Source of: Where to get heroes: summons, cost and the cap

← Where to get heroes: summons, cost and the cap

**A hero** unlocks for 10 of their own shards, and the shards keep their value afterwards: the
same currency goes into stars, and past maximum stars into [[hero-honor|honor levels]]. A stock
of the right shards is therefore never wasted, and the question this page answers is where that
stock comes from most cheaply.

## Summoning

Shards come mostly from summoning, where what counts is not the luck of a single pull but the
distance to the next guarantee.

| What | How much |
|---|---|
| Guarantee | every 50 summons |
| What it gives | 10 shards of a UR hero, an instant unlock |
| Chance of any hero shard | about 26% per summon |
| Of that, UR | 2.8% in the permanent pool, 3.1% in pools with new heroes |

The beginner pool is stingier, with a shard dropping in about 15% of summons.

One thing about the guarantee is worth knowing. In the permanent pool it always gives shards of
the same hero rather than a random UR, and that hero is [[hero-arthur|Arthur]].

The list widens later on. The second pool guarantees Arthur or Harper, the third covers seven
heroes (Arthur, Harper, Marlena, Shadow, Cynthia, Annie, Joker), and the fourth adds Daskal and
Red Lady for nine.

For a beginner this leads to a simple conclusion: Arthur's shards arrive on their own, purely
from pulling the base pool, which makes him the safest early investment. The rest of that list
comes in no particular order and cannot be farmed on purpose.

## Free pulls

Every pool holds one free pull, and there are five pools: four for heroes and one for survivors.
That makes five free pulls rather than one, and they are easy to miss because each pool counts
its own cooldown.

The gap between free pulls is stored as 259,200, the same figure the tavern carries. Read as
seconds that comes to three days, but the available data cannot confirm it.

## What it costs

A Recruit Ticket costs 398 diamonds, so a guaranteed UR comes to 19,900 diamonds. Tickets are
also sold for other currencies, 2,000 glory medals or 300 expedition medals.

## What to do

Summons are easier to count as distance to the guarantee than as separate pulls, since spending
them at random devalues what has already gone in. Universal shards are better kept for one target
hero, because shop limits are small and scattered shards unlock nobody.

## The road to maximum

Reaching 50 stars takes another 975 shards on top of the unlock. Any shard offer in the shops is
worth comparing against that number.

## Related pages

- [[heroes|All heroes]]
- [[hero-stars|Hero stars]]
- [[hero-shards|Hero shards]]
- [[roulette|Wishing Wheel]]
- [[spending|Spending]]