’s 54,400 gems. If you were able to open a perfect collection of rares and mythic rares in every pack, you would need a minimum of 272 packs. If you add in the $100 pre-order, which is essentially 20,000 gems, I spent 140 gems per rare. Since two of the sealed events were free from the preorder and two of the drafts were free (one from Wizards, one as a Mastery Pass reward), I ended up spending 7,450 gems to acquire 172 rares and 24 mythic rares, a rate of 38 gems per rare. I spent $100 for the pre-order bundles, and in return I only had to spend three weeks drafting (14 drafts and two sealed events) in order to basically collect the whole set. Rare drafting isn’t fun, but I still believe its worth the cost. This would continue to help me with Standard and Historic when everything rotates later this year. But I could start working backwards through the rest of Standard and work on acquiring Magic 2020, War of the Spark, Ravnica Allegiance and Guilds of Ravnica. I have essentially finished acquiring cards from Ikoria, Theros, and Throne of Eldraine, with enough wildcards to cover anything I’m missing. Since my acquisition period of Ikoria season is complete, what will I be doing? Good question! For the moment I’m working my way up the Standard Ranked ladder with a mono-Black Lurrus deck, which is a strong candidate for an entry-level budget deck for the free-to-play crowd. Of course you should take Easy Prey, but because of the rules I’d pick Emergent Ultimatum, likely costing myself a chance at hitting that three-win mark. In pack three you open Emergent Ultimatum and one of the uncommons is Easy Prey. Now that I no longer need to rare draft though, will my performance go up? Almost certainly! Consider drafting a fun Mardu cycling deck and you have a lot of key components. The reason is that essentially, to make Premier Draft worthwhile you need to average a three-win finish. Based on my performance in Premier Draft, I might want to consider switching to Quick Draft once it returns with Ikoria. I’ve talked about the EV of Premier Drafts vs Quick Drafts before. I managed to get to the magical three win mark in six of 14 drafts, and managed a positive result (5+ wins) twice. My win percentage over the course of 14 IKO drafts so far is 48.75%, essentially the same. My win percentage over the course of 13 THB drafts (I had to cut my season short because of COVID-19) was 47.95% (rare drafting is hard). For comparison, when drafting against the bots during Theros Beyond Death season, I averaged 3.46 rares and 0.31 mythic rares, meaning on average the bots were passing me just under one rare per draft. ![]() That means I was being passed an average of three rares each draft. Over the course of 14 premier drafts on MTG Arena (so against real people not bots) I acquired an average of 5.5 rares each draft as well as 0.7 mythic rares. On the other hand, we get passed a ton of rares. On the one hand we always end up with bombs in five colors and we almost never have a deck built around a central theme because we had to pass up key uncommons. Ikoria has been a double-edged sword for rare drafting. If there’s any downside to the free to play strategy that we’ve come up with to minimize our costs, its that we have to rare draft, which can be not fun at all. With that out of the way I want to talk about the experience of rare drafting this set. Right now I have 49 rare and 20 mythic rare wildcards. I also got a ton of wildcards and a vault opening. After opening all those packs plus cards I had already acquired from limited events and the pre-order, I was sitting on 24 mythic rares (40% completion), 172 rares (81.1% completion), and 271 uncommons (84.7% completion).
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