I got quite lucky with my last conflict, drawing 3 copies besides my 3 guaranteed ones and now am the happy owner of a Zyrx. While repairing my wagons and arranging them, I saw that I reached the 333,334 points/h with less wagons, as I had upgraded my deck a little, and was quite happy with that, feeling a lot better about conflicts after my critique.
Until I saw that this brings me only 2 guaranteed copies now. After Conflicts being 4x as expensive as in Rebellion, it's now going up even more in price. I wrote about me being de-motivated last time already, but did the economical effort to get into the game, and get at least a level 2 Airdrop, 3 CC. Now I'm sitting here and wondering, again - is it worth it?
(I adapted my Wagon calculator with the new values. Click here to find it within the Land Setup Calculator, download and/or copy to your won drive so you can sue it. Navigate to "Wagons" and play with it.)
The newest Airdrop will need 850 entries for a guaranteed card, meaning more or less 118,100 points/hour. That's 7k more than last time. Luckily, card prices have come down a little, so the new CP/$ looks like this:
Epic Gold and Black Foil are still the most efficient for conflicts, followed by Common GF and BF. Legendary cards have mostly maintained their value, which means their efficiency has suffered as the rest of the prices dropped.
No, to get 7k extra in CP per hour, the cheapest way would be to buy 16 CC of a Common Gold and 2 CC of an epic, both Gold Foil.
Gotta find cards that you want to upgrade though, so you don't need extra slots or extra wagons, which would make it even more expensive. A better idea might be to go for 3 Epic GF, leading to only $1,80 more, providing 7500 extra CP and occupying only 1 slot.
A quick calculation. Assuming that each stage of the conflict will need 50 tickets more for each guaranteed card, so 7,000 points/h, will will need 1200 Tickets per guaranteed card in the last airdrop. That's 400 more than now, meaning, 56,000 more than now.
Want to get it done right away? 2 BF Common + 2 GF Common + 2 GF Rare + 2 GF Epic for every GC that you want, and you're done. $280 per GC, and you're done for the next 8 drops, so, $35 per drop.
Just an idea. It's pricey. Make sure to think well before you do it!
This is speculative. Zyrx was a one-time-thing, a lot more copies were printed as will be in the next conflict, as many people might decide that it's not worth the trouble to pay $6 to repair the wagons, and then another $33 for each guaranteed card.
For me, I had to repair 6 wagons, which cost me $36 (a little less as a friend gave me a hand with a good deal, but for the sake of argument let's say I bought on the market). On top of that, I'd have to spend another $100 on new cards to get my 3 Guaranteed Copies.
Meaning, each GC costs me $45. Zyrx is at $10 at the moment. See the problem?
Rebellion Conflict cards are holding their value, and a lot. Even without the spend on Repair kits and such, and with a lot higher drop rate (400% more drops than Conclave Arcana), the cards are still between $13 (Rage lvl 4) and $34 (Tofu lvl 4) per Card Copy, and that's the max cards. The single copies or level 2 cost around 25-50% more.
Also, the cards that I buy for conflicts are not only for conflicts, they are supposed to help me in my game play, too. Which of course influences the price, as the most useful cards are usually more expensive, too.
Zarin the Scorch is a useful card. Not the best in my opinion (and please feel free to correct me and explain). Having it at level 2 will help my game play a lot, as I can give Phase to a high speed monster like Slade, and pair with Sevaya to make it even more unlikely for Slade to be hit, things like that come to mind. Mana would be around 25 or more for that combo, including the cheapest dragon summoner.
The cost for kits will maintain some of the value for cards. Each card will cost at least $6 for the near term future. But most likely more. Hopefully, they won't end up like Zyrx.
Let's say I upgrade my cards and make the 3 GC. If I get lucky again, drawing another 3 CC, I'd have spent $136 for a level 3 card. Just looking at the money, I'd need the price per CC to stay around $25, and it will be worth it. Otherwise, it would've been cheaper to abandon conflicts and buy the cards afterwards.
The probability of the price staying high? Low. Zarin is no Tofu, nor Lorkus. It's not even a Rage or Venka. I'd say maximum $20 (Rage + Wagon Kit).
Just from the total reward chances, 3865 CC of Zyrx were printed in Guaranteed Cards. Of course, that's not exact, as a lot of chances did not lead to a GC. The Card Counter says that 1786 Copies are in circulation, but I don't know if that refers to CC, or just cards, meaning a 11 CC level 4 counts as 1.
I already spent on Wagons because I hadn't read the announcement for Conflicts well. So, I'm going to participate in this conflict. From then on, I will see. I'll monitor the price development of Zyrx, and then of Zarin.
But my motivation is gone again. Having to spend $150 each month to keep up with the rising threshold is not something I look forward to. There are some cards that I wanted anyway, so I'll just keep building my deck accordingly. Or just abandon conflicts.
It's not only this conflict. How it is and was managed will probably make me refrain for ever buying into a new modern set again.
I get that money has to be made. I get that the big spenders keep the lights on. And we got a free2play for the low league players. But, right now I feel like it's just as in real life - the middle class gets screwed over. Either you buy your way into the upper class, or you'll find yourself among the poor.
And I repeat my main critique: The initial communication about conflicts was really, really bad from the team. The announcement to bump the threshold by 400% had to be announced before the pre-sale, so set expectations right.
And buying enough packs to get gold-level reward cards should bring players very close to getting those in the conflicts, too. Bringing the threshold to a starting point of 400 points/GC would've done the trick. 800 was overkill.
I'm still disappointed.
Former posts:
Calculating Land part 1 - How to get your ROI
Calculating Land part 2 - Are pools worth it?
Calculating Land part 3 - Organic Growth
Land Plot Efficiency for non-whales
Card-Production-Coefficient - Combining LPE and ROI
Renting for Land - at what cost?
Risks to my strategy
What do refined resources cost?
Real cost of Wagons
How to perfectly adjust your wagons
Calculating Totem and Title boosts
Calculating Plot Rarity Boost
Setting up a Rare Stone Plot
The final Beginners Land Setup Calculator
Thank you very much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it at least as much as I enjoyed writing :-D If you have any comments or feedback - please let me know! And don't forget to leave your own posts for me to curate. Thank you very much!
If you don't play the game yet, you can use my referral: Click here for referral :-)
