How to approach the wildcard/shards hoarding in the long term

Hi.

I believe that I am not the only one that has tons of Common and Rare wildcards but just a few Epic and Champion wildcards. I guess that it will always be like this, that the two most rare types of cards will be bottleneck for deck building. Considering that I can craft Epics and Champions also for shards, does it make sense to use all my Rare and Common wildcards for something that I do not have? After that, when I will open the Common/Rare that I already have, I will get a shard refund, right? I do not want to end up with hundreds of useless wildcards while still missing Epics and Champions.

Or is there any better way how to approach this in the long term?

Thanks.

As far as I can tell, there's no real downside to getting a full collection as fast as possible, so the plan to spend wildcards, finish out rarity levels, and rack up shards makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I was just doing this with common wildcards today, and found myself very annoyed that there doesn't appear to be an easy way to view "missing cards" (that is, exclusively cards of which you have fewer than three - so a bit more advanced than the "show unowned" button).

You could maybe argue that hording wildcards is better because it means you have more resources to craft when the next expansion drops, but you'll get more wildcards before then anyway, especially for the low rarity cards.

Maybe?  Personally I have huge FOMO, so I've always been reluctant to spend common/rare wildcards right before Tuesday or a big region reward chest, but I really appreciate the logic behind your argument here.

I would say ultimately, it probably doesn't matter too much.  E.g. say "hypothetically" you were sitting on 161 common wildcards.  Scenario A: you convert them all just to fill out your collection; Scenario B: you do never use them.  After a long enough time period, Scenario B would get exactly those 161 commons for free whereas Scenario A converts them to 15 shards/ea; any duplicates after those 161 would generate the same 15 shards/ea to both.  That means the total difference between the two scenarios is 2,415 shards i.e. 80% of a single champion craft.  And of course that's contingent on receiving an additional 161 non-wildcard commons of exactly the type you crafted; if they aligned perfect that could be ~5 weeks but in practice it will look more like an exponential decay graph where Scenario A nets fewer and fewer additional shards over Scenario B each week--probably months before even hitting the 2,000 mark.

I forget the refund rate for rares, but I imagine its not too much better.  I interpret this all to mean that I shouldn't our hypothetical friend shouldn't feel at all reluctant to spend common and rare wildcards on any cards he actually intends to play, but spending them just to spend them only has a minimal strategic shard advantage and that you definitely want to have some in reserve by the time the next expansion is released.

This is the strategy I used I put in $100 and bought all the common and rare cards I then played for about 3 weeks and used everything I got to buy epics and the champions I needed to make some decks it is a good way to do it in my opinion and then I put in another $100 and just bought all the cards I am currently crystal hoarding for the next expansion to now go everything F2P

Quote From OldManSanns

Maybe?  Personally I have huge FOMO, so I've always been reluctant to spend common/rare wildcards right before Tuesday or a big region reward chest, but I really appreciate the logic behind your argument here.

I would say ultimately, it probably doesn't matter too much.  E.g. say "hypothetically" you were sitting on 161 common wildcards.  Scenario A: you convert them all just to fill out your collection; Scenario B: you do never use them.  After a long enough time period, Scenario B would get exactly those 161 commons for free whereas Scenario A converts them to 15 shards/ea; any duplicates after those 161 would generate the same 15 shards/ea to both.  That means the total difference between the two scenarios is 2,415 shards i.e. 80% of a single champion craft.  And of course that's contingent on receiving an additional 161 non-wildcard commons of exactly the type you crafted; if they aligned perfect that could be ~5 weeks but in practice it will look more like an exponential decay graph where Scenario A nets fewer and fewer additional shards over Scenario B each week--probably months before even hitting the 2,000 mark.

I forget the refund rate for rares, but I imagine its not too much better.  I interpret this all to mean that I shouldn't our hypothetical friend shouldn't feel at all reluctant to spend common and rare wildcards on any cards he actually intends to play, but spending them just to spend them only has a minimal strategic shard advantage and that you definitely want to have some in reserve by the time the next expansion is released.

Interesting.. I did not really do the math, did not really research how much refund I get for which rarity, I went with my gut feelings.. I guess I will put the numbers together and try to evaluate again.

So I read some of you spend money on card collection. Since I never considered this option, i dont really know if it would effect the most efficient way how to collect all cards.

However if you collect cards only from the region award system and weekly diamond chests, then the fastest way is to keep as much cards open for being collectible from a certain region as long as you dont have the region award system completed for that region.

This is because you can spend wild cards independently from regions, but you can still get them from the regional awards. So whenever a region award hits a full 3 of one of your cards, it will give you an undervalued amount of shards for it (common card costs 100, while you only get 15). So you should spend wild cards only in regions that you dont get any region awards anymore.

Allright, so i noticed that I am sitting on almost 200 common wildcards.. I crafted every common card I was missing and I still have 120 common wildcards left. I am doing the same when next expansion hits, so I can convert them to shards somehow. I still have 70 rare wildcards, but I am too affraid to spend them all :)

I have 189 Common Wildcards now (after having already crafted all the commons a while ago). I hope that they add some way to convert Wildcards to shards at one point because otherwise I think my Common Wildcard collection will grow faster than it shrinks (even if I craft all the commons in each expansion day 1).