Conditional Bundle Changes

A few seasons after Spotlight Caches were replaced with Snap Packs, Spotlight Variants were replaced by a different sort of exclusive Variant. These come in "Conditional Bundles". The condition? Acquiring the new card in its first week.

Second Dinner has been experimenting with Conditional Bundles ever since. These tests started with multiple pricing tiers. More recently, they've tested re-running the bundles in the web shop.

Today, they announced an update on the Conditional Bundles.

Going Forward

In-Game

The in-game bundles are being increased by $10 to $29.99, and 5,000 Credits are being added. That means you'll get:

• Exclusive Variant and Avatar
• 465 Boosters for the card
• 1 Premium Mystery Border
• 5,000 Credits

These show up when you acquire a card within its first week of availability. They'll last for 48 hours.

It's worth highlighting these are now labeled as "Special Offer" rather than indicating any exclusivity.

Additionally, you can also buy these in the web shop. It's just that the next bundle type we're talking about is exclusive to the web shop.

Web Shop

These are officially not an experiment anymore. They'll continue to ship at $49.99 with the usual contents:

• Exclusive Variant and Avatar
• 465 Boosters for the card
• 1 White Fire Border
• 8,000 Credits

Nothing in today's announcement indicated how long they'll last, but data mines indicate it'll be 5 days.

These will be offered about a month after a card's release, with varied timing depending on the length of Seasons.

Besides officially declaring these here-to-stay, there is one other change. The web shop bundles will now be offered to all players, even those who don't own the base card.

"Special Offer" Value

Adding 5,000 Credits to the in-app offer and a base card to the web shop offer really changes the value proposition.

The announcement said these changes aim to "create a clearer choice."

Players seeking the best value should purchase early, while the re-run remains a strong option for players who missed the initial window.

Let's go over the history of these exclusive Variants, and compare their value. I'll be using progress value – how close a bundle gets you to acquiring another card.

Ultimately, when we're talking about cosmetics, their value is subjective. It's up to you to decide how much money a specific Variant is worth to you.

Variant Value

Without getting too deep into the math, a Variant's objective value is just under 25 Credits (about 24.2). That's all.

This value is due to the fact that new Variants come at with the gray Common border. They're primed for the upgrade to green Uncommon – which offers CL at half price (1 for 25 Credits).

Spotlights

These are the most complicated ones, promise. I'm going to simplify the math by treating the player as more-or-less collection-complete.

Spotlight Variants cost 2.5 Keys on average. You also had a 50% chance of rolling a dupe before your target Variant. Dupes converted to 2,000 Tokens.

Converting that to the modern economy, Spotlight Variants had a net cost of 7,000 Tokens.

Spotlights After Spotlights

For the first few months of Snap Packs, Spotlight Variants released directly to the Gold Shop. These cost 2,400 Gold (and did require that you owned the base card).

Additionally, old Spotlight Variants were added to the Token Shop for 3,500 Tokens.

A/B/C Testing

Players would be offered only one of three different bundles, per card.

$9.99

• Exclusive Variant and Avatar
• 155 Boosters for the card

$14.99

• Exclusive Variant and Avatar
• 310 Boosters for the card

$19.99

• Exclusive Variant and Avatar
• 465 Boosters for the card
• 1 Premium Mystery Border

The $20 bundle would eventually become the only one.

Web Reruns

Early on, these came with different contents, but pretty quickly settled on the modern prize set

$49.99

• Exclusive Variant and Avatar
• 465 Boosters for the card
• 1 White Fire Border
• 8,000 Credits

Once we get to comparing all the values, we need to consider that players who skipped the card will now be able to purchase the web shop bundle to get the usual prizes plus the base card.

New In-App

Finally, we get to today's update to the in-app bundles.

$30

• Exclusive Variant and Avatar
• 465 Boosters for the card
• 1 Premium Mystery Border
• 5,000 Credits

Value Comparison

Here's the full comparison of progress value for the various ways we've had to acquire these special Variants.

The early options had such low value I had to go to three decimal places!

The addition of Credits makes a massive difference. 1.6x value is decent for a cash bundle. You can definitely do better, but it's up there (and dramatically better than than previous options).

It's also true that $30 and $50 are just higher costs. So while you'll now get more bang-for-buck, your total cost will be higher. That might be a bummer if all you care about is the Variants themselves, but I imagine most players who were buying the $20 Conditional Bundles will be happy for the extra Credits to spend on Splits.

Even so, SD could have added some Credits to the $20 bundle without raising its price – or even lowered the price! Say, 3,000 Credits in a $20 version or 1,500 and drop the price for $10. Something like that would have been easier to call a definite win all around.

It's a weird situation for players who were already buying the $20 bundles. Considering they value the Variants at about $20 (there's hardly anything else in those bundles), they're sorta getting 5,000 Credits for $10. That's a 5x value, which is excellent, but I've already seen several on social media saying they wouldn't buy that. Meaning this is just being perceived as extra cost.

SD's right that going for the early, in-app bundle is the better option. That is, unless you're missing the base card. At 3.5x value, the web shop bundles with a base card are among the best values in the game. Basically the only things that beat it are the Gold Pass (4.5x) and Season Passes (11.2–12.4x).

Conclusion

This seems like a good change overall. At the very least, I appreciate the commitment to consistency with these bundles. The massively increased value seems like a clear win on the surface, but the reality is it just feels like extra cost to some players. It's nice that the first-week bundle clears the web store exclusive bundle in value. While that should help early investors feel better about their purchases, I'm not sure it will balance out the downsides of higher cost and lower Variant exclusivity.