Nick Fury is a staple from the core set that costs 4 resources to play and draws 3 cards. Some players claim he costs 2 equivalent resources. And that’s where I disagree and the Captain too.

Building with double resources means 1 card draw is worth more than 1 ER.

In a 40-card deck, players typically include 5 double resources, which are cards with 2 resource icons on them. To reach this number of 5, I compiled data on the public decks shared at marvelcdb.com. Those are usually the “power of” cards, as well as Energy, Genius, Strength.

Let’s ask Beast to compute the odds with his hypergeometric calculator:

With a 40 card deck containing 5 resource cards,

When I draw 6 cards,

I have 57.71% chances of getting 1 resource card or more.

We do have a quite significant chance of drawing double resources in an opening hand.

What does that mean for Nick Fury? If we take the hypothesis that we drew Nick and a double resource in our starting hand:

With a 34 card deck containing 4 resource cards,

When I draw 3 cards,

I have 32.15% chances of getting 1 resource card or more.

That’s close to 30% to get 4 resources back from Nick’s Response and not 3! Dare I say we get 3.3ER back? Now we could evaluate the full scenario, counting mulligans and all scenarios. We would reach about the same final number of 40%.

Each non resource card in play, in discard or hand bumps this 40% up, each resource in the discard pile brings it down. Counting double resources in your discard is a total legit way to win more often if you want my 2 cts. I do it.

But I want to introduce another more intuitive way to grasp this concept than an hypergeometric calculator. We can simply count the number of icons.

Count the icons

We have 35 + (2*5) = 45 resource icons in a deck. A card has on average 45/40 = 1.15 resource icons printed on it. When evaluating the strict economic value of a drawing a card, the average number of icons printed is ER.

We set up our board with upgrades, allies and support with single icons on them, meanwhile double resources stay rotating in the deck. After a few turns, the number of average printed resource icons gets higher. We call it thinning the deck, and I hope to write about that one day.

I took a bunch of data from my games and reached those odds:

It depends on the deck and how it is played.

1.20ER instead of 1ER may seem not worth debating, but it is actually quite massive when talking about Nick Fury.

• Nick Cost costs 5ER
• He draws back 3* 1.2 = 3.6ER
• Total cost for Nick 1.4ER, which is 30% better than 2ER

If I may add my dear Hank, some top players will point out that you have better cards in hand. As you probably used some resource generator to pay for Nick, you get more options with more cards. Another way of saying it is that you improved your hand quality.
I consider a draw to be worth 1.4ER.

Conclusion

Nick costs 1.4 ER, yet he delivers 3.5 ER of value with a block and 2 points of stats. A true bargain way above the curve.

It seems the old cards designed by Caleb and Michael were balanced with draw valued at 1 ER, missing the nuances of properly pricing card draw.

That would explain why Nick Fury, Ironheart, Maria Hill, One Way or Another, Change of Fortune…legacy cards with the word “draw” on them are all staples today.