Saving up for expansions

If your collection is starting to look nice and solid, maybe you are starting to think about what resources you'll need when the first expansion drops. Even if you're not there yet, you will be eventually, right? Just keep opening those Vaults and leveling those regions!

So I thought it might be helpful to tally up the cost of a full set per region. After all, it's looking like that's how expansions are going to be released: as a couple of new regions, plus maybe some new Champions for existing regions. We can't be sure how many new regions to expect per expansion. I would say probably two, but it could be three or even just one.

In any case, here's what that will cost:

At present each region contains 4 Champions, 6 epics, 18 rares, and 25 commons. Times three for a full set, that's 12 Champion, 18 epic, 54 rare, and 75 common wildcards you will need.

If you're buying wildcards with coins, it takes only four weeks to acquire a region's worth of Champions, but six weeks for epics, nine weeks for rares, and 12.5 weeks for commons! Obviously, no one would ever need or want to acquire a whole set with coins, though. It's just interesting to me how long it would take.

The shard prices are 3000, 1200, 300, and 100 respectively, which means a total shard cost of 36000 + 21600 + 16200 + 7500 = 81300 shards per complete region. (Please correct my arithmetic if you spot an error!) Coin prices are equal to 1/10 of shard prices, so that's 8130 if you're going the wildcard route. (You can get 5350 coins for $50 U.S. or 11000 for $100.)

If they release two regions, that's 162600 shards, and for three it jumps to 243900. For each additional hero they add to old regions, tack on another 9000 shards.

Certain strategies, like saving up Expedition tokens, can help offset some of this, and don't forget there will be region rewards for the new regions. I thought about calculating the shard value of that, but the stupid random upgrade system makes that weird. I could take the average case, but frankly I don't feel like it. My gut tells me if you reach max level, it could reduce the overall shard cost by about a quarter to a third, depending on your luck. If someone wants to do the actual math, I'll be happy to update this post.

Anyway, now you know the ballpark amounts you'll be facing as you save up, so you can set goals for shard saving or anticipate how much cash you'll want to spend.

If I may add my take - I'd estimate that you'd only need 75% of that to pick up the cards you'll actually play with. It'll be top-heavy because you'll probably want all the champions, but realistically there's going to be cards that you won't want to use in any given region, either because they never make it into a deck worth playing or just because they don't fit the kinds of archetypes you like to play. And that's assuming that LoR -doesn't- have the kind of filler that HS tends to see.

I'm not looking to complete the new sets in a hurry.

That said, I'm currently floating ~70 common and ~50 rare wildcards. I use them occasionally when building a new deck, but I mostly play expeditions, so the wildcards keep piling up. That means I'll probably easily fill out the common and rare slots for 1 or 2 new decks once the expansion hits.

By that time, I might consider spending some cash on wildcards so I can get those champions and epics faster.