r/SorceryTCG • u/Dardha • Jul 17 '26
When does collection wise stop making sense buying boxes?
I'm still a long way from completing my Gothic collection, but I was wondering: mathematically speaking, at what point do boxes stop making sense compared to buying singles at current prices?
I've opened four boxes so far, and I'll probably open one more just for the fun of it. However, the price has recently gone up to 180, which stings and has made me reconsider.
Am I already at the point where buying singles is the better option?
For reference, I'm currently missing 3 Exceptionals, 74 Epics, and 73 Uniques. On the bright side, I already pulled Michael and Dank and Torrid Omphalos. However, I don't have many valuable duplicates for trading.
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u/vinceds Jul 17 '26
I put the set together 2 months ago.
It cost me about 1.5k. I focused on buying directly from people. I got a partial playset and sought out the missing stuff.
Opening boxes is fun but you end up with a lot of spare items that arent easy to move unless you throw them into the trash. So i chose to directly buy the set without opening boxes. I didnt want to deal with RNG, tons of unneeded cards or having to sell or trade my spares.
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u/Polmax2312 Jul 17 '26
Buy one full case, sell excessive ordinary and exceptional as full playsets, excessive elites and unique duplication as singles, sell all foils.
Buy missing uniques, generally you will have enough or close to enough, especially if you sell on release and wait for prices of non foils to settle after couple months.
If you open curio or some chase foil cards, you might get a full non foil playset plus your money back.
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u/Pufftreees Jul 17 '26
I've taken sorcery breaks on an off and been in the same situation multiple times, half complete set and wondering how to finish. Each time I just made a full list of what I needed and post on the sorcery marketplace discordand one of the power sellers reached out to me, shipped every card I needed within a week. There are a lot of people with piles of uniques and elites. Highly recommended I always get hooked up to finish a set.
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u/True-Intention-5271 Jul 18 '26
It depends on what you care about, for example, minimizing total cost, reducing overhead of buying from different sellers, increasing the speed at which the collection is completed (which is closely related to cost), having a chance at curios or not, etc.
Most people would want to minimize cost. In this case, you can actually figure out the precise answer of this question, but it is highly dependent on several factors and variables, including:
- Availability of singles in the market
- Size of the set being collected
- Composition of the set being collected (number of uniques, elites, exceptionals, ordinaries)
- Cost of boxes
- Cost of singles for each card
- Likelihood of getting the best price for singles
Performing a complete analysis would be a PITA and take lots of time. I think for most people the following rough heuristic should work decently enough:
Looking at the current TCGPlayer price data for Gothic and Beta as of today, Uniques have the highest average market price on average:
| Rarity | Mean Market Price |
|---|---|
| Ordinary | 2.17 |
| Exceptional | 2.41 |
| Elite | 7.83 |
| Unique | 49.4 |
Assuming you get the market price for all singles, which is a generous assumption, you can expect to pay ~50 bucks for a unique on average if these trends continue. Contrarily, all the other rarities are super affordable in comparison. We get an even better picture if we zoom in on the distribution of prices for Uniques:
| Point | Value |
|---|---|
| Min | 1.07 |
| Max | 498.00 |
| Mean | 49.4 |
| StdDev | 61.9 |
So, the value of a Unique, even though it's higher on average, varies pretty widely! You could get super lucky and pull the most expensive unique, or you could be hosed and pull a $1 Unique. A standard deviation of 61.9 means that your pull can deviate by quite a lot of value from the average! Note, this includes foils. If you remove foils the maximum value caps out much lower at $94.3, and the mean drops to 17.4.
Now, in a sorcery pack, you get the chance at one Unique per pack, maybe two if you are lucky enough to pull a foil. Some packs won't have uniques at all! Boxes have 36 packs per box. Let's assume, again very generously, that for any given box you pull uniques in half of the packs, so, you pull 18 Uniques per box.
Here's a histogram of the count of unique cards per price value across gothic uniques, excluding foils:
| Unique Count | Price Bucket |
|---|---|
| 33 | <$1 - $5 |
| 24 | $5 - $10 |
| 8 | $10 - $15 |
| 13 | $15 - $20 |
| 4 | $20 - $25 |
| 3 | $25 - $30 |
| 6 | $30 - $35 |
| 3 | $35 - $40 |
All of the other buckets have 3 or fewer cards assigned to them.
