Welcome back to another installment of Mana Math, where I take the numbers we’re given about a set and turn that into easy-to-understand information about how hard it will be to open the card you really want.
Ravnica Remastered has some awesome cards, including a whopping 64 cards that are serialized to 500 copies, and some retro frame shocks, plus outstanding anime art! Let’s get to the cards, and the odds, and all the numbers you want.
We’re told right out of the gate that you have a 1% chance of opening a serialized retro frame card. With 64 options, that’s 32,000 unique cards. If that’s 1% of the total Collector Boosters out there, then we know there’s approximately 3.2 million Collector Booster packs, or 266,667 Collector Booster boxes.
Keep that number in mind, because you can plug that in with the other numbers I’m going to give you, and we’ll know exactly how many copies of a card were printed.
A caveat: Our vendor partners and distributor sources have mentioned that orders for Ravnica Remastered are low. This represents both the potential for things to be more expensive, as less is ordered and opened, or for a glut of underpriced product to show up later in the year. There’s also the chance that Wizards destroys the leftover packs, as we saw with Modern Horizons 2 back in February:
One thing Wizards didn’t give us directly was a list of serialized cards. Serialized cards are all in the Retro frame this time around, and the ones that are specific to the Collector Booster are not counted. Here’s the list:
| Serialized Rares | Serialized Mythic Rares |
| Blazing Archon Blind Obedience Ghostway Copy Enchantment Spark Double Tidespout Tyrant Crypt Ghast Infernal Tutor Massacre Girl Arclight Phoenix Hellkite Tyrant Krenko, Mob Boss Legion Warboss Mizzix’s Mastery Birds of Paradise Chord of Calling Golgari Grave-Troll Life from the Loam Borborygmos Enraged Cindervines Deathrite Shaman Dreadbore Lavinia, Azorius Renegade Lazav, the Multifarious Mindleech Mass Niv-Mizzet, Parun Prime Speaker Zegana Rakdos, Lord of Riots Savra, Queen of the Golgari Sphinx’s Revelation Stitch in Time Tajic, Legion’s Edge Teysa, Orzhov Scion Tolsimir Wolfblood Voidslime Bottled Cloister Chromatic Lantern Illusionist’s Bracers Pariah’s Shield Seal of the Guildpact Sword of the Paruns Blood Crypt Breeding Pool Godless Shrine Hallowed Fountain Overgrown Tomb Sacred Foundry Steam Vents Stomping Ground Temple Garden Watery Grave | Divine Visitation Bruvac the Grandiloquent Cyclonic Rift Dark Confidant Lord of the Void Ilharg, the Raze-Boar Utvara Hellkite Guardian Project Protean Hulk Aurelia, Exemplar of Justice Karlov of the Ghost Council Master of Cruelties Cloudstone Curio |
I don’t know why they didn’t want to give us this list directly, but here you go.
Additionally, there’s a subset of cards that is available in retro frame but only in the Collector Booster, because they are not fun in Limited or are part of strategies that aren’t supported in the Draft Booster experience. Some of them I can totally understand, others are a bit more of a surprise.
These are NOT available in serialized versions. Sorry to disappoint the Thespian’s Stage and Maze’s End players.
| Common | Uncommon | Rare | Mythic Rare |
| Shambling Shell | Sphere of Safety Aetherize Narcomoeba Turnabout Creeping Chill Darkblast Shattering Spree Perilous Forays Wilderness Reclamation Magewright’s Stone | Rest in Peace Gigantoplasm Pack Rat Supreme Verdict Pithing Needle Karn’s Bastion Thespian’s Stage | Enter the Infinite Niv-Mizzet Reborn Maze’s End |
In some sets, all the sweet versions can be distributed across multiple slots of the Collector Booster, but that’s not going to be the case with RVR.
There are good cards in those other slots, but RVR Collector Boosters are going to be a very swingy experience and that last slot is going to make or break the pack. All the foils are there, and while some of the nonfoils should keep a price of a few bucks, my expectations are pretty low.
