I have put 2000 hours into this game and have managed to grind out every achievement for it except for the Guild Wars ones (since it has been MIA for nearly a year now) and the Hoard Mimic. They recently added 2 more as well but those are not possible to get yet.
People estimate that the chance of pulling the Hoard Mimic card is 1/1000 locked behind 3 roughly 10% chances. I have put an obscene amount of time into trying to get the Hoard Mimic, but to no avail, and I’m no closer today than when I first started it. I have seen several posts on the internet say that they lowered the spawn rate of mimics a couple of months after the update dropped, which makes sense. My guild leader said he got 3 of these Hoard Mimic cards in the first 2 months, but hasn’t seen once since. I have seen maybe 10 Hoard Mimic battles total, but the card has never dropped.
Over the course of the last 60 hours, I have not seen a single Hoard Mimic. I am using a super fast e12 team (Wand, Tesla 2x, Leprechaun) and not losing any battles. I have seen plenty of regular mimics in that time, but never seen a Hoard Mimic. The last time I saw one was 2-3 months ago when i ran into 2 of them grinding explore 1s during a vault weekend.
This card has been out for nearly 3 years now, and it’s not even that good. Why can’t the devs do something to make it a little easier? Maybe attach a pity system to it or make it craftable for an obscene amount of resources? Even if it was 5,000,000 souls + 5,000 gems + 20,000 diamonds to craft it, that would still be better than how it is now. Why were so many people able to get this card a month or two after it came out, and now you can grind for thousands of hours and never see it? Theoretically, you could play for 100,000 hours and never see this card because each e12 run is a separate 1/1000 chance you get it.
If you all ready have this card, I’m sure you will not have any empathy for those that don’t have it especially if you put in thousands of hours grinding for it. I just wish they would do something to make it a bit easier since it’s been out for so long. They added the orbs of glory in the Underspire to make the 100 gold medal troops grind easier, added shiny keys in the pvp shop to make that grind easier, I just don’t understand why we can’t get something for this one.
You no doubt are aware, but this maybe helpful to a player reading your post who may not be :-
“If you are actively looking for the Hoard Mimic as I was then make sure to just do the “lantern” kingdoms. The extra 20% mythstones make a huge difference to the number of ‘nul’ kingdoms (when you don’t make it to the Boss chest)
You can get a run of 8 chests doing lanterns but it is only 4 or 5 not which adds up to a lot of time doing wasted battles !”
It took me 2 1/2 years to get this worthless troop because of how luck based it is, meanwhile others in my guild had 4+ of it.
I started tracking my progress and a more casual gamer, not being able to play this game for more than 1-2 hours a day, I can honestly say, grinding for this did kill any fun I once had playing it. If it wasn’t for the guild I was in, I probably would have given up and quit. With the how PvP is now and those dumb burning chests/immortals, I may still quit, as trying to get souls to upgrade an immortal is a god awful grind, but at least it isn’t pure luck and I can see progress.
My final stats for getting this:
4772 boss chests opened
524 mimic chests (10.98% of boss chests)
34 horde mimic chests (0.71% of boss chests, 6.49% of mimic chests)
1 horde mimic troop
So overall, I had about a 11% chance of getting a mimic battle after a boss fight, and less then a 1% chance of getting a horde mimic after a boss fight (or a 6.5% chance after the mimic fight). And getting the horde mimic, was about a 2% after a horde mimic battle, and then percentage drops considerably when compared to the mimic and boss battles.
Luck based troops/achievements like this, especially one that has 3 different levels of RNG/luck on it, are the worse game designs and just frustrate the player.
I would argue that immortals aren’t really a grind because of how horribly scarce burning marks are handed out. The season immortal can easily reach a solid level with just a light grind, but the free burning marks are so few that barely any of the other immortals will hit a even modest level 4, and grinding hardcore barely has an impact compared to spending money. If you do buy the pass and hit 180k vp (which isn’t too terrible to reach within 11 weeks), it’ll greatly exceed a f2p’s grind of burning marks.
As for the horde mimic, it’s best to think of it as a ‘nice to have’ and not a ‘must have’, it’ll greatly improve your mindset.