TFT Shop Odds: Why Your Level Decides What You See

Two gold, five slots, and not the unit you needed. You roll again, and again, and the round ends thirty gold lighter with the same board. The feeling afterwards is always the same: the shop is out to get you. It is not. It runs a completely public probability table, identical for all eight players in the lobby, driven by exactly one input: the level of your Little Legend. Not the stage you are on, not the streak of rolls you already paid for, not how many times the unit showed up on somebody else’s board.

Five slots, two gold, one variable

Before any percentage, the mechanic. It comes down to four facts, and three of the four classic shop mistakes come from assuming the system is subtler than it is.

• The shop shows five slots, each rolled independently. Nothing stops the same champion from filling two slots at once: that is not a bug, that is two draws landing the same way.
• It refreshes for free at the start of every round, and costs two gold to refresh by hand, as many times as you can afford.
• How those slots split between 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5-cost champions depends only on your level. Two players on the same level share the exact same table, whatever their placement.
• Every draw is independent of the last one. Ten dead rolls do not improve the eleventh: the game keeps no bad-luck counter.

Read your table in the client, do not copy it from elsewhere

This is the most useful advice in the article and the one you hear least. The exact percentages are displayed by the client itself: hover the experience panel in the bottom-left corner and the game shows the full split for your current level, cost by cost. It is right there, current, one mouse movement away.

Why insist on that instead of printing a table of numbers here? Because the table moves. Riot tunes it between sets, and sometimes inside a set, to fix the pace of a season. A table copied from last year’s video is therefore the surest way to roll at the wrong level while feeling clever about it. The skill worth building is not memorising numbers, it is checking the panel before you spend fifty gold.

The shape of the curve never changes

The values move, the logic does not. Whatever the set, the table always draws the same shape, and that shape is what you need in your head to decide when to level and when to roll.

1. 1At the earliest levels the shop is almost entirely 1-cost champions. That is deliberate: the opening is there to collect copies, not to find a carry.
2. 2Every level gained shifts weight upward. The 1-cost share drops, the higher costs climb, and no cost ever disappears again once it has opened.
3. 3The highest costs sit at zero or near zero for the whole first half of the game. Hunting a 5-cost at a level where it barely appears is paying two gold to draw from an empty drawer.
4. 4Each cost peaks at one or two specific levels. That is your window: rolling there is far cheaper for the same result than rolling one level early or two levels late.

The real ceiling is not the percentage, it is the pool

Here is what the table does not tell you, and it explains half the disappointing rolldowns. The percentage only decides the cost of the champion about to appear. The game then picks a unit from the ones of that cost still available, and that stock is shared by the whole lobby.

• The pool is common to all eight players. It holds a finite number of copies of each champion, generous for cheap units, very tight for expensive ones.
• A copy bought by someone else leaves the pool and can no longer be offered to you. A copy sold goes straight back in, including when an eliminated player releases their entire board.
• An untouched percentage on an empty pool gives you nothing. The slot still rolls the right cost, it just shows a different champion than the one you are waiting for.
• That is also why 1-cost units stay findable deep into a game: their pool is the deepest in the game, and it is what carries the boards built on three-starred cheap units, covered end to end in our piece on Set 18 compositions.

Being contested: what that actually means

The word gets thrown around constantly and stays vague if you are new. It does not mean the game is punishing you, and it does not mean your odds went down. It describes something very concrete: one or more players are buying the same champions you are, so they are draining the same pool. Your table is unchanged, your real chance of hitting collapses anyway.

1. 1Spot it first. Look at the other boards between rounds: two players on your trait and the pool empties three times faster. The full routine is in our article on scouting.
2. 2Measure it next. A long roll at the right level that never produces the unit, while the right cost keeps appearing, is the signature of a drained pool, not of a bad day.
3. 3Then decide. There are only two answers: change target while there is still time, or outspend the contest right now and pay for it in health.
4. 4The happy case exists too. Nobody else is on your trait, the pool is intact, and staying one more level to roll becomes a perfectly sound plan.

Why rolling is cheaper than it looks, at the right level

Two gold per refresh has a bad reputation, and it is misplaced. That gold does not buy a champion, it buys five draws. At the level where your target cost peaks, those five draws regularly come back with one or two useful slots, and the spend pays for itself in copies. At the wrong level, the same two gold buy five cards none of which could ever have helped.

1. 1The price of a refresh never changes. What changes is what it can possibly contain, which means the level, not the number of rolls, is the first decision.
2. 2Rolling below the interest threshold is the real hidden cost. The two visible gold stack on top of the interest you give up round after round, a mechanism detailed in our article on gold and interest.
3. 3Rolling with gold above the threshold, at the level where your cost peaks, is one of the best purchases in the game: interest keeps landing while the board fills up.
4. 4A roll that produces the third copy of a unit you already hold twice is worth far more than two gold: it is a star-up, a change in power, not a small gain.

Levelling is itself a way to change your odds

This is the least obvious and most useful consequence of everything above. Buying experience does not only add a slot on the board: it swaps your table for a different one, friendlier to high costs. Two opposite ways of playing follow from that, and both are legitimate.

• Deliberately stay at a low level and spend your gold rolling there. The table is saturated with cheap champions, which makes three-star breakpoints reachable. That is the whole logic of reroll boards.
• Push levels as fast as you can to open the higher costs, then roll once, hard, at the level where the table finally favours them.
• The worst of both worlds is levelling slowly while rolling along the way: you pay for experience and refreshes without ever standing at the level where either table becomes worth it.
• If the vocabulary of breakpoints and stages is still fuzzy, our beginner guide to Teamfight Tactics starts from scratch.

Since patch 18.1, this shop no longer opens on macOS

One thing to know before deciding which screen all of the above happens on. Patch 18.1, the one that opened Set 18 by moving Teamfight Tactics from Riot’s in-house engine to Unreal Engine, came with the removal of macOS support: no support, no fixes. Riot calls the removal temporary and says it is working to support the system in a future update, with no date announced. The same patch also dropped older, lower-memory Android and iOS devices. No account was reset in the process: progress, rank and purchases stay tied to the Riot account, as our article on the macOS removal explains.

Android is still supported, and that official client is what runs the game on an Apple Silicon Mac inside OSFT Launcher. For a subject like this one, the screen changes how you play: hovering the experience panel wants a pointer, a refresh answers a keyboard key faster than a thumb on six inches, and five slots read at a glance instead of being squinted at. The machine side is covered in our installation guide.

Key points

• The cost split in your shop depends on your level alone, never on the stage or on your previous rolls.
• The exact percentages are shown in-game when you hover the experience panel, and they change between sets: read them, do not memorise them.
• Each cost peaks at one or two specific levels, and that is the only place where rolling is cheap.
• The percentage picks the cost, the shared pool picks the champion: a trait everyone is playing becomes unfindable without the table moving at all.
• Levelling replaces your whole table: it is a probability lever as much as an extra board slot.