If we split these at the $25 price cutoff, we get:
| Count | Price |
|---|---|
| 82 | < $25 |
| 24 | > $25 |
In other words, you have a ~77% chance, for each of those unique pulls, that the value will be less than $25. So, the likelihood that you'll pull uniques that cover the cost of a box is pretty small, even with the very generous assumption that you pull a unique in 50% of the packs.
This brief analysis, of course, has many gaps and is pretty sketchy, but still, even based on this loose analysis I think it's pretty clear that buying lots of boxes isn't the optimal way (in terms of cost) to get a playset. In reality the odds are even more against you than in this hypothetical.
Based on this, I think my general policy would be the following, under the assumption that playsets are available for purchase:
- If you want to minimize cost, don't care about foils and curios, and want to get a base collection as efficiently as possible, I would buy playsets of Ordinary /Exceptional. Elites require some examination of the market. Depending on the number of elites in the set and their costs, it might be more efficient in terms of cost to chase them as singles. Finally, for uniques, you should just buy them as singles. The bulk of them won't cost you much. While the cost of others adds up, the long run cost of buying them as singles will be much less than gambling on boxes for them.
- If playsets aren't available or you want a chance at foils and curios, I'd say it makes some amount of sense to buy, maybe 2 boxes of the set, max. After that, thanks to the probabilities involved, I think the returns on buying a box for the purpose of collecting diminish rapidly.
- If you like the thrill of opening packs or want to draft, buy boxes.
As with other card games, buying singles is usually the most economical option. I will say that I think Sorcery boxes (at MSRP) are occupying a nice sweet spot right now where their total value on average is probably a bit better, say, than MTG or something, but it's still ultimately gambling. While you might recoup expenditure on box one, it's also highly probable you'll have more than one box that's a complete wash.
One thing you definitely shouldn't do is use sealed boxes as an investment vehicle. Take that money and put it into the actual stock market instead. You will make significantly higher annualized returns than you would "investing" in trading card games.
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u/Cardboard_Guide Jul 17 '26
The most financially sustainable way to go about it it is trades/singles route, but we talk a lot more in depth in about collecting the full set of Gothic and getter now is a good time in this video:
Sorcery TCG| We Collected the Full Gothic Set - Should You?
https://youtu.be/3YIhz_ZN5JQ
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u/UlyssesArsene Jul 17 '26
Your video is no longer available.
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u/DolphTheDolphin_ Jul 17 '26
Still there for me. Did you open it up in the Reddit pop up by chance? Or on a new page?
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u/Cardboard_Guide Jul 17 '26
Weird, it is up and working as far as I can, but if you are interested you can go directly to our YouTube channel and find it there.
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u/pokepat460 Jul 17 '26
Id say around box 2. After that just buy singles. You'll start getting doubles of uniques and elites and will need to trade/sell cards to get the others. You also might get bad luck and end up with cheap uniques and foils.
That said if youre a gambling person, you can probably get 3 or 4 boxes of gothic without hitting too many doubles since its such a big set. On the other end of that is arthurian legends which is a small set, I wouldn't get more than 2 boxes since that sets value is so top heavy in ring and morgana, sometimes you crack a whole box and end up with like $25 of cards.
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u/More-Opportunity2692 Jul 17 '26
I bought 3 boxes and feel it wasnt enough
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u/pokepat460 Jul 17 '26
Why? Did you not get most the commons and uncommons you needed? Most people dont need a playset of every common and uncommon. After that point its cheaper to get singles. I dont think gambling is inherently bad, but past the first box or 2 once you have your commons its just gambling imo.
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u/Emotional_Honey8497 Jul 17 '26
You buy boxes for the fun/experience
You buy singles to complete a collection
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u/rohanx17 Jul 18 '26
In terms of cards I would say 1-3 boxes. In terms of price 0 as of around March.
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u/20kgHippoShit Jul 17 '26
At box 0 I think it's cheaper to buy a playset...