The Ultimate Guide to the High Voltage: Overdrive Economy

High Voltage: Overdrive (HV:O) runs from January 12th to 19th. It's only the second time for Overdrive. The first was in June – the notorious Kid Omega event. This run is a lot more player-friendly, but that's a low bar to clear. I'll spend the rest of this article breaking down the event's economy, including how easy it'll be to claim the new card, Dragon Lord.

Fourth Location subscribers had early access to this guide. It became free when the event was 48 hours old (2pm Eastern on the 14th). If you're able to support the work that Scott and I do, I'd really appreciate if you signed up here! Simply put, your support lets me do this. Full access to early and exclusive content on the site starts at just $4 a month. 🩵

Event Structure

HV:O is taking on the same format as other recent events: a Free Pass, and Premium Pass, and a Shop where you can spend event currency (Volts) on rewards.

Dragon Lord sits at the 40% mark on the Free Pass. A chibi Dragon Lord variant by Rian Gonzalez sits as the final prize on the Premium Pass. I think it's a great idea that the exclusive Premium variant is one for the event's new card!

Event Passes

You level up the Event Passes with XP. In High Voltage, nearly all your XP will come from Missions. You get a tiny bit from winning, but that pales in comparison to Missions. In fact, you can complete the Free Event Pass without winning a single game or spending any Gold.

The Premium Event Pass costs 800 Gold and gives you 5,000 XP and 2 Neon Nights Borders upon purchase.

Here's a breakdown of the prizing on the Event Passes:

Assuming the Passes work like other events:

• If you claim a prize on one Pass, it will automatically claim the prize at the same level of the other Pass (this also means that if you have already claimed a bunch of rewards from the Free Pass when you buy the Premium, it will automatically claim the Premium rewards at the same levels)
• You can buy levels of the Pass for 100 Gold each if you have bought the Premium Pass

The first point isn't really a big deal in HV:O, since there aren't any tickets you'd want to delay collecting.

Shop

Here's a breakdown of what's available in the shop. I'll have images of the variants and emotes in the following sections (just to spread out the visual elements).

Note that buying a Portal Pull will randomly give you one of the "Portal Pull" variants you don't already have. You'll have to buy all three to guarantee getting a specific variant.

Any given Snap Pack will be unavailable to purchase if you already have every card in it.

The Shop is confirmed to stay open for 48 hours after the event ends.

Premium Pass Value

If you finish the Premium Pass, it gives you about 456 Gold's worth of progression value at the cost of 800 Gold. That gives it a 0.57x value. By "progression value", I mean anything that gets you closer to acquiring another card (treating cosmetics as having little-to-no value).

When we're strictly talking about progression value, this is quite poor. There are often bundles that can yield 1.2x or better value for your Gold.

However, that's not the whole story, of course. The Premium Pass also means two other things: speed and cosmetics.

If you want to get Dragon Lord as quickly as possible, Premium skips about two days' worth of Missions.

If you would pay 800 Gold for Chibi Dragon Lord, then of course the Premium Pass is worth it!

Shop Snap Pack Value

My 0.57x value ignores the 5,500 extra Volts that Premium gives you. Those extra Volts are important if you want event cosmetics, but there's not actually much to buy that has progression value. There are some Credits, but they're easily afforded without the Premium Pass.

The highlight is the Series 4 Snap Packs in the Shop. One Seasonal, one Collector's. These actually have pretty great value. Note that you cannot buy a Pack from the Shop if you already have every card in it.

If we did count the extra Volts from Premium going towards one of the Snap Packs, the value rockets to about 1.45x! That's high enough that I'd call it a great bundle.

However, I'm hesitant to ascribe that much value to the Premium Pass. The Series 4 Packs cost 18,000 (Collector's) and 22,000 (Seasonal) Volts. You can afford one without the Premium Pass, and then you'll need another ~10,000 Volts to afford the next one.

I'm wary of how you close that gap. Are you spending extra Gold in the Shop? Paying for Mission refreshes? Either way, it hurts the value. It would still probably be worth a bit over 1.0x (I don't have the Shop's Gold prices at time of writing), but I'm usually looking to get at least 1.2x value from my Gold.

