Are Big Contracts worth it?

One of the cellphone games I play is "Big Win Hockey", and I recently had to debate whether or not to use Big Bucks to buy Big Contracts.

Typically I play with a two-squad system: I have my Platinum Team (with occasional upgrades to Superstar players, and occasional downgrades of Gold players), and then my Bronze Team (with occasional upgrades to Silver players, and occasionally Platinum players on expired contracts currently sitting out while a Gold player gets "burned up", but its not really an upgrade).

Recently I actually dropped the 50 Big Bucks it takes to buy a pack of five "Big Contracts". But is it a good idea and worth your money? It all boils down to whether or not the "Big Contracts" give you more play time or not. For that, we need to know the average contract size, which...we don't.

Instead we'll have to do some guesstimating. Having only obtained one pack, I don't know a standard distribution or anything, but my highest was 63 games and most of them were 50-53 games. Now let's compare with non-premium contracts. I like to have at least 30 games for each renewal, sometimes I'll get 37 or 39 game cards as well, so this average is a little more flexible: it can be as high or low as I want.

Since bronze game packs only cost coins, not bucks, and coins are basically infinite (you can watch free videos to get 300 coins, or two bronze packs), you could in theory sell all cards that aren't 35-game or up and keep bronze packing it until you get there. But let's say you just want in the 30s, and that your average card would be 32 games.

Each of your six players gets six contracts (5 renewals), so every renewal at a 32 games per contract average would occur after your player plays 192 games. After 192 games, you have to use a "Fountain of Life" (cost: 50 bucks) to get your player back. So that's 50 bucks every 192 games, or 0.2604 bucks/player/game. (We could multiply by 6: your team costs 1.56 bucks/game, but we're just comparing anyways).

Now instead imagine you buy Big Contracts. Each pack only gives 5 contracts, so in other words your one player will completely consume one pack (this is why we don't need to multiply by 6). I'm going to put an estimate of 55 games per contract card on average: if anybody has more experience please note it in the comments. At this rate, your player will manage 330 games before using up the final contract. However, you will have to spend 50 Big Bucks on the contracts plus 50 Big Bucks on the renewal. That's 100 Big Bucks every 330 games, for a Bucks/player/game ratio of 0.303. That's 1.8 Bucks/game for your team. In other words, it's not worth the money.

At 64 games/contract, the bucks/player/game ratio matches the "el cheapo" scenario. Relatively obviously, in our simplistic analysis the games/contract has to be double. It's not true: the first contract after a renewal is 55 games, so at 32 games/contract we get 215 games, not 192. At a 55-game average for the Big Contract card we stay at 330 games, but it doesn't make Big Contracts a better bet. In fact, it makes it worse.

If your team averages 32 game contracts, Big Contracts only pay off if you get an average of 75 game contracts, which you definitely don't.

In fact, I'm not sure offhand if 75 game contracts are even found: I think 72 is the largest I've ever seen. So in the final analysis, you're better off sticking to the "free" contacts you get in coin-purchased packs^† then you are wasting your Big Bucks. The only platinum contracts you should ever hold are the ones you get as a consolation prize when trying to get a Superstar player.

^† Bronze packs, by the way, destroy silver packs. Quite often silver packs don't contain any actual silver cards, and never more than two: unless you're really interested in fielding an all-silver team, take my advice and ignore Dan the Puckgamer.