Ah, you got me. I thought it was legendary for some reason. The point stands: $15 is a drop in the bucket for any card. Let me know when it hits Jace level (>$80) and we can start talking about what's broken.

@Starbane Sure, both a compression of information about the actions, but I feel like referring to it is as 3 actions is more lossy about the action cost information than to say it is one action extra over normally deploying an upgrade. My argument for this comes from the fact that let us consider some support 'holisupport' that is a holicron that is a support. I would also take '3 actions' to put in an upgrade, but if we consider it comparatively, it would be 2 actions difference vs deploying an upgrade normally (ignoring other evaluations, holisupport could easily be a better card). Part of what I am loving about this game is there is a lot of depth to the ordering of actions and grouping of them for both efficiency and to try and minimise disruption. The most complete description would be: It requires 3 actions, one before character activation, one character activation action and one special resolution action... but that is so long winded!

As you say, we are basically in agreement and quibbling over semantics . Definite agreement that the value goes down over time, especially if you have to deploy it on the second turn. If it is already in play on the second turn, then you get the edge of being able to do all the damage/dice manipulation w/e first, then precede with getting the extra edge out of the holicron. Hyper-aggro seems like the best answer as beating the holicron in the mid game seems tougher.

@Hida77 There is an over 50% chance of facing down a T1 holicron. So in more than 1/6 games you have to deal with a special of a holicron on the first turn without any extra work from the opponent. That is kinda more than 'maybe effecting 5% of games'. Now obviously this isn't unbeatable, but we are playing a TCG not chess, win rates are never even close to 100% and don't need to be for a card to be 'broken'.

@WonderWAAAGH Comparing a game with several orders of magnitude more players on pricing probably isn't fair...

Lets tone the language down to something I think most people can agree on: I would argue that holicron is the strongest card in the set, likely to to get stronger with subsequent sets and opponents can play it T1 50% of the time (To me this makes it a design mistake, as if the strongest card in your set is also the one that is likely to increase in power the most with time it is gonna limit design space or warp the meta around it). Given that is the case, what is the best way to counter a holicron deck? Stuff like electroshock are universally good, but having to spend a resource and a card to delay their 0 cost upgrade will definitely leave you behind as you now can't deploy that T1 upgrade. Just try to go fast and pile damage on the holicron target and hope that you 'get there' (kind of a universal approach to upgrades I guess...) Use Confiscation to bounce if it they roll the special, or after they activate their other character (at least it doesn't put you down resources on T1 so you can still deploy a 2 cost upgrade). Curious about any other ideas.

@Hida77 There is an over 50% chance of facing down a T1 holicron. So in more than 1/6 games you have to deal with a special of a holicron on the first turn without any extra work from the opponent. That is kinda more than 'maybe effecting 5% of games'. Now obviously this isn't unbeatable, but we are playing a TCG not chess, win rates are never even close to 100% and don't need to be for a card to be 'broken'.

@WonderWAAAGH Comparing a game with several orders of magnitude more players on pricing probably isn't fair...

Lets tone the language down to something I think most people can agree on: I would argue that holicron is the strongest card in the set, likely to to get stronger with subsequent sets and opponents can play it T1 50% of the time (To me this makes it a design mistake, as if the strongest card in your set is also the one that is likely to increase in power the most with time it is gonna limit design space or warp the meta around it). Given that is the case, what is the best way to counter a holicron deck? Stuff like electroshock are universally good, but having to spend a resource and a card to delay their 0 cost upgrade will definitely leave you behind as you now can't deploy that T1 upgrade. Just try to go fast and pile damage on the holicron target and hope that you 'get there' (kind of a universal approach to upgrades I guess...) Use Confiscation to bounce if it they roll the special, or after they activate their other character (at least it doesn't put you down resources on T1 so you can still deploy a 2 cost upgrade). Curious about any other ideas.

We are talking in circles...

