How many licks to get to the center of a champed 5* Thor...

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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1

stats updated for 10,000 pulls

I’m a fully entrenched 4* player, thinking about my MPQ future, and I started wondering…what would it take for me to get a champed 5* Thor? Aside from perhaps Okoye (or maybe Thanos?) he seems the most important for the transition. So I started crunching the numbers and running the simulations.

For those of you with short attention spans, the answer (if I was starting from scratch) is around 1,236 Classic pulls or 24,720 CP to have a 50/50 chance of fully covering him (math below). Of course, I could always get lucky. But this is one of my biggest challenges with this game (which I do overall enjoy immensely): I’m going to be a 4* player for a very, very, very long time, or at least until they release a new meta-defining 5* at a time when I have enough tokens and CP to fully cover them pulling from the latest vault.

I guess this is why I see so many complaints about dilution?

Read on if you’re a stat geek. Otherwise feel free to post a comment!

Assumptions:

  1. The only way I will get Thor covers is by pulling Classic Tokens. For simplicity I am ignoring other ways to get covers (e.g. special stores with increased odds, Valkyrie champ rewards, heroes for hire, etc.)
  2. I have Thor set as my only 5* bonus hero
  3. I am ignoring bank conversions (i.e. my Thor is at 2/5/5 with 3 saved covers and I convert my 3 saved to the 1 color I need)
  4. I am ignoring that as other 5* characters get released into the classic vault, the chances of pulling a random Thor get worse and worse

The odds:
There’s a 1/7 chance of pulling a random 5*
Thor is 1/27 (once Loki rotates in) 5* characters in Classics
There’s a 1/20 chance of pulling a bonus hero

Putting it together:
There’s a 1/7 * 1/27 * 1/20 = 0.0265% chance of pulling a Thor and getting a bonus Thor (2 covers in 1 pull–jackpot!)
There’s a 1/7 * 1/27 * 19/20 = 0.5026% chance of pulling a Thor and not getting a bonus
There’s a 1/7 * 26/27 * 1/20 = 0.6878% chance of pulling a different 5* but getting a bonus Thor
And the remaining 98.7831% of the time, I’m a Thor loser.

The results:
I ran 10,000 simulations, and on average it took 1,236 pulls to fully cover a Thor, assuming I was starting from scratch.
The best result in that data set was 271 pulls.
The worst result was 3,930

Thankfully, I’m not starting from scratch, as my Thor is already at 2/0/0. So I ran those 10,000 simulations again, with my actual starting point. This time it only took on average 1,102 pulls to fully cover my Thor.
The best result was 229 pulls.
The worst result was 3,659

2

1165 pulls is only 23.3k cp. which is only 932lt pulls. There are quite a few people who dedicate that number of pulls to turbocharged a lastest 5*. It’s not unheard of at all.

3

Time to bonus hero the hell out of your Valkyrie.

4

The world may never know…

5

Trying to attempt to cover a classic from scratch is probably one of the worst strategy though. You’ll have better luck waiting for a special store that includes Thor. Bonus hero Valkyrie while you save up your cp and if you managed to add 6 to your 2, then you are more than half way there when he appears in a special store.

6

First, Kitty and Rocket are already an alternative to the meta (although you’ll use more health packs than Thorkoye).

If that’s not your taste…I dunno. There will, I’m sure, be some options for a new meta eventually.

Thor was just featured in the Loki store a few months ago, so there’s probably a wait until that happens again.

Oh, I hope that you have 250CP on hand for the H5H next week. Thor might be one of the few I’d say buy any color you can when it comes up twice a year, especially if you’re starting from 2 covers.

Ultimately though, you are in the long process of building up your 4’s and that should be your focus for now, anyway.

7

Using that same math, there are 69 (not including limited heroes, ones that are currently not in tokens, or future releases) four stars. Setting her as the bonus hero:

Chance of a double Valkyrie: 6/71/691/20 : 0.06211% (Depressed yet?)
Chance of a single, non-bonus Val: 6/71/6919/20: 1.1801%
Chance of a single, bonus Val: 6/768/691/20: 4.2236%

Chance of a single Val per classic token = 5.4037%, with a 1-in-1,610 chance of the 2xVal cover.

Assuming no Valkyrie at the start, you will need 113 covers (and a bunch of ISO, again assumed) to get her fully max-champed. That would take, on average, about 2,073 pulls to get 113 covers for her, assuming an average of one token that gives you a double-cover. So you probably won’t get all of the covers you need while getting Thor, but it should certainly help shorten the wait.

It’s nice to run these numbers every once in a while to set yourself a goal, but bluewolf got it right. Building up the four stars is going to take a while. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the non-Thorkoye metagame.

8

Or they could do something crazy like fix dilution so people that want Valkyrie could target her much easier. Introduce custom packs that is latest 12 plus 4 personally selected 4s along with two or three 5s and one personally selected 5*.

9

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/73515/legendary-token-pdf-generator-tools#latest

This is is a great tool, that I just discovered, for these kind of simulations. I used it to see the range of pulls needed to cover my 1/5/5 Thanos (then pulled a black on my very first pull and flipped!).