Missions

Missions come in sets of three:

• Start with three
• Hold maximum of three
• Three refresh every eight hours

Missions can be worth 125, 250, or 500 XP + Volts. New ones refresh in that order (125, 250, 500, repeat). That means you can't just focus on the 500s and expect they'll always be replaced with another 500.

Losses are worth 0 XP + Volts. Wins are worth 20 XP + Volts. To put that in perspective, it takes 43.75 Wins to match the output of a single set of Missions.

You can pay 40 Gold per Mission to refresh them early, but the free refreshes every eight hours will be plenty for anybody who plays somewhat actively.

Event Completion Speed

Completing every free Mission requires active play since you can only hold three at a time. If you can play that actively, you'll earn 18,375 XP + Volts from Missions alone.

Here's a chart showing how many mission sets you'll need to complete, and how many extra games you'll need to win on top of that. It takes into consideration the Volts you'll earn from the Passes.

For example, it takes 6–7 full sets of missions (a little over 2 days) to get reach Dragon Lord for free. Super achievable! The Premium Pass only gives 5,000 XP, so you will have to play a bit to get Dragon Lord after buying Premium (or else spend 200 more Gold on two additional levels of the Pass).

Note that "Mission Sets" cap out at 21 because that's how many are available for free. Refreshing Missions will definitely be better for your time than grinding out hundreds of wins. I expect Mission refreshes to be the cheapest way to spend your Gold if you really want to buy more Volts, but I don't have the Shop's Gold prices at time of writing.

Note you can finish the pass with 17–18 of the available 21 free Mission sets. It's looking like a pretty chill event. Where it was nearly impossible to finish December's Team Clash Pass for free, you can finish HV:O's Pass with over a day to spare.

Planning Your Shopping

You can expect 18,375 Volts if you play actively enough to finish all 21 free Mission sets. You'll get an additional 5,500 from the Free Pass for a total of 23,875 Volts. Premium Pass buyers will get an additional 5,500 for a total of 29,375.

All that's before any Volts earned from wins. While those will represent a much smaller portion, they're not nothing.

Let's say you play eight games per refresh (AKA every eight hours). That's arbitrary, but it aligns with how much you get to play if you have a 50% win rate in a ticketed event like Sanctum Showdown or Grand Arena.

50% win rate would give you four wins per refresh. Over 21 refreshes, that's 84 wins and an additional 1,680 Volts. You'll have to estimate your own Volts from wins based on how much you play.

Personally, I enjoy High Voltage most when I challenge myself to knock out Missions in as few games as possible. It's fun building custom decks for each new set of Missions, but I don't expect to be getting very many Volts from wins.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm relieved to see High Voltage: Overdrive with a much more reasonable economy this time around. It was a low bar, but it's still nice to see. Being able to unlock an event's card for free in a third of the event's length is extremely player-friendly.

I'll be skipping the Premium Pass myself, but I wouldn't ever begrudge somebody wanting to go in on it. While the objective value is low, the subjective value of time savings or cosmetics you love is potentially massive! I also think it's super cool that the event's exclusive variant is for the new card. It's been a while since they've done that in a mode besides Grand Arena (I can't think of one since Cassandra Nova in the first Deadpool's Diner, but I could be missing one)! I know there are a bunch of people who really want to replace base art in their collection as soon as possible. The game should be monetizing cosmetics where it can!

The only thing I feel sorta mixed about are the Snap Packs in the Shop. They offer a great value, but I think they drive pretty twisted incentives. The price is pretty good objectively, but it's so high that I think players who chase the Snap Packs will have a worse event experience because of it. They either encourage players to spend almost all of their Volts on a single prize (which is less fun than being able to buy some cosmetics of your choice), or else will drive people to grind or spend a lot more just to afford the next Pack.

I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about this one. The two High Voltages are my least favorite game modes because of how vapid they feel, but I know other players love them, and it seems like SD is being pretty respectful of my time in regards to how long it'll take to get Dragon Lord.