Statistics... WITH A VENGEANCE!

Hello, Meerkat here, doing more maths as an attempt to procrastinate doing other, less appealing maths. After Shattered Timelines came out, I calculated the total number of possible different games (it was 71,466,240), and now we have NEW THINGS I'm going to do it again.

So, let's start with sets of 5 heroes. We now have 23 different hero decks, so that's 23C5 = 33649 teams, to start with. Now we need to take our 18 promo heroes into account, so we have 18 x 22C4 = 131670 teams with one promo, 18C2 x 21C3 = 203490 teams with two, 18C3 x 20C2 = 155040 with 3, 18C4 x 19 = 58140 with 4 and 18C5 = 8568 with 5. Add those up, we get 556908. The only problem is, this includes teams that have two of the same hero (Legacy, Bunker or Wraith); we need to subtract 3 x 21C3 + 3 x 16 x 20C2 + 3 x 16C2 x 19 + 3 x 16C3 = 21630 bad pairs - but even this takes out those pairs with two duplicate heroes twice, so we add back 3C2 x (14 + 19) = 99, giving us a grand total of 535377 five-hero teams.

Right, four-hero teams now. Similar procedure, 23C4 + 18 x 22C3 + 18C2 x 21C2 + 18C3 x 20 + 18C4 = 8855 + 27720 + 32130 + 16320 + 3060 = 88085, minus 3 x 21C2 + 3 x 16 x 20 + 3 x 16C2 = 1950, plus 3C2 = 3, equals 86138 teams of four. For three-hero teams, 23C3 + 18 x 22C2 + 18C2 x 21 + 18C3 - 3 X (16 + 21) = 9847 three-man teams. Total these up, you get 631362 hero teams.

Environments are still easy; there are 14 of them, along with 22 regular villains and two difficulty settings; 631362 x 2 x 22 x 14 = 388918992 games not against the Vengeful Five. Against them, a five-man band can play against them on two difficulties in fourteen different environments, for 14990556 games, a quartet can play against 5 different arrangements of them for a total of 12059320, and a three-piece suite can take on ten different Vengeful Threes, for 2757160 games.

Total number of deck combinations? 418,726,028. Which is a lot.

Tweeted.

Thank you! I might have succumbed to the temptation to calculate this for myself if you hadn't posted these.

Gotta play them all.

We'd better get started then. Those permutations won't play themselves!

The critical question: Since turn order can matter (a lot) should we also calculate for all possible turn orders?

Awesome. I think I may only be 1/1000 of the way there...

Just had the thought that if you really wanted to stress test your calculator's overflow buffer, you should also take into account the number of possible orders the cards in each deck could be in.