More than 1/6? Whoopadeedoo? If the "best" card in my deck helps me in less than 3 rounds of a standard tournament, what does that say about my deck? I'll tell you this, it probably means I'm not making the cut unless my opponents are terrible.

i agree, win rates are not likely to approach 100%. But I'd expect they'd have to get over 70% before I'd get worried. 50-60% usually just means a deck is really strong and has weak counters. But equating a deck being good to a card being good are two totally separate things. If Vader decks with holocron are dominating, isn't it much more likely that Vader, being the card that starts in play, that he is too strong, and not the holocron which *might* be a factor in 50% of those wins?

PS- Vader decks do not dominate....

So 17% of the time you actually trigger it turn 1. And of that, only 1 upgrade causes the game to potentially spiral out of a reasonable amount of control. If you drop a Force Choke or Immobilize, I couldn't really care less...

"Facing down" a holocron turn 1? It's not exactly a bull man.. its just a free upgrade that gives you a sub 60% chance of giving you a slightly better upgrade and an even smaller chance (once you factor in the 2-card wombo combo) of giving you a really strong upgrade. I think a Turn 1 Jetpack on Jango (as an example) is much, much scarier, since now I don't even want to activate my characters.... but maybe that's just me. And all that is required there is to draw the freaking Jetpack...

The obvious answer to your question is play a stronger deck that will either A) Beat down wherever the holocron is dropping upgrades before it significantly impacts the game B) beat them at the control game by using action triggers to deny them damage/specials (usually how Blue Heroes operate) or C) Be more consistently efficient in getting damage over time despite whatever advantage they get from the holocron.

A is the easiest, and works universally well against most Villians. Dooku is the notable exception, but luckily his damage output is low enough early game that you can take an extra turn or two and still likely win.

C is the riskiest game-to-game, but in a multi-round tourney is probably fine, If I enter the game expecting that unless my opponent god draws/rolls I will probably win in the long game, that;s a reasonable approach, albeit luck-based.

Using dice removal to slow them down is a good way to enhance and exacerbate one of those 3 options.But that's another topic entirely. Dice removal is a means to accomplishing one of the other methods, not a method in and of itself. Which is why I devalue many of the blue ability upgrades to begin with. It's not realistic to think you can remove all your opponent's dice every turn and somehow coast to victory. But again, that's another topic entirely.

There's a ton of ways this works and you don't need a single resource.

Rey can roll 3 damage all by herself. Han can roll two (2)'s. a holdout blaster can roll +2 for Han. That's 9 right there. Or can even be a little less than 9 and still kill a tusken raider or almost any non unique, even if it had some shielding.

Playing a Holdout Blaster doesn't feel like "not a single resource". And while I think I had in my head that Rey only had one die, you're again talking about an exact roll on 5 dice - 1 in 7,700 or so times.

We obviously have differences of opinion on what "a ton of ways" means, but it's getting tiring having people tell me the Holocron is too unreliable while they offer up "Look what I can do scenarios" that are 400 times less likely to happen.

@Starbane Sure, both a compression of information about the actions, but I feel like referring to it is as 3 actions is more lossy about the action cost information than to say it is one action extra over normally deploying an upgrade. My argument for this comes from the fact that let us consider some support 'holisupport' that is a holicron that is a support. I would also take '3 actions' to put in an upgrade, but if we consider it comparatively, it would be 2 actions difference vs deploying an upgrade normally (ignoring other evaluations, holisupport could easily be a better card). Part of what I am loving about this game is there is a lot of depth to the ordering of actions and grouping of them for both efficiency and to try and minimise disruption. The most complete description would be: It requires 3 actions, one before character activation, one character activation action and one special resolution action... but that is so long winded!

As you say, we are basically in agreement and quibbling over semantics . Definite agreement that the value goes down over time, especially if you have to deploy it on the second turn. If it is already in play on the second turn, then you get the edge of being able to do all the damage/dice manipulation w/e first, then precede with getting the extra edge out of the holicron. Hyper-aggro seems like the best answer as beating the holicron in the mid game seems tougher.

