Ashes of Outland has finally arrived in Hearthstone and I had the great pleasure of opening one of the 90 pack preorder bundles. Blizzard has had duplicate protection in the past for Legendary cards but has recently announced a broadening of the policy to cover all rarities. For those of you not familiar, duplicate protection Is a system that protects the consumer from opening more than 2 of the same card of any rarity, Common through Epic, and 1 of each Legendary, before you can open duplicates in that rarity slot. For instance, you have to have 2 of each Common before you can open a third copy of any from that set. Keep in mind that if you dust a card you can’t open it again until you’ve opened the rest. That means once you dust the Legendary you thought was trash for 400 dust and it becomes a big player in the meta you’d have to spend 1600 Dust or open every Legendary from the set before you can open it again.
I can definitively say after my pack openings that I am incredibly satisfied with how this works. I opened 90 packs from preorder, and 19 packs from gold. I held back 500 gold on the off chance that there could be a Brawliseum coming up, but if there isn’t, I’ll go ahead and use that for some packs too. This is the first time since I’ve started playing that I collected two of every common and every rare in one opening. I’m missing 16 Legendaries and 21 Epics. I say 21 Epics, but that is to have the maximum playable number of cards. I did craft Maiev Shadowsong, but that leaves me with 10,515 dust, most of which came from the Hall of Fame rotation and the duplicates that I did manage to get from Ashes of Outlands. I Disenchanted all the golden cards from the set that I don’t think I will use, as I only really collect those from the Classic set. To craft all the Legendaries and all the Epics in the set I would need 34,000 Arcane Dust. That’s a ton of Dust! If I spent all the Dust I have now I would still need 23,485 Arcane Dust. Now hold up! You’re probably asking yourself how can this guy be so upbeat about STILL having to spend OVER 23,000 Dust to have the whole set? Well, there are several reasons for this:
1. It will take some time for the meta to shake out. We won’t know for a few weeks what is good and what isn’t, and I don’t plan on spending ANY of my 10,515 Dust until I know exactly what I want to spend it on. (Except Maiev of course)
2. Every pack I open from here on out will increase my dust total or net me an Epic or Legendary I don’t yet have.
3. That’s IF I open packs, because from now, until the time the next expansion releases, for the first time in the history of the game I feel like I can just wait and sit on my gold. I will only spend the gold on packs if I ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE a specific card, and ONLY if I don’t already have enough Dust to get it. This strategy will allow me to maximize my in-game value by deciding which currency is the most important at which moment in time. The closer it gets to an expansion release, the more weighted toward gold that scale will be.
If I follow these strategies, and I preorder 90 packs for the next expansion I can expect to open well over the amount of packs I did today. Continuing to do this expansion after expansion will put me in a place where, eventually, I will be able to open 2 of each Common, Rare, and Epic. Then maybe one day 2 of each Common, Rare, Epic, and 1 of each Legendary. Of course the game will have gold sinks, like special Tavern Brawl events that require gold as an entry fee, or possibly more Adventures that require gold or real money to purchase, but with proper management of resources duplicate protection has made it more feasible for a player to have a fantastic collection with one preorder, or maybe even less, per expansion. If you have any great strategies to share with us, we’d love to hear them. Thanks for stopping by, and as always #RuleTheRoost
-BitBeaker
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