What type of packs to buy?

[thklein]

Is there a consensus on the best way to spend PP on packs for someone who is still building a team? If it better to load up on regular packs, save up for gold packs, or save up even more for diamond.

[pgjocki]

Always, always, and if you forget, always buy regular packs.

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[mcdog512]

Originally Posted by thklein

Is there a consensus on the best way to spend PP on packs for someone who is still building a team? If it better to load up on regular packs, save up for gold packs, or save up even more for diamond.

What he said. Regular packs is usually the way to go.

[FancySkunk]

To go into more detail: Whenever you buy a pack, the tier of one card is locked in, and the other 5 are always completely random. A regular pack is 1 bronze 5 random, gold is 1 gold 5 random, and diamond is 1 diamond 5 random.

This means that in order for your gold/diamond pack to be worth it, your one guaranteed gold/diamond card needs to be more valuable than the cost of the pack. However, 75% of all cards are live series, meaning that 75% of the time, the gold or diamond you get will go for near quicksell value. Even if you do pull a historical gold/diamond, many of them are also worth less than the cost of a gold/diamond pack.

The best value is in the cheapest way to get the 5 random card pulls, which is the regular pack.

[rburgh]

Yes, they should fix the pack issue by, say, cutting the irons and bronzes in the gold packs by 50% and the in the diamond packs cut the irons and bronzes by 80% and the silvers by 50%. Or some such numbers. I have bought a lot of packs with my earned PP's for my 6 teams in the last few weeks, and really have pulled only two useful cards at D/P level - a Chris Sale (who has made an excellent lefty reliever for me) and a Peak Fergie Jenkins who I sold.

Saving up for the AH is the way to go.

[dkgo]

There is no "issue." If packs returned more points than they cost the game economy would explode

Gold is definitely a suckers play but the other two are reasonable -EV gambles that some people have fun with.

[thklein]

Thanks everyone!

That definitely worked out for me. I bought 10 regular packs and ended up getting a diamond and two golds. A 95 Walker Buehler, an 88 Liam Hendricks, an 86 Historical All Star Reggie Smith, and an 80 Eloy Jimenez. Definitely a better result than if I had waited until I earned another 5000 pp for a diamond pack.

[BigRed75]

That's the key to remember - unless and until they release a "Perfect Pack", every pack has the same chance of pulling a Perfect 100 card. So why wouldn't you spend your money on regular packs and get 15x more chances to pull a 100 than a diamond pack?

Besides, you usually end up with a diamond in the 15 packs, anyway. And this way you can get multiple Connor Joes...

[Orion]

Yeah regular packs are the best as you maximize chances of getting a 100. That being said, the diamond packs are a fairly good value as well as there are a good # of very valuable historical diamonds floating around. The gold packs are really the only ones to avoid.

[BigRed75]

Originally Posted by Orion

Yeah regular packs are the best as you maximize chances of getting a 100. That being said, the diamond packs are a fairly good value as well as there are a good # of very valuable historical diamonds floating around. The gold packs are really the only ones to avoid.

Unless you're my son, who routinely pulls diamond cards out of gold packs.

On Tuesday he managed to pull a double diamond out of a gold pack, so half of the cards were greater than 80 OVR. And two of them were historical (the gold and one of the diamonds)

I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again. That kid's luck...

[rburgh]

There is no "issue." If packs returned more points than they cost the game economy would explode

If a typical bronze is worth, say 40, a typical Gold is worth, say 1700, and a typical diamond is worth, say 7000, while the other 5 cards in each pack have the same average value, then:


If the average value of the other 5 cards is more than 960, then regular packs are a positive sum game, Gold packs have an EV of 2660 (barely 50% of what you paid in PP's) and Diamond packs have an EV of 7960, again barely what you paid for the pack.


I totally agree that regular packs are the way to go, but if they would cut the number of Irons and Bronzes in a silver pack to 2 or 3, there would be a better return on the purchase. And if they guaranteed that every diamond pack would have at most one iron or bronze, they would also come closer to being a "not stupid" purchase.

