Foundations is coming out in two weeks, there’s barely any preorders to be had, and while there’s a lot to discuss with the timeframe of the set and how long it’ll be in print for, we also know that some of these cards are going to be casual all-stars.
It’s important that we remember that this set will be Standard-legal until the end of 2029. That’s five full years! An enormous amount of time for the ten scrylands to be legal in the format, on top of all the other things to be had here.
Another important caveat is that we should expect this set to get reprints at some time in that five-year period. We haven’t yet had a full reprinting of Collector Boosters, just Draft/Play boosters, and there’s no reason to think that Wizards will change that policy…but they are changing a LOT of things and nothing is 100% in this crazy world.
Except, perhaps, that if you want to know how rare the rarest drops are in Foundations, I’ve got you covered. Dust off your calculators, here we go.
I want to start off with the nonfoils of the EA and the borderless cards. We’re given two slots with these, and so the odds have to be cut in half. There is indeed a chance you get a pack with a pair of the same FEA mythic, albeit in nonfoil.
Wow gonna be a lot of nonfoils out there, plus what peeps open in Play Boosters! Given the casual appeal of a lot of the Foundations cards, this may turn out to be a profitable spot once we reach max supply.
But what about the foil slot?
| Traditional Foil (unless noted otherwise) | # of cards in that group | Percent chance for any card of that category | Percent chance for a specific card of that category | # of packs to open one specific card from that category |
| Borderless Rare | 43 | 34.50% | 2.03% | 49.28 |
| Borderless Mythic Rare | 17 | 6.80% | 0.16% | 632.35 |
| Extended-Art Rare | 37 | 29.60% | 0.80% | 125.00 |
| Extended-Art Mythic Rare | 9 | 3.60% | 0.40% | 250.00 |
| Mana Foil Rare | 43 | 8.40% | 0.20% | 511.90 |
| Mana Foil Mythic Rare | 17 | 1.60% | 0.09% | 1062.50 |
| Foil Special Guest | 10 | 5.50% | 0.55% | 181.82 |
| Traditional Foil Japan Showcase in English (10) | 10 | 6.00% | 0.60% | 166.67 |
| Traditional Foil Japan Showcase in Japanese | 10 | 3.00% | 0.30% | 333.33 |
| Fracture Foil Japan Showcase in English | 10 | 0.66% | 0.07% | 1515.15 |
| Fracture Foil Japan Showcase in Japanese | 10 | 0.33% | 0.03% | 3030.30 |
Holy #$%#$ that is some rare loot to drop! One in 3000 packs is up there, equivalent to pulling a serialized card out of Assassin’s Creed packs.
However, that 1 in 3030 has a big caveat: It’s 1 in 1000 in the Japanese-language packs. We got this same breakdown in Duskmourn, and there’s not a huge price gap, just a few percent between the English and the Japanese versions. For the English, though, that 1515 is still a huge number, roughly the same as getting a textured foil out of the OTP subset of Outlaws of Thunder Junction. Some of those textured foils are impressively cheap at the moment, and I know I’ve picked some in the past as great spec targets.
The Mana Foils ought to hold a nice premium here too, considering that it takes a thousand packs to open a specific one. That’s up there with the rarest pulls from All Will Be One, the concept Praetors. The Mana foils are a good treatment to have, up there with the Fractured foils, and I’m looking forward to seeing this pattern used more.
Finally, I want to call out the Special Guests here. Dropping at a rate of 1/180 packs, that’s almost twice as common as they were in the last couple of sets, so if you want any of the newest ten, you’d do well to hold off a bit and let the supply build up. Their prices should fall faster than the SPG of Duskmourn or Bloomburrow.
I hope this information helps your buying, and as always, please look me up on Twitter or on the ProTrader Discord if you’ve got questions or want to call out my errors. Happy Pack-Cracking!
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.