We get a breakdown of that last slot:
Let’s get into what we can get here, and just how rare each of those is.
| Type/Rarity (# of options) | Percent chance for any card of that category | Percent chance for a specific card of that category | # of CBs to open one specific card from that category |
| Traditional Foil Retro Frame Rare (51) | 55.2% | 1.09% | 92.39 |
| Traditional Foil Retro Frame Mythic Rare (13) | 5.3% | 0.4% | 245.3 |
| Traditional Foil Retro Frame CB Exclusive Rare (7) | 10.6% | 1.5% | 66.04 |
| Traditional Foil Retro Frame CB Exclusive Mythic Rare (3) | 2.1% | 0.7% | 142.9 |
| Traditional Foil Borderless Anime Rare (17) | 13.4% | 0.79% | 126.8 |
| Traditional Foil Borderless Anime Planeswalker Mythic Rare (3) | 2.1% | 0.7% | 142.9 |
| Traditional Foil Borderless Anime Mythic Rare (11) | 4% | 0.36% | 275 |
| Traditional Foil Borderless Shock Land Rare (10) | 7% | 0.7% | 142.9 |
| Serialized Double Rainbow Foil Retro Frame (64) | 1% | 0.016 | 6400 |
This slot is going to have some wild variance, but remember that 65.8% of packs, or just about two out of three, will have a foil Retro Rare, not even a foil anime version of a card. If you add those rares in, you’re looking at nearly 4-in-5 packs (79.2%) and adding in shocks gets you to 86%.
Mythics and serialized cards are present in this last slot for just 14.5% of packs, or just a little more often than one in 8 packs. The average CB box, with twelve packs, will have approximately 1.7 mythics. It’s not like mythics are the only things worth money, but Cyclonic Rift is one of the big upshifts to mythic, and having more of those would have helped the EV of these boxes.
The second-to-last slot, with nonfoil borderless anime cards or the shockland, is the best bet because of what it has, but at the same time, because there’s less options there’s going to be that many more of the cards. Let’s look at the specifics:
| Type/Rarity (# of options) | Percent chance for any card of that category | Percent chance for a specific card of that category | # of CBs to open one specific card from that category |
| Non-foil borderless anime rare (32) | 52% | 1.625% | 61.53 |
| Non-foil borderless anime planeswalker mythic rares (2) | 5.5% | 2.75% | 36.36 |
| Non-foil borderless anime mythic rares (11) | 15% | 1.36% | 73.3 |
| Borderless shock land rares (10) | 27.5% | 2.75% | 36.36 |
Now, let’s use that 3.2 million figure and say how many copies of a card will be printed, approximately. I find this useful when thinking of what the prices should be:
| Card | Approx # of copies total | Card | Approx # of copies total |
| Retro Foil Steam Vents | 22,393 | Nonfoil borderless Steam Vents | 88,000 |
| Borderless Foil Anime Utvara Hellkite | 11,636 | Nonfoil borderless anime Utvara Hellkite | 43,656 |
| Borderless Foil Anime Chromatic Lantern | 25,236 | Nonfoil borderless anime Chromatic Lantern | 52,007 |
I yearn for the days when there was a clear and consistent ratio, but sadly, those days are gone. For some cards, the foils are 4x as rare as the nonfoils, and for others, it’s only 2x.
Finally, let’s get into some specific cards, and their drop rates.
| Card/treatment | Approx. number of CBs needed to find one copy (approx.) |
| Retro Foil Tidespout Tyrant | 92.39 |
| Retro Foil Bruvac the Grandiloquent | 245.3 |
| Borderless Anime Foil Crypt Ghast | 126.8 |
| Retro Foil Watery Grave | 142.9 |
| Borderless Anime Foil Cyclonic Rift | 275 |
| Serialized Double Rainbow Retro Frame Steam Vents | 6400 |
Again, I hope you use these numbers to inform your buying plans. The highs on this set are going to be amazing, but there’s going to be a lot of Collector Boosters opened that contain chaff that wasn’t worth the pack. Opening packs is always a swingy experience, but that experience is going to be even more of a rollercoaster this time around.
As always, if you have questions about my methods or results, please feel free to reach out on Twitter/X or in the ProTrader Discord.
Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.