Honkai: Star Rail – I used Stellar Jade worth $830 USD to pull for Black Swan

Look at me, I’m the whale now
Honkai: Star Rail – I used Stellar Jade worth $830 USD to pull for Black Swan
Honkai: Star Rail – I used Stellar Jade worth $830 USD to pull for Black Swan /

Sometimes you just have to go wild and let loose, right? I mean, that’s what we’re in Penacony for in the first place. It’s space Vegas, baby! It’s basically mandatory to get there and do some gambling – all the better if it’s all for science.

I recently had the chance to play Honkai: Star Rail update 2.0 on a preview server ahead of launch using a special press account provided by HoYoverse. Imagine what a whale account in a game like this looks like and then quadruple that imagination – that account had literally everything unlocked, including the new characters, Black Swan and Misha. It was a blue whale account. It’s probably what HoYoverse CEO Dawei plays on usually.

As a cherry on top, the studio had loaded the account up with 50,000 Stellar Jade, the in-game currency required to purchase Warps – tickets for the gacha mechanic. Did I need those after already having everything unlocked? No. Did I use them anyway before HoYoverse takes that account back? You bet.

Here comes Pom-Pom, the decider of fates / HoYoverse

I played through the update first, though, gobbling up whatever Stellar Jade I could through my gameplay to add to these large funds. I also converted all the waste material you get as you’re pulling into tickets, so all in all I was able to pull 419 times – that’s 67.040 Stellar Jades worth of pulls.

To put this into perspective: You get 8.080 Stellar Jade for the $99.99 USD package in the store found in the game, which provides the best Dollar to Stellar Jade conversion available (without considering factors like the initial top-up bonus for your first purchase) at 80.81 Stellar Jade for the Dollar.

To get those 419 pulls, you’d have to purchase the $99.99 USD package 8.2 times. Using the 80.81 Stellar Jade per Dollar conversion, I blew currency worth approximately $829.6 USD on the Black Swan banner. That’s what I call whaling, ladies and gentlemen!

Here comes the part you’re all here for – the tally!

  • 5-Star characters: 6
  • 4-Star characters: 35
  • 5-Star Light Cones: 0
  • 4-Star Light Cones: 16

Black Swan graced me with her presence four times, the other two 5-Star character pulls were both Himeko. I didn’t exactly count how many of Misha, Guinaifen, and Tingyun I got (and they were already E6 when I received the account), but I’m pretty sure I could have fully leveled up each of them.

That's Black Swan grabbing all the gacha tickets / HoYoverse

In Honkai: Star Rail, you’re guaranteed to get a 4-Star character or Light Cone for every ten pulls and a 5-Star character or Light Cone for every 90 pulls. On a limited banner, you’re guaranteed to get the featured character – Black Swan, in this case – after 180 pulls, in case you lose the so-called 50-50 to another character of that rarity. Since I got six 5-Star characters, I beat the minimum amount I should have gotten by two.

But if you look back at it, six characters really isn’t a lot considering I would have had to spend $830 USD for them. That’s not even enough to E6 Black Swan.

And, sure, I could have gotten more than that, had I been luckier. But I could have also gotten less, so, you know – you’re still submitting to a lottery here, despite HoYoverse’s system being remarkably fair in comparison to some other competitors out there. My colleague Josh, who was in the preview as well, got exactly one 5-Star character pulling from the standard banner using all that free Stellar Jade – the rest of his gets consisted of Light Cones.

Let that difference of fortunes be a lesson to you – always spend responsibly, no matter how hot that waifu or husbando you’re trying to get is.

Honkai: Star Rail update 2.0 impressions – Penacony lives up to the hype


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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg