How much are you willing to pay for Hearthstone cards?

I enjoy playing Hearthstone… but I don’t enjoy paying for Hearthstone nearly as much. I’m pretty sure most of you will be with me on this one. Playing games? Fun! Spending money? Less fun.

While I’m perfectly willing to pay for things I enjoy — like Hearthstone — but packs can get expensive. Buying a single pack will set you back $1.50, which, while not a tremendously burdensome cost in itself, does add up — because you need lots of cards. You may tell yourself you just need one more pack, which is an enticing lie. Having been buying up collectable card games since the early days of Magic: The Gathering, I can say with complete confidence that it is never just one more pack.

Still, pack prices do do get lower in bundles. You can buy a bundle of 40 packs for any expansion, which will only set you back $50 (or $1.25 per pack). And Hearthstone’s limited-time bundles do even better: pre-order bundles offer 50 packs for $50, or  $1 per pack. The limited-time Year of the Mammoth bundle includes 30 packs for $20, or $0.67 per pack. What a steal! And the Welcome bundle includes 10 Classic packs plus a Legendary for $5, or truly bargain basement price of $0.50 per pack.

When you can get to $1 per pack, you have my interest. But above that? I’m more likely to just quest and buy packs whenever I have the gold to do it. I tend to pre-order expansion packs, and I snagged both the Year of the Mammoth and Welcome bundles. But $50 for 40 packs? I’ve never taken Blizzard up on that offer.

But beyond the money-sink, the problem is that the more packs you open, the less rewarding it is to open new packs. As you collect cards, more and more of the cards in new packs will be duplicates — and it’s not very exciting to open a pack full of duplicates that you’re immediately going to disenchant. Yawn.

So the announcement of the Witchwood expansion, with a pre-order offer of 70 packs for $50 (or $0.71 per pack), caught my eye. It isn’t quite the best deal Hearthstone’s ever offered, but it’s still a good deal. And that 70 packs could well satiate your pack-opening cravings… at least for long enough to earn the gold to buy a couple more packs.

But what about you? When are Hearthstone packs cheap enough that you’re ready to fork over some cash?