[rburgh]

At the risk of boring most of you, I poked around the auction house. I sorted the cards by current bid or minimum price, and tagged the top, bottom, and each quartile prices. The results:


Perfect 1,250,000 170,000 66,000 26,000 24,000
Diamond 250,000 17,000 7,000 5000 4000
Gold 16,500 2,000 1,500 1200 1000
Silver 12,500 330 210 160 100
Bronze 1200 41 34 30 25
Iron 1000 10 8 6 5


I suspect, from this data, that a reasonable approximation for the values of a random card of a particular class is the average of the 3 middle numbers there. So my guess at the values of a card from a pack are:


Perfect 87,000
Diamond 9,700
Gold 1600
Silver 233
Bronze 35
Iron 8


Since the chances of a card in a pack being in one of these classes are uniform for the 5 "random" cards, the average value of those cards is:


Perfect 87,000/1000 = 87
Diamond 9700/150 = 65
Gold 1600/50 = 32
Silver 233/20 = 12
Bronze 35/5 = 7
Iron average of 3.6 cards per pack = 3.6*8 = 29


So the average value of the 5 random cards in any pack is 5* (87+65+32+12+7) = 1015 + 29 for the residual irons = 1044.


For a standard pack, then, the expected value on the auction house of the 6 cards you receive is 1079.


For a gold pack it's 2644. and for a diamond pack it's 10744.


Other people have tried this analysis with different results. But on the other hand, the truly special diamond cards and all perfect cards probably don't get put back on the AH nearly as often as the low-end golds and silvers. So my analysis may well be conservative.



One problem with the standard packs is that you might get multiples of the same guy. Also, as the level of your team increases you will reach a point where only a small percentage of diamonds are of any use for you.


Another problem with this analysis is that the golds and diamonds you get from packs may well be heavily weighted toward Live cards, which are well known to be less valuable than the average historical card. If that's the case then my analysis is off on the high side and even the standard packs are negative sum items.

[BigRed75]

Originally Posted by rburgh

Another problem with this analysis is that the golds and diamonds you get from packs may well be heavily weighted toward Live cards, which are well known to be less valuable than the average historical card. If that's the case then my analysis is off on the high side and even the standard packs are negative sum items.

No "may" (or even "might") about it. They absolutely are weighted toward Live cards.

All packs are negative sum items. If they were positive sum, then somebody is pricing the packs incorrectly.

Packs are really a lottery ticket. Do you want to spend $1, $5 or $15 for a chance to win a million? The higher tickets give you a better chance of breaking even but all give you the same chance at the grand prize.

[One Great Matrix]

It's up to you, want 400 cards to sell. Buy regular packs.
Want 20 cards you might use buy diamond packs.
Want to have a great team that gets beaten by perfect teams?, buy gold packs.


Probably just me but make a deal in the auction house cause if you want to improve your team you can just go there.

[Orion]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

Unless you're my son, who routinely pulls diamond cards out of gold packs.

On Tuesday he managed to pull a double diamond out of a gold pack, so half of the cards were greater than 80 OVR. And two of them were historical (the gold and one of the diamonds)

I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again. That kid's luck...

Truth is only good pack I ever had was a gold pack. Got Gold Joe Cronin and Diamond Moosy Mussina.

[Orion]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

Unless you're my son, who routinely pulls diamond cards out of gold packs.

On Tuesday he managed to pull a double diamond out of a gold pack, so half of the cards were greater than 80 OVR. And two of them were historical (the gold and one of the diamonds)

I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again. That kid's luck...

Some people are just lucky. I am not (at least when it comes to lotteries), so I stick with the AH.

[Orion]

Originally Posted by thklein

Thanks everyone!

That definitely worked out for me. I bought 10 regular packs and ended up getting a diamond and two golds. A 95 Walker Buehler, an 88 Liam Hendricks, an 86 Historical All Star Reggie Smith, and an 80 Eloy Jimenez. Definitely a better result than if I had waited until I earned another 5000 pp for a diamond pack.

That Reggie Smith card was a reserve all the way to Perfect for one of my teams, its a good card, he rakes.