LTGMs

Draft Economy Guide - Sep ‘26

Lauren walks you through the economy of the second run of Draft.

Draft returns, and with some pretty significant changes! That’s expected for a new mode to need some extra tuning, on both the gameplay and economy side of things. On top of that, Second Dinner has been pretty open about listening to player feedback and iterating on Draft. This guide should help you make better decisions about your resources as you engage with the mode.

Adding Sanctum-style scoring to Draft is a significant change. For strategy discussion, check out Scott's article!

Event Overview

Dates: September 28th – October 12th (with the Shop open an additional 48 hours)

Economy Key Features:

Dual prize tracks you climb with XP (Free Pass + Premium Pass)
Shop where you can buy prizes with event currency (Bits) and Gold
Prizes that scale with the number of wins you get in a run

Primary Goal: Win games

Tips & Tricks

Lots of great economy optimization tips are the same every time an event runs. I keep those in a separate article so this one can focus on what changes each time! My "recurring tips" guide is always free and has great info for each event. If you want a refresher on those tips, check out this article and read the sections with the Draft logo.

Enjoy Written Snap Content?

The rest of this guide will get into the details of the Draft economy. Fourth Location subscribers had early access to the full guide until the event was ~48 hours old.

Our articles depend on your support! If you enjoy this type of Snap content, want to see more, and have the means, please consider supporting us with a paid membership! It starts at just $4 a month. If you're already a subscriber, thank you. 🩵

Membership comes with perks like early access to event economy articles like this one and exclusive access to bonus decks for new cards and events. Ultimately, it’s about supporting Scott and I. We're able to justify the many hours this takes because it helps support our families.

Grand Prizes

The Free Pass rewards the new card, The Inversion, at 1,190 XP. It seems pretty niche, but it has some proactive uses and it’ll sometimes be worth a lot of Power – imagine when your opponent leaves something big by itself.

The Premium Pass offers this exclusive animated emote of Nico Minoru panicking. It seems pretty useful whether you prefer to use your emotes sincerely or sarcastically.

Tickets

It costs a Ticket to start a run. A run lasts until you win five games or lose two.

The more wins you get in a run, the better prizing you get. At five wins, you get your Ticket back, and that's the most valuable prize of all. More Tickets means more runs, which means more Bits and XP.

Starting: 8
Regenerating: 2 every 24 hours
Soft Cap: 12 (you cannot regenerate beyond this)
Hard Cap: 200 (you cannot have more than this)
Free Pass: 2
Login Rewards: 0
Mini Event: 6
Premium Pass: 8
—
Total Free Tickets: 42
Total Premium Tickets: 50
Single Ticket Cost: 100 Gold
Ticket Bundle Cost: 5 for 350 Gold

Mind the cap! My usual suggestion is to never collect Tickets until you want to play and have zero Tickets. That's still the safest way to go, but Ticket regen in Draft is slow enough to easily manage. Your goal should be to stay below 11 Tickets so you don't burn any.

Ticket regeneration is one place SD listened to feedback! The first Draft offered a trickle at just one Ticket per day. It’s now doubled to two, which still feels pretty slow, but it’s literally doubled. Of course, they’ve cut Tickets in other places to compensate. There aren’t any from Login Rewards and you start with two fewer.

Without buying extra Tickets with Gold, this run has two fewer Tickets total (that includes the six Tickets from Twitch Drops last time). However, this run is one day shorter (14 days instead of 15), so you actually end up with more Tickets per day. That’s a win – more tickets per day, and spreading them out a bit more.

If you really love Draft and just want to play more for fun (or daily Premium Mystery Variants), the bundle with five Tickets for 350 Gold is the way to go. You can buy it from the event Shop once every 24 hours.

Respawn Tokens

Once per run, you can get an extra life by spending a Respawn Token. In other words, those runs will last until you win five games or lose three.

Respawn Tokens
Starting: 5
Free Pass: 3
Login Rewards: 0
Premium Pass: 8
—
Total Free Respawn Tokens: 8
Total Premium Respawn Tokens: 16
Single Respawn Token Cost: 100 Gold

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows with resource changes. Respawn Tokens have taken a massive hit – dropping from 21 to eight for Free (the Premium Pass rewarded eight last time, too). That change really hurts how many successful runs you’ll be able to have without injecting more Gold.

I’m not surprised to see Respawn Tokens take a hit – they were really generous before — but I am surprised just how hard the hit was. My past advice was to spend them on any run with at least two wins. Now, my advice is to save Respawn Tokens for four-win runs.

The number in the “Win Count” column indicates the level at which you can cover 100% of those runs with Respawn Tokens. “Spare Tokens” indicates how many you’ll have left over for game overs at lower win counts. The “—” indicates you won’t have enough to cover all your runs that end with four wins.

