Current battle pass discussion
Hey peeps
I'm thinkin about doing a post like this for every battle pass from now on if people are interested. It's gonna have mostly info but I'm not gonna pretend I don't have a lot of inherent biases lmao. I'll /try/ to keep this post informative then express my opinions in the replies
(I also was noting stuff down splitscreen on my phone so I might have made some small mistakes but they'll be pretty insignificant)
So let's chat about the current battle pass :)
Getting the easiest part out of the way first, if you buy the Premium Battle Pass and complete the entire thing, you'll earn 600 crystals. This is exactly enough to pay for the Premium Pass I believe.
Coins are also entirely stashed in the Premium Pass. Maxing out earns you 1550 coins, so you can /just/ fail to reach the value of a deck box, a coin, and a set of sleeves valuing at 1575. I genuinely don't think it's worth working out the values on spending coins on clothing because I've seen literally nobody associate and value to the clothing ^^;
OK now for the fun parts, the bits that actually affect the game!
Completing the entire Pass earns you 4445 credits (split into 2645 in regular Pass, 1800 in Premium). This is enough to craft either 4VMAX/Vstar, just under 6 Pokemon V, or 10 no-rulebox Rare Pokemon.
Completing the Pass nets you 87 booster packs, including 2x large Silver Tempest packs. The distribution is heavily in the regular Pass with 75 of the packs. Speaking of distribution, the 12 packs in the Premium Pass are a wild variety, including 4 packs that rotate in 2 months time. The regular Pass packs focus on the last couple of releases, including 42 packs from Crown Zenith . I've not done any calcs to work out the average credit output of booster packs so if anyone feels like it that'd be super interesting :)
Finally the most interesting part. Regular and Premium Pass each give 2 strong meta decks. These decks include higher rarity versions of cards, and are received at ranks 1 and 25. Free pass gives ADP (lmao it's Arceus Decidueye Pikachu don't worry) and then Palkia Vstar at 25, premium gives Eternatus VMax at 1 then Mew/Genesect at 25.
In terms of distribution a majority of rewards are represented by the first 10 ranks of each pass, plus the decks at 25. A large proportion of rewards from the Premium Pass are aesthetics, mostly clothing for your avatar, and given that they hold no function I didn't include them in the data.
Thanks for reading this, I have no idea if it's useful, but it helps me a lot when information is in a chunk I can access instead of split up in tiny segments :)
Comments
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I think the battle pass should give out more credits and less pre picked cards from established decks, yeah of course getting a complete mew deck for free is very good for new players but people who want to experiment with different cards or strategies or decks dont get much out of the pre picked cards. I know TPCi wants people to buy boosters for credits but giving out like 1k credits every week wouldnt be bad.
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Eyy approved post
So my personal thoughts on this are complex and I'm gonna end up rambling but I wanted to keep the data separate from the opinions
First off, I think receiving back the same number of crystals spent, in a vacuum, looks bad. Taking into account the number of booster packs received though I don't think it's bad at all. My only thoughts on that are that it might be more satisfying for us as players to receive the equivalent crystals instead of boosters because that gives us more choice in what we do with them, and I'm sure we all agree that "choices" are the thing that make CCGs fun.
That ties in really well with my next thought, which is on the decks available in this Pass. Amazing, giving us some really strong (and genuinely enjoyable to play) decks! Big fan of this. Also giving us the entire deck in a chunk (rather than a bunch of the cards then drip feeding the rest gradually over the first 20 ranks of the Pass like we had with Lugia last month) means people can get a better idea of the deck and then start making adjustments to suit themselves rather than having to fill holes until they can begin that process. I've seen a ton of variations on the Weezing/Eternatus shell and it's been super fun to play matches already this Pass ;D
My main issue with the decks doesn't implicitly affect me right now but it scares me a little bit about the future. The decks given out give maximum or unique rarity versions of some of the more expensive or key cards. I love flexing cool cards like I nearly full-arted all the supporters in my paper expanded deck before the pandemic ended paper expanded lmao 🙃 the problem though is that there's no mechanism in this game for dealing with unwanted cards, so if I had for example scraped my credits together to build Mew Genesect, then this pass gives me the max rarity version of the deck, I have no option for any kind of return on my time and money investment.
It feels like the people who commit to making the wrong deck might just be punished for it, especially as Credits are very slow to acquire (given that the entire battle pass accounts for enough credits to craft just 4 Mew Vmax as I mentioned in the original post). This absolutely puts me off crafting anything in case it gets given out in a Pass in the future, and pushes me towards only playing the decks that the game gives me. Obviously this was much worse last month with how dominant Lugia Vstar was, and having access to two unique decks at the very start plus two more after some significant grind makes me think that the devs are paying attention to that, but without some way to convert cards to currency it still feels like crafting a deck is strictly bad for the player. (RIP my desire to play Kevin Durant on Live lmaoo)
In terms of Gold Coins it does feel a little insulting that the pass doesn't even afford a complete setup for your deck but I also might have miscalculated so I'm not gonna get mad about it until I'm a bit more awake. The cosmetics for your avatar have been discussed a lot on this forum so I don't feel like I need to expand too much on why I think they're literally not even worth acknowledging 🙄 gold coins still feel like they're an afterthought and don't really feel like they do anything so when several Premium ranks give just some coins it just does not feel impactful earning them.
Overall I'm really impressed by this Pass over the previous one though, it's a huge step in the right kind of direction, I just hope TPCi keep listening to the feedback and making moves. Games like this stay exciting by giving players plenty of options so they can make cool and unique choices. Things feel to me like they're looking up (as long as Expanded gets implemented soon, I miss Night March 😭) but let's keep giving feedback and pushing this game to be as good as it can be <3
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@Makr0ss yes, once you unlock the decks, they should be at the bottom of your list of decks.
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