@Hida77 There is an over 50% chance of facing down a T1 holicron. So in more than 1/6 games you have to deal with a special of a holicron on the first turn without any extra work from the opponent. That is kinda more than 'maybe effecting 5% of games'. Now obviously this isn't unbeatable, but we are playing a TCG not chess, win rates are never even close to 100% and don't need to be for a card to be 'broken'.

@WonderWAAAGH Comparing a game with several orders of magnitude more players on pricing probably isn't fair...

Lets tone the language down to something I think most people can agree on: I would argue that holicron is the strongest card in the set, likely to to get stronger with subsequent sets and opponents can play it T1 50% of the time (To me this makes it a design mistake, as if the strongest card in your set is also the one that is likely to increase in power the most with time it is gonna limit design space or warp the meta around it). Given that is the case, what is the best way to counter a holicron deck? Stuff like electroshock are universally good, but having to spend a resource and a card to delay their 0 cost upgrade will definitely leave you behind as you now can't deploy that T1 upgrade. Just try to go fast and pile damage on the holicron target and hope that you 'get there' (kind of a universal approach to upgrades I guess...) Use Confiscation to bounce if it they roll the special, or after they activate their other character (at least it doesn't put you down resources on T1 so you can still deploy a 2 cost upgrade). Curious about any other ideas.

You're right, more players should equate to lower overall prices for singles.

Is it time to start talking about breakfast yet?

@Starbane Sure, both a compression of information about the actions, but I feel like referring to it is as 3 actions is more lossy about the action cost information than to say it is one action extra over normally deploying an upgrade. My argument for this comes from the fact that let us consider some support 'holisupport' that is a holicron that is a support. I would also take '3 actions' to put in an upgrade, but if we consider it comparatively, it would be 2 actions difference vs deploying an upgrade normally (ignoring other evaluations, holisupport could easily be a better card). Part of what I am loving about this game is there is a lot of depth to the ordering of actions and grouping of them for both efficiency and to try and minimise disruption. The most complete description would be: It requires 3 actions, one before character activation, one character activation action and one special resolution action... but that is so long winded!

As you say, we are basically in agreement and quibbling over semantics . Definite agreement that the value goes down over time, especially if you have to deploy it on the second turn. If it is already in play on the second turn, then you get the edge of being able to do all the damage/dice manipulation w/e first, then precede with getting the extra edge out of the holicron. Hyper-aggro seems like the best answer as beating the holicron in the mid game seems tougher.

@Hida77 There is an over 50% chance of facing down a T1 holicron. So in more than 1/6 games you have to deal with a special of a holicron on the first turn without any extra work from the opponent. That is kinda more than 'maybe effecting 5% of games'. Now obviously this isn't unbeatable, but we are playing a TCG not chess, win rates are never even close to 100% and don't need to be for a card to be 'broken'.

@WonderWAAAGH Comparing a game with several orders of magnitude more players on pricing probably isn't fair...

Lets tone the language down to something I think most people can agree on: I would argue that holicron is the strongest card in the set, likely to to get stronger with subsequent sets and opponents can play it T1 50% of the time (To me this makes it a design mistake, as if the strongest card in your set is also the one that is likely to increase in power the most with time it is gonna limit design space or warp the meta around it). Given that is the case, what is the best way to counter a holicron deck? Stuff like electroshock are universally good, but having to spend a resource and a card to delay their 0 cost upgrade will definitely leave you behind as you now can't deploy that T1 upgrade. Just try to go fast and pile damage on the holicron target and hope that you 'get there' (kind of a universal approach to upgrades I guess...) Use Confiscation to bounce if it they roll the special, or after they activate their other character (at least it doesn't put you down resources on T1 so you can still deploy a 2 cost upgrade). Curious about any other ideas.

You're right, more players should equate to lower overall prices for singles.

Is it time to start talking about breakfast yet?

Sure... that is totally how supply and demand effects prices of limited rare objects...

I'm thinking bacon and waffles... mmm baaaaacon.

I was leaning towards Eggs Benedict.

First I'd like to say thanks to yodaman1971 and gobberlerra for posting solutions to my math question.

