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When I started the challenge at the beginning of Jan 2022, we were coming off an insane bull run, and little did I know then that we were going into a typical crypto bear winter cycle. As I stated before, I predominately started this challenge for one main reason – I wanted to run a personal experiment to test what return can be achieved from opening 1000 packs. From a personal interest background, I know from reading many statistical sports books and sport betting books that buy packs and open them generally never return a positive return. Statistical variance plays a huge factor, so you will get some people who open a couple of packs and pack a Gold Foil legendary (law of small numbers). However, your mileage may vary due to luck. Ok, enough pre-amble; let's get into the overall stats.

Source of 1000 Chaos Legion packs

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When I started the challenge, I was initially worried that the Chaos Legion packs would sell out before I could complete the challenge, and I spent most of the outlay for this challenge by purchasing packs from the official store. In hindsight, I would've waited and continued to dollar-cost average purchase packs from hive-engine, but alas, I didn't know that at the time. Purchasing packs from the store benefitted me in two ways – convenience and airdrops. Purchasing packs from the secondary market requires me to convert cash (credit card) into crypto and then do the crypto exchange hops until I finally get Hive into hive-engine. To give an example, some weeks, I was doing the following:

Purchase BTC using a credit card on a local exchange.
Swap BTC to LTC (cheaper transaction fees to send).
Send LTC to Binance.
Convert LTC to BNB.
Purchase Hive using BNB.
Send Hive to Hive account.
Deposit into hive-engine.
Exhausting process, and when you think we're too late for crypto, we're still very early for mass adoption, but save that for another post.

Key Cards

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The all-important metric that anyone who opens packs is how many Gold Foil legendaries did you get? And the second most crucial metric is how many regular foil legendaries you got. The drop rates for the Chaos Legion sets are Commons 70.4%, Rares 24.8%, Epics 4%, and Legendaries 0.8%. Quite impressive that when you look at the number of legendary monsters I managed to pack is in the range of expected probabilities. I packed 79 regular foil legendary monsters and two Gold Foil legendary monsters (Chaos Dragon, Grandmaster Rathe).

About halfway through the challenge, I started to track the airdrops received as part of the pack challenge. So far, I have managed to get eight regular foil legendary airdrops. There are still two more airdrops to happen, so maybe the RNG gods would be in my favor and deliver something special?

Pack Challenge Profit / Loss

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It's not a pretty picture, but in the grand scheme, it's not all too bad when you consider that we are almost one year deep into a bear market. If you told me today that I need to redo the challenge again, would I do it again? It depends. Can I repeat the challenge but buy all the packs from the secondary market at a discount value – then, yes. The price you are purchasing a pack for can make a difference if you intend to open a lot of packs. For the 1k pack challenge, for every pack I opened, I was losing, on average, $0.81 for each pack! Therefore, the packs would only return 76% of their value (($3480/1000) - $0.81) / ($3480/1000)). The smart money would've held onto those 1000 packs and looked to sell them once they go out of print, but hey, what's the point of doing the challenge?

What would I do differently next time?

I made many mistakes and have many regrets while doing this challenge. What would I do differently if I had to do this challenge again (possibly for the Rebellion edition)?

Track each card received from the packs.
- I only kept track of the regular and gold foil legendary cards during the challenge, but it would be good to track exactly how many cards of each type I received.
Track all the SPS, DEC, GLX, and VOUCHER tokens.
- This proved almost impossible to keep track of as I constantly sent packs between my main and alt, depending on which account had more potions. For me to track this, this would require me to set up another alternate account, as it would make it much easier to keep track of all the tokens received by playing splinterlands.
Track the value of each pack purchased.
- At times, getting an exact price per pack wasn't easy as I was purchasing packs from the official store, from hive-engine, and receiving them from rewards.

What was the outcome of the challenge?

When I started this challenge, I opened an alt account and then started working to build the account to be playable in Gold league with the following Chaos Legion edition card requirements:

Rare Summoners – level 3
Legendary Summoners – level 2
Common Monsters – level 4
Rare Monsters – level 3
Epic Monsters – level 2
Legendary Monsters – level 2

All packs opened, and any relevant cards I sent to the alt account. After opening 1000 packs over the past year, I have gotten close to meeting the above requirements on the account, but I still got some work to do. And this brings me to my next splinterlands challenge.

What is the next challenge?

As the 1k pack opening challenge was going on, I was constantly working in the background, building up the alt account to have a complete regular foil Chaos Legion edition set playable in the Gold league. I have found the above requirements for summoners and monsters' are good enough to compete in Gold leagues.

Now onto the challenge; I will be focusing on the following goals:

Obtain a complete regular foil Chaos Legion set playable in Gold Leagues by the end of 2023 Q1.
Obtain a complete regular foil Chaos Legion set playable in Diamond Leagues by the end of 2023 Q3.
Obtain one plot of Land by the end of 2023 Q3.

For the Diamond league challenge, I will aim to have a complete regular foil Chaos Legion set at the following levels:

Rare Summoners – level 5
Legendary Summoners – level 3
Common Monsters – level 6
Rare Monsters – level 5
Epic Monsters – level 4
Legendary Monsters – level 3

Why the timeframes on the challenge?

From the recent splinterlands updates, the new Rebellion edition and Land are potentially planned to be released in 2023 Q3 / Q4. I will use these timeframes to give me a deadline to work towards.

How will I keep track of this challenge?

I will post weekly updates and track any progress on the goals. Also, I will keep track of the overall expected vs. actual spending to see how the week-by-week card prices deviate.

Conclusion

When I initially started the 1k pack challenge, the idea and concept were just a dream, but after almost a year of consistently grinding out weekly (mostly) updates, the 1k pack challenge is now done! While I wish I would've loved to post an update whereby I could've used a clickbaity title as to how splinterlands earned me thousands and thousands of dollars in profit by opening packs, alas, the gambler's fallacy came home to roost. Opening packs is a negative expectation game, whereby statistical variance plays a huge factor. It ultimately boils down to luck and praying to the RNG gods to get that sweet, sweet gold foil legendary monster that will skyrocket the value gained from a pack. Nonetheless, I got a lot from this challenge, and I hope to kick it up a gear with the following challenge and build an alt account for the long term.

Complete Index of the 1k Pack Opening Challenge:

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Road to Opening 1000 Chaos Legion Packs - 100% Complete, Summary Post | Splinterlands #240