How many Gold Legendary cards will the Transcendent Set have?
We opened 4,000,000 Transcendent Set crates, and here’s what we found.
As part of the process of making sure everything will run smoothly for the Transcendent Set Crate Unlocking Event, we tested the related smart contracts by opening all 400,000 crates on Polygon test nets, ten times. Thanks to these test runs we are able to share this interesting information with you.
How many cards should there be?
In simple terms, there should be fewer Legendary cards than Common and more Painted Metal cards than Gold, but only by testing our custom randomness smart contracts will we know if the crates will behave as anticipated. The information here should give you an idea of what to expect when all the 400,000 Transcendent Set crates have been opened.
Above, you can see the probability values for receiving cards of different Rarity and Quality. If the numbers for Rarity look slightly unfamiliar to you, it’s because these numbers reflect the fact that every Transcendent Set crate is guaranteed to contain at least one Rare card. Thus, this is the distribution rate, rather than the drop chance that we have had on our website.
These percentages are converted into card numbers in the next table (below). These numbers are what to expect if the probability were to play out completely as expected. Of course, we’re dealing with random number generation, so things might not look exactly like this table once all 400,000 crates are open.
Finally, it’s important to note that there are 34 different cards that make up the Transcendent Set: six Legendary, seven Epic, ten Rare, and eleven Common. Therefore, the 200 Gold Legendary cards indicated in the table will actually be shared between six individual Legendary cards, more on this below.
Rarity
The Rarity of a card refers to how many or few in number a card may be. For example, there will be many fewer Legendary cards than Common cards. This is because the Legendary cards represent a special Serran character or technology, it does not necessarily relate to how powerful the card might be in gameplay.
We can see in the table above that the smart contracts drew all types of Rarity within a very tight range. For Common and Rare cards the minimum and maximum numbers are within ~0.1% of each other. For Epic and Legendary, this expanded to ~0.6% and ~2% respectively. This is to be expected as there are fewer of those cards drawn altogether, and so have less chance to regress to the mean as they are being drawn.
Quality
The other factor to consider when assessing a card is its Quality, this applies to all cards and refers to the frame and associated cosmetics of cards. For example, all Gold cards will be animated.
Again, the table below shows that the smart contract drew the crates in a very tight range. There is a difference of just 1,049 out of over two million cards between the most Painted Metal cards drawn and the fewest Painted Metal cards drawn in the ten test runs.
The tight ranges seen in the testing data show that the smart contract randomness is working as intended; that it is random but adheres to the core distribution rate.
Rarity x Quality = Scarcity
All cards will have Rarity and Quality, and these combine to make Scarcity. We have an article coming soon on Scarcity, but for this exercise, the numbers in the long table below represent the minimum and maximum numbers of individual cards of each Scarcity drawn in the ten test runs.
As you can see below, almost all the different Scarcity categories are clearly defined. The only overlap we see is between Gold Epic cards and Silver Legendary cards. It looks like Gold Epic cards will be mostly more scarce than Silver Legendary cards, but this will depend a lot on the individual card.
Let’s delve a little deeper though. In the Transcendent Set, there are six different Legendary cards you could get out of your crates. According to the ten test runs, the Painted Metal versions of these six cards are likely to number between 2,665 and 2,893 each, while each of the six Legendary cards in Gold is likely to number between 18 and 43.
Therefore, it is likely that there will be fewer than 45 of each of these Legendary cards below, maybe even fewer than 20 of some of them.
Keep in mind that the numbers in this article refer to a time when all 400,000 Transcendent Set Crates are opened, so in practice, there may be even fewer of these cards.
We should also note that only one test run produced a Gold Legendary card numbering fewer than 23, but this is the reason that we did ten different test runs; outliers can happen when dealing with random number generation. We think this makes it even more exciting.
Artifacts
Artifacts are ancient powers, knowledge, and devices that were lost to the sands of time as Serra evolved. Devised and existing during a near-forgotten period of Serra’s evolution, they will only reveal their true nature when they are discovered.
As they are such a rare and special item, testing how the Artifacts revealed themselves was very important to the test runs. We are happy to see a good distribution of when the Artifacts were drawn. Over the ten runs of opening 400,000 crates, the earliest crate to discover an Artifact was the 15,053rd crate to be opened. The latest crate to discover an Artifact was crate number 398,745.
There are 12 Artifacts in total; however, we do not know exactly how many Artifacts are lost in the Transcendent Set. In every one of the test runs at least two Artifacts were drawn so we are pleased that our custom formula has proved reliable in maintaining the extreme rarity of these items, but without hiding them forever.
It is important to remember that every crate has the same artifact drop chance of 1/100,000, therefore, even the very first crate in the Crate Unlocking Event could contain an Artifact.
Conclusion
The code in our smart contract forms a public, transparent set of rules and logic, and the testing and these statistics show that it works as intended.
The test runs have shown us that we are very likely to avoid a situation where no Artifacts are drawn, or where the Artifacts are always drawn at the same crate number. They also show us that the percentage chances attributed to the Quality and Rarity, and therefore Scarcity, are working as intended. The runs have also shown us that it’s likely that different cards of the same Scarcity will have a different amount of copies in existence.
Importantly, despite the transparency, nobody will be able to predict when certain cards or Artifacts will be drawn, which cards or Artifacts will be drawn, or how many of each card or Artifacts will be drawn from crates when they are opened.
This is the power of decentralization. And seeing what you get from your crate will be fun and exciting of course!
An additional fun fact for reading to the bottom: opening all 400,000 crates once took around 15 hours on the Mumbai TestNet.
Who are we?
Our vision at Calystral is to unleash the potential of gamers. We are focusing on building games where the time and effort put in is rewarded with real value. Enhancing the players’ experience and empowering gamers to achieve more. In the process, we strive to overcome the technical limitations of Blockchain Technology and use its benefits to lift games to the next level. We would love to share these solutions with the community and other developers. Towards a better future of Gaming!
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