@yodaman1971 you did exactly as I asked. Good job. Unfortunately i asked my question slightly wrong. I wanted to draw A Holocron and any 2 of 8 abilities, then roll the special on my Holocron twice.

8 abilities as in 4 cards each appearing 2x in the deck (so 8 cards total you're picking 2 of) or 8 cards that each appear 2x in the deck (so 16 cards total you're picking 2 of)?

I'm saying 4 cards with 2 of each for 8 total abilities in the deck.

@Buhallin I don't have time for a long answer now, but I'll get back with you.

Sorry, been tied up with stuff the past few days. Saw a post that said the odds were 24% and that seemed low to me based on this set-up. I went and did the computations myself. I double checked things and am pretty sure I've got the correct answer. This gets even trickier than before so bear with me. I'm assuming you could draw 2 of the same ability, like 2 Mind Probes and a Holocron would be an acceptable draw.

As before the total number of 5 card hands you could draw from 30 cards is 142506

There are 13636 ways your initial 5 card hand could have at least 1 of the 2 holocrons and also at least 2 of the 8 special ability cards. That gives 13656/142506 which is about .0957 or 9.57%

Now you have to look at the subcases where you'd mulligan.

Case 1: Your opening hand has 0 holcorons and 0 of the special ability cards. There are 15504 ways this can happen. So the odds of it happening are 15504/142506 which is about .1088 In this case you have to mulligan all 5 cards and try to get at least 1 holocron and at least 2 special abilities. The chances of that happening (as listed above) is .0957. You have to multiply the two results together to get .0104 or 1.04%

Case 2: Your opening hand has 1 or 2 holocrons, but 0 of the special ability cards. There are 10830 ways this could happen so the odds of it happening is .0760. In this case you have to mulligan 4 cards (if you have 2 holocrons, you put 1 back)and hope to get at least 2 of the special ability cards in the 4, so you're drawing 4 cards from 29 which has 23751 possible outcomes. The number of ways to get at least 2 special ability cards in those 4 is 7126. So the odds of it happening is .300. You multiply those results together and get .0228 or 2.28%

Case 3: Your opening hand has 0 of the holocrons and exactly 1 of the special ability cards. There are 38760 ways this can happen so the odds of it happening is .272. In this case you have to mulligan 4 cards and hope to get at least 1 holocron and at least 1 special ability in those 4. Again you're drawing 4 cards from 29 so there are 23751 possible outcomes for that. The number of ways to get at least 1 holocron and at least 1 special ability in those 4 is 3731. So the odds of it happening is .157. You multiply those results together and get .0427 or 4.27%

Case 4: Your opening hand has 1 or 2 holocrons and exactly 1 of the special ability cards. There are 19760 ways for this to happen so the odds of it happening is .1387. In this case you have to mulligan 3 cards (if you have 2 holocrons, you put 1 back) and hope to get at least 1 special ability in those 3. You are drawing 3 cards from 28 which has 3276 possible outcomes. The number of ways to get at least 1 special ability in those 3 is 1946. So the odds of it happening is .5940. Multiply those numbers together and you get .0824 or 8.24%

Case 5: Your opening hand has 0 of the holocrons at least 2 of the special ability cards. There are 44016 ways this can happen. So the odds of it happening is .3089. In this case you have to mulligan 3 cards and hope to get at least 1 holocron in those 3. Again you are drawing 3 cards from 28 so there are 3276 possible outcomes. The number of ways to get at least 1 holocron in the 3 cards is 676 so the odds of it happening is .2063. Multiply those together and you get .0637 or 6.37%

Now we have to add up all the percentages from the cases which is: 9.57 + 1.04 + 2.28 + 4.27 + 8.24 + 6.37 = 31.77%

Saw a post that said the odds were 24% and that seemed low to me based on this set-up.

Now we have to add up all the percentages from the cases which is: 9.57 + 1.04 + 2.28 + 4.27 + 8.24 + 6.37 = 31.77%

This actually feels really high to me.

