Intro+Geek

Well, I finally broke down and did the LJ jazz. Since keeping in touch with my friends seems to be a nigh impossibility, you know with the whole working 70 hours per week (including transit time). Plus it gives me the opportunity to be an über-geek without annoying Amelia (as much).

[geek]Here’s my chance to get all the annoying geekiness that’s been consuming my brain power the last few days (don’t laugh, I stick my finger in the electrical socket to get charged up every now and then) out. So, like the other 0.08% of the world’s population I play World of Warcraft (doesn’t sound so popular when put in that perspective, eh? it’s ~five million people). Well, there’s a new trading card game that’s based on WoW that certain chase cards give online in-game features (the secondary reason I’m interested, the primary being that one of my favorite artists, Greg Hildebrandt, of the the Hildebrandt brothers is doing some of the art ((they did the old Tolkien artwork for those without a clue)))

Anyhoo, here’s the facts about the TCG
“Currently we are looking at 5 different rarities, each color coded based on how items are color coded in the WoW MMO. Common is white, uncommon is green, rare is blue, epic is purple and legendary is orange. There will be a little over 20 epic cards in the first set and will include the Thrall card and about 100 rares. The epics are printed at twice the rarity of a rare so you can expect around 3 epics per booster box. The Legendary cards are on a slightly different system. One is about as rare as a rare, so you can expect to see one in ~4 booster boxes, one is about as rare as an epic so ~1 Case and one is about twice as rare as an epic so ~2 Cases. Booster packs are packed out as 1 rare/epic/legendary, 3 uncommons, 10 commons and 1 Hero card.”

Here’s what that comes out to: there is a 1:12 chance of pulling any specific rare/legendary(rare), 1:24 chance of pulling any specific epic/legendary(epic), and a 1:48 chance of pulling the über-rare legendary. So for a greater than 99.99% probability of pulling the rare it works out to 114 packs which is 4.75 boxes (so ~4 boxes, closer to 5 but hey, I’m not the UDE/WoW marketing guy); for an epic it works out to 234 packs which is 9.75 boxes (so ~ 1 case/12 boxes); and for the über-rare legendary it works out to 471 packs which is 19.625 boxes (so ~ 2 cases) so it lines up nearly perfectly with the facts. Here’s the kicker, since it’s impossible to have 100% (unless one bought every single pack of the game made), the trick is to find the point at which the probability of pulling the über-rare doesn’t change much after reaching that certain number of packs. Now, I’m probably more obsessed with this than the average person, but I’m limiting myself to 4 boxes (really I just fear Amelia breaking my knees if I go over that), which in turn yields 99.98%, 98.32%, and 86.75% probability of pulling any specific rare, epic, and über-rare legendary, respectively. That’s not bad! So, the way I figure it, if I don’t get the über-rare legendary in 4 boxes, I’m not gonna get it.[/geek]
Ok, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system…back to what I was doing.