Hours to Earn an Average Professional Deck in Hearthstone Read More on Numbers

This week, Blizzard released the list of the 32 players that qualified for the next phase of the Hearthstone World Championship. Obviously these players got to where they are based on both their skill and the quality of their deck, but what would it take for most players to build these kinds of decks? Thanks to the site Dollars to Dust, that's not too hard to calculate.

For my results I took the most recent know decklist of each player, ran them through the Dollars to Dust to figure up total cost and packs you'd need to buy. Then I averaged those out and figured up how many matches you'd have to play and win to earn enough gold.

All told, you'd need a minimum of 272.4 hours – that's assuming you win basically every game and hit the maximum gold every day. Most player's will be a bit less lucky, however. If we lower the win rate to 60% and use 8 minute games – which is closer to the average – then we're looking at 6.4 hours to earn 100 gold. The average professional deck will take 68 packs to build (which is helped by the fact that you can always disenchant cards to get dust). Multiplying those two numbers gives us 435.2 hours, or more than 18 solid days of play.

If you're thinking of kicking in some of your own cash to help that along, you'd need to spend an average of $90.58 to get a professional-level deck. Damn. Well better get started.

You're reading Numbers, a blog on Kotaku that examines games and culture through the lens of math and statistics. To contact the author of this post, write to dancstarkey@gmail.com or find him on Twitter @dcstarkey.