Lottery or random chance, I think, will leave a bad taste for most people. If you went with the prize being "a chance to buy" you would end up with massive complication when someone "wins" but doesn't have the money to pay for the thing. If you go with charging people to enter and the prize being "the thing for free" then you need to very carefully work out how many entries you might need to cover costs, and if you don't get that you'd have to scramble for alternatives, leaving complication of refunds and upset people.
Well, just how expensive is it to produce these things? Is it the kind of expense that could be used as a loss leader to bring in additional sales? Because if you can, that's really a good way to both boost your deck sales while at the same time removing much of the eBay mindset and allowing people whose pockets aren't very deep or were for exigent, uncontrollable reasons unable to complete a purchase quickly enough (or at all) a shot at winning a VERY rare item.
For the record, in case this hasn't been mentioned, I think the way the Blue Crown released the Gold Crowns is definitely the way to go on anything limited edition.
I agree that was awesome, you have to sign up to be in on it and everyoe has different times avoiding a crash and they can for exacally how many people will be logging on so there will be o crash.That is possibly the best way to go.
Well, they could do that because they had hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of the item in question to be sold. What happens when you only have twenty-five? The windows would be insanely tiny, and it becomes again a case of the fastest click-n-buy wins. Those Gold Crowns were still on the site hours later during my window, while these cases wouldn't last a minute.
C'mon, guys... Who hasn't bought at least one lottery ticket when the jackpot gets high enough? I suspect that the majority of winners didn't buy more than a handful of tickets - and because of the huge pool of ticket buyers they were in and the massive number of tickets sold, they still had far worse chances of winning that prize than if someone bought only a single deck for a single shot at winning a case. But they still managed to win, despite the odds, for the simple reason that SOMEONE has to win (twenty-five "someones" in this case) in this type of drawing, and unless you obtain a very significant portion of all the chances available, your odds won't improve enough to make a great-enough statistical difference between buying a deck, a half-brick or a brick.
I'm going to try a little math on the fly here...
Let's assume that there's a drawing for the cases, which are presented for free to the winners. There's 25 cases, and 5,000 potential entries (each being a deck of cards). If the print run is 2,500, just double each of my conclusions regarding odds of winning. I will further assume that the deck will be a sellout, and that the decks sold each represent a single chance of winning any of the twenty-five cases.
1 deck - 1:200
A half-brick - 1:33.33
A full brick - 1:16.67
Two bricks - 1:8.33
Translating those numbers into percentage values gives us:
1 deck - 0.5%
Half-brick - 3%
Full brick - 6%
Two bricks - 12%
These numbers are NOT massive game changers. The guy buying two bricks and holding his breath that he'll win stands a chance of only less than one out of eight. If a surgeon offered me an expensive, experimental surgery that only stood a 12% chance of success, I'd be VERY leery of taking that chance unless I faced certain death otherwise. You'd need to buy EIGHT BRICKS to have just below a 50-50 chance, while somewhere between SIXTEEN and SEVENTEEN bricks would give you a near-certain chance. Sure, a deep-pocketed person could go ahead and buy over two-hundred decks, but that's certain to be the exception rather than the rule, and that's a lot of paper to buy just for a near-solid chance of winning. Even if by miracle they were discounted to merely $5 a pack, that's over $1,000.
And don't forget: this assumes that EVERY DECK sold will be part of the drawing. Odds do improve if fewer people are in the pool to win a deck, but you'd still need to buy a sizable percentage of the decks sold if you wanted to insure victory, and the chances of someone having that much disposable income just to win an attractive plastic display case just aren't that high - and it still gives him only a single case if there's a stipulation of only one case per winner. Someone buying two-hundred decks who wins once takes 199 other chances of him winning out of the running. When you factor that in, the odds for small-quantity buyers improve and the one-deck buyer actually gets a fairly decent if long-shot chance of winning something.
tl:dr
In short, in a lottery-style drawing, no one is statistically "guaranteed" to win a thing unless they corner a significant chunk of the market for Aurum decks, giving even small purchases a fair chance. To paraphrase from an old tagline from the New York Lottery, "all it takes is a deck and a dream..."
