Regular or Gold foil... Which one to choose?

Let's be honest, who doesn't like gold foil cards? Well, sometimes it's worth to buy a gold foil card instead of a regular one.

First thing you should remember is, you will NEVER finish your deck. You will always want better and better cards. So if right now you are thinking like "Ok I have this amount to spend, I will buy low BCX cards to finish my deck", remember that you will need to level up those cards in the future. So, if you need two cards and you can only afford one, choose the one with the higher rental price, and rent the other!

I made a list of a few aspects you need to have in consideration when choosing a card that will help you to make the right choice! Let's get into it! 😁
(I will not be talking about purchasing a card to rent or resell.)

Rental Price

Well, if you use PeakMonsters you can skip this step xD

You should always look at both regular and gold foil cards. Sometimes the gold foil is actually cheaper than the regular foil card. This happens because the gold foil card is just cheaper... Or because the regular one has more BCX than the required for its level.

If we want a level 3 card, the card just needs to have 14 BCX.
Here are the rental prices I'm having right now for this card.

As you can see, the gold card is cheaper. And you can see that the regular level 3 cards have 29 BCX, and you just need 14. So you are basically paying the doubled amount. Well, but even if the card had only 14 BCX the regular one would still be cheaper though. 😉

Purchase Price

If you are thinking about buying a card, keep in mind that it might be worth to rent a card instead of bying it, and vice-versa. Some cards have the same sell price, but a lot different rental prices. So you need to choose carefully between the cards you are looking for.

Level

Now, the level might be a bit tricky, because if your goal is to go up in the leagues you will constantly need to level up your cards.
Let's take a look at General Sloan.

If you are newbie, than you would be looking for a level 1 card and paying $ 1.65 for the regular foil. But then you will reach silver, gold, and be leveling up the card to level 2, 3, 4...

So let's say we want a level 3 card right now. We can either buy a 14 BCX regular, or 2 BCX gold.
Regular level 3 price = 14 * $1.75 = $24.5
Gold level 3 price = 2 * $13 = $26

The gold card is almost the same price as the regular. In this case, it's obvious that you should buy the gold card. You even get +720 power, and +10% bonus Reward Points.
You may see a reason for you to buy the regular card, that I may not be seeing, but make sure to think well enough and be good at mathematics! 🤣

Power

If you want to increase your rank you will need power. At the moment you can rent power for pretty cheap, but sometimes you may forget and when you look at your rank, you get scared. 😱
So it's always good to have a good self collection power.

Gold cards are here to increase the power of your deck! 😎 Gold cards give a lot more power than regular ones. And it's some power that you will never need to worry about again.

Remuneration

If you are going hardcore on your daily chests, you really need to maximize your gains. The best way is to play with gold cards. These cards increase your Reward Points by 10%.
By now everybody knows this formula:

Let's say your rating is 1100, and you are going to start a session with 100% ECR and play until 75%.
If you win and lose alternatively, without focus you will get around 15k Reward Points.
If you play with a gold foil card insted, you would get around 16.5k RP.
Now if you played with gold cards only, you would get around 24k RP.
Remember that these results are very inaccurate, and you also get bonus for winning streaks, guild, focus, cards used, etc.

Here is a simple way for you to mess around with the formula.

rating = 1100
ecr = 0.75
gold_cards = 5
extra_bonus = 0.1

((rating ^ 3 / 1000) * ecr * (1 + bonus + gold_cards * 0.1)) / 1000
= 1,597.2

To get the same results I got before, all you need to do is to get the result for 100% ECR, and for 75% lik this:

max_ecr_rp = 2100
low_ecr_rp = 1600

total_rp = (max_ecr_rp + low_ecr_rp) / 2 * 13
= 24,050

Again, this is supposing you win, lose, win, lose alternatively so your rating is not going to change very much.

Conclusion

If your main objective is to get a lot of chests, I can say that the gold cards will increse the amount of RP you are getting by 40-60%. So go for them if their price is not much higher than the regular card.

If you want to build a deck, you are probably not ready for gold cards yet. Take it easy, but always pay attention to their price. As I said before, sometimes they are cheaper. 👀

You also need to take into consideration tournaments and brawl frays. Some of them are gold foil only.

Thank you for your time, enjoy the game! 😁