I like that you can play with the odds if you choose to convert saved covers versus if you don’t. Also if you set the character as a bonus versus if you don’t. You can also set the dilution to your liking as well.

For example, with bonus heroes but without exchanging, I need 25-125 pulls to finish Kitty and 170 pulls for a 95% success rate.

If youre chasing someone I definitely suggest it. Shout out to Hadronic!

10

Don’t get hung up on Thor. Yeah, he’s great, but he’s unobtainable for most. Same goes for Okoye and JJ. Look for alternatives in Latest. You can enter 5* land much, much sooner by looking for good combos among the Latest 5s. You could also hoard for New Release stores that have Classic 5s, but that will take a lot of CP (and your LTs can’t help you).

11

I don’t see that factored in. Every 100 pulls should be 5x 4* BH. 1000 pulls would be 50 Vals.

Probably get 2 or 3 Thors just from Val’s rewards. All depends on how many you pull.

This game has a lot of walls. First it’s HP, then ISO, then 5* covers.

12

But do you recall…

the greatest wall of them all…

R
N
G
Dilution is a close second and a very good friend of RNG.

13

By the way, what would you all think if they ditched the theme stores for new releases and followed some form of rotation. Personally I like the themes, but in a game that makes it near impossible to cover classics, a rotation would be very helpful for players. If I know for a fact Thor’s rotation is in say 4 months, then I can plan accordingly. Or if I really like Dr. Strange and know he’ll be up 5 releases from now.

14

LOL, well played, well played…

The combo of those 2 is pretty rough.

I like what they do with new releases and a store. Just wish it either lasted longer or was rotated each month.

15

First, I’m disappointed this thread is not strategies to widdle down Thor to 50% before you nuke him.

Second, abandon all hope of completing classics via classic tokens, it’s completely illogical, flied in the face of any proper statistics.

I largely agree with the others, Thor will be replaced by a new meta carrot. If that doesn’t happen soon enough for you, your best bet to cover Thor is to hoard CP until he appears in a special vault e.g new release or themed event. Then you can use the standard ~300 stats

16

This was kinda the crux of the vaulting debate. Pro vaulting: you can cover 4*s faster. Anti-vaulting: you can’t cover old characters. The way to deal with it is the same, accept that you can’t get the old ones and just try to get the new ones.

I did recently champ Phoenix, OML, and got Green Goblin and Thanos to 12 covers. I don’t know how and where I got those covers, but I am pretty sure I did not make good progress on them when they were in Latests (or whatever the system was at the time). I think its a combination of Gambit sell tokens, themed store tokens, daily resupply, feeders, and I guess just a long time in classics. I guess my point is, it can happen eventually, but don’t count on it. I have plenty of old 5*s that aren’t close

17

It would ve great if they did this, but there are two slight possible problems.

First, i dont think they want us to have that much control over our pulls. Rng over our pulls, and rng over BH may only be as far as they are willing to go.

Second is the coding. Considering how much trouble they have with legacy codes, I’m not sure they could even introduce a token that is customizable for every single player.

Unless…i guess they could just create a new token, and a new type of Bonus Hero. Make it a different color from the red for normal BH, and set it to only trigger when you pull from that store. The other stipulation being that you could only open the token if you have at least “X” number of characters with that new BH. Like 12, or maybe even 20. Then, when you pull from there, all you get is one of those specific characters, and no other.

Ok, so it is possible now that i think of it, but still unlikely

18

I updated the model to account for my Valkyrie and the potential 6 additional Thor covers. I did not factor in champing her twice.

Recall from the original 10,000 simulations, with my Thor at 2/0/0, it took:
min: 229
average: 1,102
max: 3,659

If I also make Valk my one and only 4* bonus hero, as she is starting at level 275, my 2/0/0 Thor gets to full coverage in:
min: 225
average: 639
max: 1,260

Same assumptions as before apply–in this case, I’m also assuming no additional 4* characters get into classic packs which we know isn’t realistic, so this is

So it does cut the time to champ down by 25%.

19

You’d do much better if you waited until Thor was in one of the new 5-star vaults. You’re limited by the CP you have, but at least then you’d have a 30% chance of getting one of his covers when you pulled a 5-star.

I need one more cover to champion my Thor. I’ve got Valk set as my 4-star BH, but need six more Valk covers to get the Thor cover I need. I won’t have a chance at it until Kitty rotates out and I make my next stab at latest to try to finish Cable & Kingpin, plus pick up the new 5-star.

20

Alternatively, you could take a lot of the randomness out of the equation by upgrading the powers with CP, once you get a red & yellow. Assuming you just pulled those 2 covers & you already have 2 green, that means 9720 for 6,480cp. HFH, Valkyrie & bonus pulls cut that down quite a bit. Not the most wise use of the CP for the rest of the 4 you won’t pull, but for the specific purpose of covering Thor it’s significantly more cost effective than 23,000+ CP for rng.