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Comment by sturmeh | Hacker News Reader

The cost and effort of printing duel decks is never going to be less than just buying the product.

Eh, that's only true if you are cash rich and time poor. A booster box with 36 booster packs costs ~$100. At 15 cards per pack, that's 540 cards per box. The latest set has 249 cards, so a box will probably get you close to 2 of each card. But to be guaranteed to have all the cards you want, you may need to buy a second booster box and do some trading/purchasing of individual cards. Total cost is at minimum ~5¢ per card.

But I can also just print 6 cards per page from my black and white laser printer at a cost of up to 8¢ per page, or about 1.3¢ per resulting card (plus cutting them out with scissors). And, this doesn't require an upfront payment of $150+.

So no, I would not say the cost of just buying the product is lower.

It's even worse if you consider rarity. A pack has one slot for rare cards, three slots for uncommon, etc. 1/8 of the time the rare card will be a "mythic rare". The latest set has 53 rares and 15 mythic rares, so the chance of having even one copy of a particular rare card in your box is 1-(1-1/53×7/8)^36 or 45%. For mythic rares the probability is only 1-(1-1/15×1/8)^36 or 26% that you'll even have one copy. Then consider the number of times you'll want a "playset" of a card, which means four copies.

The only sane options I can see are:

* Play limited formats

* Play casual with proxies

* Buy individual cards

Parent was referring to duel decks, which are a specific product. I agree with them: proxying a $10 deck is generally a waste of your time.

I don't think he meant the duel deck product, I think he just meant two decks to duel with.

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