The odds of pulling a single card, with aggressive mulligan, comes out around 32.6%:

1/30+1/29+1/28+1/27+1/26 = 17.9%

.179 (opening) + (.179 * (1-.179)) = .325

I'm not gaming out all the other possibilities here, but it seems unlikely that we can go from "32.5% chance for a holocron" to "31.8% chance for a holocron and 2 others from a set of 8". I may be missing something, of course, the possibilities for multiples and the mulligan really muck it up.

I hit the 24% by brute force - draw the hand randomly, throw back anything that didn't match the pattern, draw back to full and then check, do that about 10 million times and see what the counts are. Possible I missed something up there but it tested out correctly for some known cases so I thought it was good. I'll take another pass at verifying it.

I'm not sure why you're adding what you did. That really isn't how things work when trying to do these probabilities.

Say there's only 1 copy of a card in a 30 card deck and you want to get it in your opening 5 card hand. You can either draw the card in your initial hand or potentially on a mulligan of 5 cards.

You can figure it out with combinations essentially you break the cards up into 2 groups. A group of 1 card and a group of 29 cards. To figure out the odds you do (1 C 1) * (29 C 4) then divide by (30 C 5). That actually works out to exactly 1/6.

This also means the odds of not getting that single card in the opening hand is 5/6.

Then if you mulligan, what happens is you have to multiply the probability of not drawing the card the first time, mulliganing all 5 cards then drawing a new 5 card hand and drawing the card. To get the answer you'd have to multiply 5/6 * 1/6 = 5/36= .1389 = 13.89%.

Add those two cases together and you get 30.55%.

If you change it to 2 copies of the same card in a 30 card deck, the you have 2 groups, 1 with 2 cards and the other with 28. The easiest way to figure out the odds of drawing one of the 2 in your initial hand is to actually figure out the odds of not drawing one of the 2 in your initial opening hand then subtracting from 1. The odds of not drawing 1 of the 2 would be (2 C 0) * (28 C 5) / (30 C 5) = .6897, then subtract from 1 and you get .3103 or 31.03%.

Then the other case would be you fail to draw 1 the first time, but draw 1 of the 2 copies after you mulligan all 5 cards.

If you don't draw 1 the first time the odds are .6987 as stated above. Then, if you mulligan all 5 cards and do draw 1 copy of the 2, the odds are .3101. Now you'd multiply the .6897 * .3103 = .214 or 21.4% to figure out the odds of not having the card the first time, but drawing at least 1 of it the 2nd time.

Now to figure out the odds of drawing 1 of the 2 copies of a card in a 30 card deck you add those case together so it's 31.03+21.4 = 52.43%.

Those numbers actually don't surprise me since with 2 copies of a card in a 30 card deck (which is relatively small), there would be a 1/15 chance of drawing it if you just draw a single card. Since you are essentially drawing 10 cards (some of which could certainly be repeats), I would have expected this to be decent odds and am not surprised it worked out that way.

The similar thing happens with the 2 holocron, 8 ability example. Essentially those cards make up 1/3 or your deck. It's not surprising to me that the odds of getting what you want with an aggressive mulligan approach is so high.

Look at Disarm. I think it eats Holocrons for breakfast

I'm not sure why you're adding what you did. That really isn't how things work when trying to do these probabilities.

Combinatorics was never my strongest suit. I appreciate the correction.

I think when I mentioned the 24% before I actually had a different test case in, and pulled the wrong number. Again, on me for trying to rush things. But hey, at least I was lowballing my own theory so nobody should think I was intentionally lying about the numbers

FWIW my brute force is landing at pretty much the same numbers you've got now that I'm running the right test case. I even used a few of your other examples to test my code

Look at Disarm. I think it eats Holocrons for breakfast

lol.... eggs Benedict

I think people throw around the "broken" term anytime they get wrecked.

Until I see many tournament results where all the top decks are villain blue cards that are winning specifically because of that card, then the discussion can be brought out. As it stands now, the only deck I see winning consistantly is Han/Rey decks.

Edit - actually let me rephrase it: When half the decks at a tournament are villain blue with sith holocrons and the other half are decks designed specifically to counter that deck, then it's time to review.