How much currency do you need to buy all the rewards from the WoW 20th anniversary event?

The World of Warcraft‘s patch 11.0.5, and its centerpiece 20th anniversary event, are both now live, bringing with them a plethora of activities to do — as well as the all-important sweet, sweet cosmetic loot. And it wouldn’t be modern-era World of Warcraft if it didn’t have a new currency for our groaningly-full currency tabs, so the event tasks you with collecting Bronze Celebration Tokens for most of the rewards. (Most of them. More on that in a second.) But you may be wondering — how many of those tokens do I need, anyway? And I hear there’s a Timewalking component to this — how many Timewarped Badges do I need?

Well, I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news.

The good news: Bronze Celebration Tokens

The number is actually not as large as you might think:

• Traeya sells Eternal Tier 2 cosmetic sets. Each set of Eternal Tier 2 (like the Eternal Judgment Armor) costs 60 Tokens, and there are 13 sets, so the total might seem to be 780 — but luckily, that’s not correct. The first set you buy will cost you 60, but then you get a discount on the second set, which will cost only 40. The other 11 sets? 20 apiece. That means you only need 320 tokens for all 13 Eternal Tier 2 cosmetic sets!
• Historian Ma’di carries a number of new anniversary prizes — toys, pets, and cosmetics of varying prices. There’s a set of five Coldflame items, which are in-game versions of the real-life Blizzard service awards for completing 5, 10, etc. years with the company; there’s the kind of adorable Lil’ Doomy; and there’s a treasure chest full of balloons. These three items will run you 75 Bronze Celebration Tokens in total.
• Storekeeper Reginald also sells a number of past anniversary events items, just in case you missed them — ranging from the Baby Blizzard Bear from the 2008 4th anniversary event to Hatespark the Tiny, who was a rare drop during the Molten Core anniversary event in 2014. All of Reginald’s items together cost 90 badges — 40 for the mounts, 50 for the pets. But if you’re an anniversary aficionado, you might already have some or all of these!

That puts the total number of Bronze Celebration Tokens you need at a grand total of 485, or 395 if you already have all the old anniversary items. Wowhead crunched the numbers and it looks like it will take players completing a full slate of weekly content about three weeks to get Token Collector at 100 Tokens — at that point, Tokens start dropping from other repeatable activities, making their acquisition faster as time goes on.

Remember, though, you have until January 6th to earn tokens for this event! Don’t dawdle around, but you also don’t need to feel severely time crunched either.

The bad news…maybe: Timewarped Badges

There are a lot of new items added to vendors, including new vendors, that also cost Timewarped Badges. There will be a few Timewalking events during the anniversary (including Cataclysm Timewalking during the second week) and a repeatable source of Badges in buying Bag of Timewarped Badges from Historian Ma’di at a rate of 1 Celebration Token to 20 Timewarped Badges. But the problem is that the things that cost Timewarped Badges cost more. A whole lot more. And if you don’t have a bunch of them sitting around on your Warband (remember, you can transfer them between characters on your account now), you may be in for a grind if you want to get all these items before the event ends… maybe.

Why am I hedging my bets? Well, Blizzard has mentioned that the vendor Bobadormu is also the associated vendor for the Classic Timewalking feature that will be added during the anniversary event but which will stick around afterwards as part of the rotation. There’s a possibility that Bobadormu’s rewards will be around for the future, and so there’s no rush to buy his goods. The problem is, we have no clarification one way or another from Blizzard. So if you want to play it safe and buy everything:

• Notary Grably sells titles for 100 Timewarped Badges a pop. These express your love for a zone or continent, like Grizzly Hills Hiker, Karazhan Graduate, Molten Core Prospector, or … Draenor Enthusiast. (There’s no accounting for taste.) I would guess Grably’s titles are a limited time reward for the anniversary, and buying the whole lot would cost you 1500 Timewarped Badges.
• Bobadormu sells a number of cosmetic items based on ultra-rare drops from Classic; these will run you 1205 badges if you want them all — but I would take that number with a grain of salt, because the list includes things like Freezing Band, a ring.
• Bobadormu also sells more expensive things, like the Frayfeather Hippogryph mount, and a series of cosmetic weapons and offhands based on new items from Season of Discovery. These more expensive rewards will run you 33,100 badges if you want all of them.
• Lastly, Historian Ma’di also sells a set of pets and toys from previous anniversaries for Timewarped Badges. Why are they on her vendor list and not Reginald’s? Why do they cost Timewarped Badges and not Celebration Tokens? Your guess is as good as mine. But if you need all of these as well, you’re looking at an additional 11,000 badges — 10,000 total for two mounts, and 1000 total for 2 pets, 2 cosmetic items, and a toy.

That means you’re looking at a cost of 35,805 Timewarped Badges — or 46,805 if you need the old anniversary items. This number is, frankly, absurd, and I hope the devs will confirm very soon whether or not Bobadormu will return when Classic Timewalking does, because grinding this amount of badges is just going to lead to burnout for folks who feel like they have to have everything. If you want to prioritize some purchases, I’d suggest the titles from Grably and the Season of Discovery cosmetics, as they seem way more likely to be anniversary-exclusive; there’s a distinct possibility that the cheap versions of existing (admittedly rare) drops, as well as the more expensive stuff like the mount, is just Bobadormu’s Timewalking inventory.