The Ultimate Guide to the High Voltage Economy
Lauren walks through the economy of this weekend's cosmetics-only High Voltage.
So… surprise High Voltage! It's a mini event. A so-called "Weekend Edition". It runs for just 3 days and the prizes are all cosmetics.
A small-scale event with small-scale prizes deserves a small-scale guide.
Format
The format is the same as usual. There's a progress bar that fills as you earn Volts. You can play as many matches as you want for free — one thing I really like about High Voltage. Instead, there's a different bottleneck.
Missions
Wins earn you only 20 volts (and you get nothing for losses). Missions are by far the best way to bring in Volts — you'll refresh three of them every eight hours, and a full set is worth 875 Volts. That's the equivalent of nearly 44 wins!
You can only hold three missions at a time, so you'll have to play frequently to make room for refreshes. If you're trying to optimize your Volts-per-minute, you'll knock out the three missions as quickly as possible, then wait for the next refresh.
I struggle to just play High Voltage for fun. The combination of the gameplay and minimal rewards for wins just makes it feel pretty empty. That said, I do actually find a lot of fun in building a new deck every eight hours that's designed to knock out all three missions at once.
You can refresh missions for 100 Gold apiece, but I'm not sure if any of the prizes justify that price. Regardless of how you get new missions (whether Gold or patience), they will always regenerate in order: 125, 250, 500, repeat. That means if you finish only one mission in a set, there's no guarantee it will be replaced with a new mission of the same level.
Prizing
Here's what you can earn by reaching certain milestones for total Volts earned during the event:
| Volts | Reward |
|---|---|
| 500 | 1 Metal Chains Border |
| 1,000 | 1 Mystery Variant |
| 2,000 | 1 Neon Nights Border |
| 4,000 | 2 Premium Mystery Borders |
| 6,000 | 1 Premium Mystery Variant |
| 12,000 | 2 Premium Mystery Borders |
Income
Now there's addressing what you can realistically expect to achieve.
If you're clearing every possible free mission, that'll only be nine sets. Those would be worth 7,875 Volts on their own.
Most missions only take about three games to finish, but some can take much longer – such as those that ask you to spend lots of Energy or to win all three locations. Let's say each set takes your four games and you rock a 50% win rate. That's 18 more wins, worth 360 Volts.
In other words, knocking out missions only will land you right around 8,235 Volts. Well past the Premium Mystery Variant (which seems like the grand prize), but quite short of the extra Premium Mystery Borders. You'd have to win 189 more times in just three days.
On the other hand, you could reach the Premium Mystery Variant with only seven full mission sets, no win required.
Conclusion
It seems fine for a mini-event. There's nothing as important as a card on the line, so I'd only recommend playing if you love playing High Voltage, or would play 20–30 games to earn a Premium Mystery Variant.
Don't forget to check out Scott's article if you wanna quickly grab a High Voltage deck or two!
Scosco
