Introduction
With the changes to Daily Play & Earn (DP&E) last August, playing with a lot of Gold and Diamond cards became very appealing, from a return on investment perspective. Players started changing their decks not to make them more competitive but cheaper by stacking effective-enough cards they could shine up to Diamond cheaply.
With this post, I will take a competitive cheap deck and estimate what would be a reasonable shining cost to reach ROI in a few months. Of course, there are a few variables that fall out of an individual player's control and can affect the time to ROI. For example:
the number of people playing
the overall 'shinyness' of all the decks being used
the price of the $GODS token
meta shifts that may make the deck less competitive
Decklist
This Aggro War deck by SakuramboSpecial has a good performance and includes a lot of the stronger cards that will win games, although some of them are too expensive to shine in a time-to-ROI optimization scenario. I think this is a good example of balancing between performance and earning potential.
GU_1_6_BDyNAwKBjKBjCBaCBaHAFHAFBDoBDoCDqCDqIDjIDjCBBCBBOAGOAGCAZKBgKBgIDkHAcNAyNAyCEcCEcKBiKBiPAG
Shining estimates
The estimates are based on floor Meteorite prices, which are usually the most cost-effective. It will be very slow to forge them all up to Diamond. So these prices can be somewhat underestimated. Prices are also subject to change over time, especially if the cards are being bought slowly.
The criterion for using a Diamond card is based on the median value of a Diamond Core card. I am including any Diamond card up to around $15-18.
You can find the spreadsheet with the calculations here.
ROI estimate
Here I provide two estimates, playing in Ranked mode. One is for a player in the Solar Gold rank, which I consider to be the minimum for an effective DP&E performance. The other is for the Mythic rank. Both assume an overall 50% win rate.
If you use this as a template for your own calculations you should manually calculate the current 'Fragments per $GODS' ratio by looking at your most recent earning results and dividing the amount of Fragments you received by the amount of corresponding $GODS.
There are also other factors you should take into consideration that affect the actual earnings:
If you manage to play in Formats with a shiny deck, you'll earn considerably more with the same number of Diamond cards.
The daily value is likely to be overestimated, as we're seeing a pattern of a slow increase in the fragments per $GODS ratio, as players slowly improve the shine of their decks.
The time to ROI is heavily affected by the price of $GODS
If you happen to have the Shadow cards in your collection to raise the minimum quality level to Shadow, this will result in an appreciable boost in earnings.
With $GODS at 9 cents,
In Solar Gold, earning an average of $1.11 per day, you'll reach ROI in 138 / 1.11 = 124 days ~ 4 months.
In Mythic, earning an average of $1.5 per day, you'll reach ROI in 138 / 1.5 = 92 days ~ 3 months.
I hope this analysis was helpful for your deck-building and earning strategy.
Thanks for reading!