Run Rewards

Wins grant 30 Bits and XP, losses reward 15 of each. New to this run, ties count as neither. After a tie, you’ll go back to the main Draft screen as if that game never happened. No prizes, no penalties, no new cards or upgrades to draft.

These are great changes all around. The wins and losses have doubled value – making more XP and Bits available to players who struggle to have strong runs. The change to ties is especially cool – it’s a great solution and I hope to see it applied to all Ticket-based LTGMs (where ties historically feel bad for both players).

You’ll earn additional rewards whenever a run ends, based on how many games you won.

There are just a few changes here. Credits at two–three wins were bumped from 20 to 25. Good news for anybody who hates having their resource balances sit at weird numbers. The only other change is the XP at five wins going from 1,000 to 700. For most players, this will be covered by the doubled per-game XP. Notably, the Bits aren’t reduced at all, so the doubled per-game Bits are pure increase.

I’m kinda surprised to see the daily Premium Mystery Variant return. That represents a lot of new Variants for players who play enough and are sufficiently skilled. It also represents a good reason to spread out your Tickets!

If you time it just right, you can get one extra PMV after the event ends. Have a four-win run ready to go, and then start your last game a minute before the event ends. As long as daily reset happens during your game, a win will net you one last PMV.

Passes

The Premium Pass costs 1,200 Gold and comes with the following prizes whenever you buy it:

1,200 XP
2 Draft Tickets
2 Respawn Tokens

Here's everything you can find on the Passes (with the instant rewards shown at 0 XP):

Premium Value

The Premium Pass comes in at 50% more than most events, but this is typical for events that last two weeks. It also has increased prizing to account for this, coming in right around the same value as other Premium Passes. In terms of progress value (resources to acquire your next card), this comes in at 65.12% value.

If your primary goal for your Gold is to acquire more cards, the Premium Pass is probably a bad buy.

It might be a good buy if you want to…

Get The Inversion without playing Draft
- 1,200 instant XP
Grab more cosmetics from the event
- exclusive animated emote
- 4,500 Bits to spend in the Shop
Play more Draft
- the extra Tickets and Respawn Tokens are worth 1,360 Gold alone… if you’d have bought them anyway

There could be situations where the Premium Pass could be good for progress value, like if the 4,500 extra Bits help you grab an extra Snap Pack.

Time Investment

This table shows how many runs you’ll need to play. These numbers are based on:

Whether you bought the Premium Pass
What your goal is
What your win rate is

The Premium Pass saves about three runs, whether you’re just in for The Inversion or want to complete the Pass.

The Free Tickets are plenty to complete the Pass for free. You have 42, which leaves several spare even for a player with a 35% win rate.

The Shop

Here’s everything you can spend your Bits on!

Each Portal Pull will randomly give you one of the three you haven’t already pulled.

The Doctor Strange is super cool – probably enough to get me to chase him. Major Victory’s not a very good card, but a Series 4 is a Series 4 if you’re missing him.

This Shop debuts two colors of a new Border type: Chromatic.

It seems the rotating portion of the Draft shop is keeping its 24-hour cycle. I really dislike that pace (compare the 8-hour cycle of other event Shops). I really like the rotating Variants as a bonus target. Especially once I’ve bought out all the Cosmetics I like.

Heads-up that the game will let you buy Collector’s Packs as long as you are Series-incomplete. That means that if you visit the Shop when Scarlet Witch Queen of Chaos or Zombie Venom hit Snap Packs, you’ll be able to buy the Collector’s Series 5 Pack for some extra Tokens. I expect this is a bug that will be patched someday, but as far as I know, it hasn’t been yet!

Variant Series

This can be useful info if you're missing any of these cards. When you get the Variant, you'll get the base card, too.

Card	Series
Major Victory	4
Doctor Strange	1
Medusa	1
Scarlet Witch.	1
Nebula	3
Hellcow FF	4

Shop Priorities

You need to decide how much any of the cosmetics are worth to you. If you’d like to focus on progress value, here’s what you should prioritize buying. Ellipses represent big gaps in value differences.

Hellcow FF (unowned base card)
…
Portal Pull: Major Victory (unowned base card)
…
Collector's Series 4 Pack
Collector's Series 5 Pack
Credits
…
Nebula (unowned base card)
…
Series 3 Pack
…
All other Variants

Portal Pulls: I assume two-and-a-half pulls to hit a specific prize in the Portal Pull. The average is two, but I've penalized it a bit to represent how unreliable it is – if it takes you three to get what you want, that increased cost might mess up your other plans!

Series 3 Packs: I credit them with some value – 24.19 Credits for a new gray card plus the average value of the two Pack goodies. I do not credit them with the cost of the Pack (650 Tokens) because it is better to get Series 3 cards for free from the Collection Level track. I would only suggest buying these if you have a significant surplus of Bits or you are trying to complete Series 3 as fast as possible (even if it hurts your progress towards Series 4 and 5).

