PityTracker's Dust Guide

This is a small collection of statistics-based answers to some of the questions you may have asked yourself. If something is unclear or you have another question you've been asking yourself or you find a mistake, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Crafting Cards

Should I wait to find a specific card in a pack or should I craft it?

We all know the feeling: We want to play with a specific card, but we are reluctant to craft it, because we might find it in a pack and we don't want to waste the dust. Is this concern justified?

Let's look at the probability to find a specific card in a pack:

Rarity	Classic	GvG	TGT	TOG
C	3.8 %	9.0 %	7.3 %	7.2 %
R	1.4 %	3.1 %	3.2 %	3.2 %
E	0.6 %	0.8 %	0.8 %	0.8 %
L	0.2 %	0.3 %	0.3 %	0.3 %

Probabilities are based on data from pitytracker.com. Number of cards per expansion here.

As you can see, the probabilities are so low that it does not pay off to wait for specific cards to come up. Your best shot is finding a specific GvG common, but even there you're looking at roughly 10 packs on average until you find it. For a specific legendary, you'll have to wait roughly 300 packs on average to find the card you are looking for!

Our Tip: Don't wait up! Craft any card you want without a worry!

Should I Dust Golden Cards?

In the end this is a matter of personal preference. All we can do is to objectify the question as much as possible.

Let's look at it from a fun perspective: If you want to craft a new legendary, you can dust four golden epics to be able to craft that legendary. Now let's consider this argument:

Argument (A): Do you personally find more enjoyment in the animations of the golden cards you need to disenchant, or do you find more enjoyment in playing with your new crafted card?

Our Tip: Keep your golden cards until you want to craft a specific card. Then use argument (A) to decide. Think of your golden cards as a piggy bank you can plunder if you need to.

Note that we do not recommend you dust any card unless you have more than two (except for Gnomish Experimenter).

How Much Dust in a Pack?

This question looks at how much dust you get out of one pack if you disenchant all cards.

Not accounting for golden cards, one pack is worth roughly 86.7 dust on average. We don't have good enough statistics on golden cards yet, so we're excluding that for the moment, but the dust value will be higher if golden cards are taken into account.

Our Tip: Think of one pack being worth roughly 100 dust, so that 100 gold equals 100 dust.

How should I spend my gold? Packs or Arena?

In general, Arena gives you more bang for the buck, so if you are low on gold and have a lot of time to play, always use your gold for the arena.

Now there are a few things to consider. First, Arena gives you back gold, the better you are, the more gold you will be getting back. So if you are good enough, you'll be coming out of the arena with more gold than you had when you entered. In this case you might as well spend some gold on packs.

Second, if you don't enjoy Arena as much as Ranked, or you just don't have enough time to realistically spend all your gold on arena runs, then you might as well buy some packs straight away.

Our Tip: Spend your gold in the Arena. If you have more than 1000 gold, spend that extra money on packs.

Note that with 7 wins and above you will always be rewarded at least 150 gold, so that you can play Arena indefinitely.

This table will give you a quick overview of the Arena rewards in terms of dust.

The most important milestone from a dust perspective is to reach 8 wins for a chance at the higher tier rewards.

Maximizing Ranked Rewards

How do I maximize dust rewards from Ranked play?

The reward you get at the end of the month from finishing at a specifc rank scales up pretty linearly, but there are jumps. The biggest jumps are from 16 to 15 and 6 to 5, with a smaller jump at 11 to 10. See this page for the full list of rewards per rank.

Our Tip: To maximize your reward, try to always reach either rank 15, rank 10 or rank 5 every month.

Should I buy non-Standard packs before they rotate out of the shop?

First of all, this question is only relevant if you are planning to play in Wild format, or if you're aiming for a complete collection. If you plan to only play Standard going forward, then forget about non-Standard packs and move on.

Since you're still reading, I assume you are set on completing your non-golden collection.

The answer to the question is: It depends on the size of your collection.

First, let's look at the two extreme cases: A) You have very few cards of a soon to be non-Standard set. B) You already have a lot of cards of that set. In both cases the answer is evident. A) Go buy packs. B) Don't buy packs, it's not worth it. You'll have to opt for crafting the missing cards instead.

So the big question is: What is "a lot" of cards of a set, and where is the line to be drawn between A and B?

To answer this question, we'll refer you to the great work of reddit user /u/Rkynick, who did a pack opening simulation for TGT to find out how many packs one needed for a complete collection. You can find it here.

Assuming that the overall number of cards and rarity distribution is comparable for GvG, TGT and TOG, Rkynick's simulation serves as a good approximation for our purposes.

I'd like to use an example to make this as clear as possible. As an example I will use the following likely scenario: Let's consider a case where a user already has roughly 75% of all available cards of a given expansion. In terms of card distribution, let's consider he has all commons, 85% of the rares, 1/3 of the epics and 1/4 of the legendaries. In the case of TGT this comes down to 98/98 commons, 60/72 rares, 17/52 epics and 5/21 legendaries. If you have opened about 100 TGT packs, you will likely have a very similar distribution.

Now we'll compare acquiring the remaining cards via packs to acquiring them via crafting.

Packs: Looking at the graph above, having 75% of the cards is roughly equivalent to having opened 100 packs. This is a very rough estimate, but given that there is a variance between different expansions, it will be good enough. According to Rkynick's simulations, you'll need to open roughly 380 packs to get an expansion's full collection. That means at 100 packs, you're roughly 280 packs short of completing TGT.

Crafting: Crafting the remaining 12 rares, 35 epics and 16 legendaries will cost 40,800 dust - let's round it to a rough 40k. Estimating 1 pack at 100 dust, that's 400 packs.

So, if you're aiming for a complete set, it will be cheaper to buy 280 packs now (via gold or money), than to fill it out later with dust gathered from other packs.

Our Tip: If you are dead set on completing your collection and are not on a budget, buy non-Standard packs before they go out of print. If you are not willing to pay real money for non-Standard packs and don't have enough gold to reach the 380 mark, then let go of the idea of having a complete collection and save your gold for the next expansion.

And don't forget that if your pity timer is low (below 10), it's well worth it to buy a few packs until you get your guaranteed legendary.