50 Packs Means What

It's been a while since statistics so it's nice to find someone doing this for me…

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Out of 50 packs, about how many of the 130 cards should the average person get? And how much dust would 50 packs get?

TLDR: 93% of commons, 62% of rares, 21% of epics, 14% of legendaries and 1100 dust, equaling a total value of 18245 dust

Almost forgot to answer the original question from the title: 89 unique cards out of the 132.

I assumed that TGT has the exact same rarity distribution as GvG, plus 9 extra commons (1 for each class), which makes it: 49 commons, 37 rares, 26 epics and 20 legendaries. I also assumed that you don't care about golden cards, so you only keep golden cards if you don't have enough non-golden copies of the same card. Sadly, I don't have the time to properly analyze the data, so I just averaged it all together. (I could sort the runs and show some values for the top and bottom 10%, maybe in a separate post later.) So the average result is:

• Commons: out of 49, you have both copies of 43 and a single copy of 5, that equals 93% (I'm sure that single card missing is the best common of the set)
• Rares: out of 37, you have both copies of 17 and a single copy of 12, that means no copies of 8, equaling 62%
• Epics: out of 26, you have both copies of 2, and a single copy of 7, no copies of 17, equaling 21%
• Legendaries: 3 unique legendaries (duplicates have been auto-disenchanted), it was 2.8 on average, so it's 14%
• Dust: from duplicates, you ended up with 1100 dust
• Total value: 18245 dust, which equals 365 per pack. This is the crafting cost of all the cards summed up plus the dust from disenchanting. (This slightly differs from the sum of the previous values, because of the rounding errors.)

I hope the information was useful for you. I'll maybe do a proper analysis with confidence intervals and all the fancy statistics, if I have enought time for that, sometime later in a separate post.
Good luck actually opening your 50 packs! Cheers!

Hearthstone Brawl: The Masked Ball

Spent a couple of hours on this Brawl to get my dailies done and assemble a decent deck. Starting out I needed to get two Rogue wins. Initially I built a deck with a number of minions to exploit the free summons. Cards like Defias Ringleader, Haunted Creeper, and Violet Teacher. My first game scared a Priest away when coined out the Defias:

During the second game I realized I was doing it wrong. Many of the summons (Spectral Spider or Violet Apprentice) did not cost the required two mana to trigger a free card. While a little disheartened I thought my Hogger would finally shine since it summons Gnolls which "cost" two mana. Alas it appears that only "played" cards would trigger Brawl since when my Gnolls were killed they did not summon Wisps or Target Dummies.

There is a way to exploit the Brawl effect. Turns out it is like a hidden Death Rattle which means Baron Rivendare is suddenly relevant. An enterprising Hunter caught me by surprise with this. Turn six he had a Piloted Shredder on the board. He then played the Baron followed by Feign Death. Suddenly I was facing a full board:

Thankfully I was able to remove the Baron immediately and had enough board developed to stabilize. But imagine the havoc Sneed's Old Shredder could wreak! Something to consider.

While I needed to get some Druid wins in I ended up sticking with the Druid to play. The Druid's ability to ramp into large minions is especially potent with the Brawl effect. Sadly I don't have the cool trees (Ancient of Lore or Ancient of War) but there is plenty of other heft to get by with (plenty, other, heft, et cetera)

Did learn a couple of things.

The turn one Emperor Thaurissan sure seemed powerful. Yet keeping and using the two Innervates along with the coin ended up draining any hope of tempo. Naturally the Priest drew into SW: Death by turn three and nothing that I had drawn into the cost reduction helped me. The biggest lesson came with Poison Seeds. You pretty much guarantee a loss for yourself by playing it since each dying minion summons a new one to go along with a bunch of free treants.

What I ended up doing was "taunting into ramp": Decklist. Start with small taunt minions to stall early aggression. Then follow up with some more taunt in the mid-range, like Belcher and Druid of the Claw. End the curve with high-mana, high-value cards as finishers. Spells were either buffs or removal along with Nourish for the ability to choose between draw or ramp.

There's a bit more tuning to do. The deck is light on draw so each card needs to be high value or more draw should be added. There are too many spells—which don't synergize with the Brawl power. Need to go either removal or buffs. Really wish I had more giants. *sigh*

Nozdormu continues to win me games. With the focus on getting taunts out he's actually surviving and messing with people.

This ramp druid had me beat until I managed to get the roping going. He tried to use Savage Roar on me but the animations must have slowed him down. Was giggling to myself for a while after winning that game. Definitely love that about the Brawl games… being able to use cards that don't fit into "normal" constructed play.

The free pack was okay:

Destroyed all of the commons but I did need the Perdition's Blade. While I enjoy Rogue the decks I've played with never encouraged me to make it.