Shopping with Gold

If you try buying something when you don't have enough Bits, the game lets you spend Gold to cover the gap. This is an inefficient way to spend Gold, but if you're going to do it – note that each item has its own Bits-to-Gold conversion rate (which is obnoxious at best, and I will always think it's bad that SD does it). That means there's a strategy for which items you spend Bits on vs. which items you spend Gold on. The higher Bits per 100 Gold in the purple Shop tables above, the better deal you’re getting.

Every day, you can buy five Tickets for 350 Gold. This gives you the best deal for converting Gold into Bits. At a 50% win rate, 5 Tickets are worth ~1,485 Bits. That's 424 Bits per 100 Gold, significantly higher than anything else in the Shop. Of course, you’ll need to actually play games to convert those Tickets into Bits, so it saves you Gold but costs you time.

Expected Bits and Bobs

The table below shows how many Wins, Credits, and Bits you can expect to earn over the course of the event. This is separated by whether or not you get the Premium Pass, what your win rate is, and how much you play.

“Use All Tickets” represents acquiring and spending all possible Tickets without spending any Gold (with the possible exception of the Premium Pass). Even if you don’t play that much, the table can still give you a sense of how impactful win rate and the Premium Pass are.

"Wins" give an idea of how many daily Premium Mystery Variants you can earn (if you space out your wins to one per day).

The Credits include Credits from the Passes and Run winnings, but not from the Shop. Credits are one place Draft is more generous than other events. Where most big events offer 900 total Credits, it’s very realistic to squeeze around 2,000 from Draft.

Finally, the Bits are the star of this section so you can plan your Shop purchases.

By the way, any unspent Tickets and Bits will convert to random Boosters when the Shop closes 48 hours after Draft ends. Unspent Respawn Tokens will simply vanish (boo).

Relative Pricing

The purpose of this section is to compare events to each other. The test is totally arbitrary, but it helps see how the available Tickets convert into prizes.

take the event currency you'd have by clearing every Mission and spending every Ticket, with a 50% win rate (as applicable for each event)
see how many Portal Pulls, S4 Packs, Emotes, or Credits could you buy from the event's Shop if it had unlimited stock?

I'm actually surprised by the results – I expected the massive hit to Respawn Tokens to counteract all the positives, but the doubled Bits for wins and and losses sufficiently counteract it. This Draft is right in line with last month’s, which means it’s handing out significantly more prizing than other recent events.

Fewer Respawn Tokens still translate to fewer Wins, PMVs, and Credits… but the Bits are okay!

Conclusion

Modern Snap events are really consistent, and that’s the case here, even with a bunch of tweaks to the economy balance! Draft remains quite generous relative to other events, even if you don’t win a single daily PMV.

The economy balance tweaks are in the general direction I expected and would have recommended – make it easier for casual players to accrue Bits and make it harder to win Credits and PMVs. The key changes being doubled XP and Bits for every game, but a dramatic cut in Respawn Tokens.

The gutting of Respawn Tokens is rough, and might be the single biggest impact to how Draft feels. Having to adjust my guidance from spending them on runs with 2+ wins to runs with 4+ wins is a significant change! The players who brought in a bunch of PMVs last time will find it

Basically, the range of outputs has been compressed. Compared to August’s Draft, the player at the 10th percentile will end up with more prizing and the player at the 90th percentile will end up with less.

I’m honestly surprised to see PMVs remain, but I appreciate how special they make winning runs feel. I’m also surprised that a Series 5 Pack is still present in the Shop. I just expected that the first run of Draft was extra stacked to celebrate the new mode, and that future runs would gradually fall back in line with other events. That may still be the long-term plan, but we’re not seeing it implemented yet.

I normally skip Premium Passes to save Gold for other things, but I’ll be buying this one. I ended up buying 20–30 extra Tickets last time, so the extra Tickets and Respawn Tokens alone will be worth it to me. I was chasing daily PMVs last time, but ultimately I just think Draft is fun and want to play more than the free Tickets allow. I’d much rather spend 1,200 Gold on 17 extra Draft runs than a Super Rare Variant.

Overall, Draft is among the best of events. Its gameplay offers unique fun and its economy is generous and fair. There’s still room to improve, but it’s nothing dire. These might be pipe dreams, but I’d love to see Tickets phased out of events altogether and the Gold conversion rates in shops standardized across every item.

Finally, here’s my reminder to check out Scott’s article covering the strategy side of Draft.

Come chat with us and other readers in the Fourth Location Discord server!

Special thanks to SnapComplete for providing our blue-bordered card art. Additionally, their data mines are critical for filling in certain economy details in a timely manner. Please go support them!