I started a new account not too long ago, and formed the typical shrieker rush (short sword, 17 pillars, 6 graboid, 6 shrieker). Farmed AI3 continuously over the past couple weeks, short sessions of course, and slowly upgraded the whole deck. 1333 total games, 1291 won / 42 lost.
This gave me a starting point to farm AI3 with possibly the best deck for the job, and once this deck was complete I did not sell off any more cards I won.
The idea was to continue farming and form a new deck to move on to AI5, possibly mono-aether, but jump in fully upgraded. I just ran the total electrum I can raise from selling off everything, and came up with some interesting numbers I didn't expect - a pretty thorough ratio of electrum-won to cards-won-and-sold when farming AI3, and various corollaries.
- I farmed AI3 enough after completing the shrieker upgrades to amass 4192 electrum without selling any cards.
- Not counting rares, the cards won in the process would yield another 1722 electrum.
- Electrum from sold cards thus provides an additional 41% over the raw electrum won, assuming my win/loss rate. Assume a good 35% with any decent unupped starter deck like the ones jmizzle7 recommends. (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,1190.0.html)
- Average raw electrum won per game was probably about 22, counting the few EMs and the +5 bonus each time the first two reels matched.
- Assuming a decent starter deck and average starter winrate, you're probably looking at
30-35 net electrum per game including cards sold, keeping all rares.
- Assuming an electrum rate of 22 for the games after I completed the deck, I can work backwards and estimate 190 games played since the upgrading was finished.
- 1143 games remaining and 30 cards to upgrade means anywhere from
35-40 AI3 games per 1500 electrum (for one card upgrade) depending on your luck.
- Disregarding electrum to buy the raw cards, the baseline upgrades required to run SG's famous FG farmer rainbow cost are only six - two Otyughs and four Hourglasses. That means if you farm only AI3 to get these upgrades,
you can expect to play about 210-240 games before you're FG-ready!Selling rares as well would yield another 1600 electrum. After 1333 games against AI3 (save for a handful to finish the first quests), I can marshal 42,261 electrum if I sell off everything, and I'm stocked with the following rares:
Arsenic
Pulverizer x2
Fahrenheit
Arctic Squid
Morning Star
Miracle
Owl's Eye
Eternity
Vampire Stiletto
At a very rough estimate, 200 games for this many rares means about a rare every 20 games. This is a small sample size, but seems fairly realistic to me.
Note that I won and sold MANY more rares in the process of upgrading the initial deck. Judging by the ratio of rare card electrum to other electrum AFTER upgrading the deck, you could keep all the rares you win and suffer a drop of only 21% upgrading speed.
DISCLAIMER: I do not recommend anyone actually do this, as it can be incredibly boring! Figured some people out there would like to see the numbers my OCD has produced, though. And it's encouraging for newbies to know you can get a LOT of rares from AI3 if you're patient! I did win
every rare card except Shards and Nymphs at least once. The math above contains a TON of estimates.
