How to get Heirloom Shards in Apex Legends

Heirloom Shards come out of Apex Packs, and the system has a hard floor: open 500 Apex Packs without pulling shards and the 500th one guarantees 150 of them — enough to buy any one Heirloom Set outright. Below that count you're rolling the dice at just under a 1-in-500 chance (around 0.2%) per pack, so the 500-pack number isn't a rough guideline, it's the actual ceiling on how unlucky you can get.

The pity number, and why it isn't a fresh grind every time

That guarantee resets only once you actually pull shards — a pack that lands on Heirloom Shards is refunded, not consumed, so the count doesn't cost you a pack either. Once you're holding 150 shards, they sit in your account like currency: you spend them in the Mythic Store on whichever Legend's set you actually want, and you don't have to decide right away.

This shard system isn't how heirlooms always worked. Until a March 2020 update, full Heirloom Sets could drop directly out of packs at random; that patch replaced random full-set drops with the shard-and-store model that's still in place today, which is also why nothing about "which set did I get" is left to chance anymore — you choose.

Where the packs come from if you don't buy them

The pity counter climbs whether you spend money or not. Apex Packs come from levelling up your account, the free track of each Battle Pass, and periodic login or challenge rewards, so a player who never opens their wallet still reaches pack 500 eventually — just on the game's schedule, not theirs. Buying packs only shortens the wait; it doesn't change the odds or the guarantee.

Legend-specific heirlooms vs. the universal ones

Most heirlooms are tied to one Legend: a melee weapon skin bundled with that character's finisher, banner poses, and intro quip, unlocked either through a collection event or bought with 150 shards once you own that Legend. A smaller category — Apex Artifacts — breaks that rule: these are Mythic-rarity melee skins built to work with every Legend, not just one, so pulling or unlocking one isn't wasted if the Legend you main doesn't have a set yet.

Collection events: the fast, expensive route

During a collection event, Respawn runs a 24-item cosmetic set tied to that event; buying all 24 items unlocks the event's Heirloom Set immediately, without touching your pity count at all. It's the only way to get a specific heirloom on demand instead of waiting for pack 500 or the shard store — but it means paying real money for 24 items just to reach the one you actually want, which is consistently the priciest path to an heirloom of the three.

Miss the event window and that set doesn't stay locked forever: once the event ends, its Heirloom Set moves into the regular Mythic Store rotation, where it can be bought with 150 shards like any other set. So a set you didn't unlock during its event isn't gone — it just goes back to being a pity-and-patience purchase instead of a guaranteed one.

"All heirlooms" is a moving target

There's no fixed final list to memorize, and any page claiming otherwise is out of date the next patch. New Legends generally get their own heirloom added over time rather than launching with one, so at any given moment some Legends have a set in the Mythic Store and some don't yet — that gap closes gradually, not all at once. The same is true for the universal Apex Artifacts: new ones are added far less often than legend-specific sets, which is exactly why they're the rarer of the two categories in the table above.

What it actually costs, honestly

Respawn doesn't publish a shard-to-dollar price, and Apex Coin bundle pricing shifts often enough that a number written today would likely be wrong by the time you read this — so treat any dollar figure you see elsewhere with suspicion unless it's dated. What's stable is the shape of the cost: buying your way to the pack-500 guarantee outright means buying hundreds of packs in one go, and buying out a full collection event means paying for 24 unrelated cosmetics to get one item. Either route is a real bill, not pocket change. The free route — levelling, Battle Pass tracks, and event rewards — costs nothing but time, and it's the only one where the eventual heirloom is basically guaranteed rather than gambled on.