Ikoria is the Land of Behemoths, but will be we be receiving monstrous value from this set's mastery pass?
WotC released the mastery pass information early this set. While we don't know what levels we will get what rewards at, we can look at past mastery mass tracks to have a pretty good guess. This will only be needed to figure out the break even point. Total value can still be obtained if you plan to complete the entire track. How long is Ikoria Lair of Behemoths? The length of Ikoria is even shorter than Theros Beyond Death, clocking in at only 71 days this time. The Mastery Tree is 80 levels total, with level 80 and beyond giving out the uncommon ICRs, the same as the last two mastery passes. Ikoria runs from 4/16/20 with it's last day most likely being being 6/25/20. The release date for Core Set 2021 starts July 3, Paper pre-release and Arena play generally begins the weekend before. For active players, I am still recommending the same model of playing 4 wins per day for maximizing your gold farming ability without running into burnout. Doing so averages out to 1135 XP per day over the course of the week. With 71 days of play, you should be at Level 80. This gives you exactly enough time to reach the final level of reward. Here is what this looks like calculated out:
In fact, to be more accurate, we can use MTGAHelper's excellent Mastery Pass Calculator to figure this out for us once the new pass goes live. Where do the values come from? All values have been carefully traced back to actual money that you can spend in the game through gems, or using gold to gem conversion rates. Everything in the game can be traced back to an actual dollar amount at this point in time. Even individual random cards, which includes ICRs. For more information on real world Arena values, please click on my article HERE. Free Mastery Track Lets start by looking at what is in the free path of the mastery track. Ikoria free mastery track includes the following:
So all of you F2P players are getting $43.48 value for just playing the game. That's excellent value for zero dollars spent! Paid Mastery Pass Now, lets see what the paid mastery pass gives you this set. Ikoria mastery pass includes the following:
This gives us a combined total of $183.17. Thoughts on the Ikoria Mastery Pass. Lets say you aren't interested in the cosmetic items. You are still getting $40.82 in value for virtual product at just under $20 worth of Gems. This is still a pretty decent value for any active player. Although... Keep in mind that when Zendikar Rising releases in the late summer, that 13 of these booster packs will no longer be used in Standard, which is about $14 in value. This still leaves us with $26.72 in value. The mastery pass costs us $19.85 in gems. This is barely worth it at this point from just a product perspective, but it's still in the positive. It may get worse... For those that have been playing for a while and like to draft or open lots of booster packs, then those 20 extra booster packs from older sets may be worth nothing to you at all. This brings total value to $19.13, which is not a great buy if all you care about is virtual product only. I didn't really get back into Arena until the end of RNA, so while my collection of GRN and RNA are low, and I have less WAR than M20 and beyond, I already have crafted anything I needed from these older sets, making anything I open in those packs rather worthless for me. I am also in the same boat as a lot of active players in the past year in that for M20 and newer, I have nearly the entire playset for all of these sets, so I won't be getting much value out of these booster packs either. The only thing of value at this point is the duplicated protected rare slot from those booster packs, and the vault progress from all the useless duplicates, neither of which I care about at this point for those particular sets. If you love cosmetics, then this is always an excellent value. You will get your cosmetics for the latest set sooner than waiting on them to show up in the store later. Also, it appears that from what we have seen so far in the store, this is a much better value on cosmetics. Think of it as buying most of this set's cosmetics at a discounted bulk rate. Is the Ikoria Lair of Behemoths Mastery Pass it worth it?
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