Welcome to the latest installment of the Mana Math series, this time talking about Innistrad Remastered! This set has reprints of previous showcase frames, it has borderless art, movie poster art, and even a single serialized card in the progenitor himself, Edgar Markov. 

We haven’t gotten all the previews yet, but they told us enough information that I can confidently write out how many packs it will take to get a card with a certain treatment, in foil or nonfoil. So let’s get to the numbers, and see what we can see.

In the Collecting Innistrad Remastered article, the information we need is spread out, regarding how many cards there are in each frame, but if you read carefully, it’s all in there. I’ve assembled it into a handy table for you.

With that laid out, we can now look at the categories and percentages Wizards lays out for us for our nonfoil pulls from a Collector Booster:

• 2 Non-foil Booster Fun rare or mythic rare cards
  • Each slot can drop a non-foil movie poster card 8.7% of the time.
  • Each slot can drop a retro frame rare (41.7%) or mythic rare (14.8%) card.
  • Each slot can drop a different type of Booster Fun rare (29.6%) or mythic rare (5.2%) card.

And with this, we can make a table to tell us the drop rates: 

They lump the Borderless, Fang, and Equinox frames together because they don’t want to make it easy on us, but math cannot be defeated!

None of these nonfoils are particularly difficult to pull, especially with two nonfoil slots, so when this product lands, the special frame nonfoils will be especially deep and might represent a very cheap entry point on some of these cards. The Movie Posters are the ones I’m most interested in, even though they haven’t all been revealed yet.

• 1 Traditional foil Booster Fun rare or mythic rare card
  • There is a 10% chance for a traditional foil movie poster card.
  • In less than 1% of Collector Boosters, this is replaced with a serialized double rainbow foil movie poster Edgar Markov.
  • There is a 41.1% chance for a traditional foil retro frame rare card.
  • There is a 14.6% chance for a traditional foil retro frame mythic rare card.
  • There is a 29.2% chance for a borderless, showcase equinox, or showcase fang rare card.
  • There is a 5.1% chance for a borderless, showcase equinox, or showcase fang mythic rare card.

And with this data, we can calculate our odds of pulling a foil.

Compared to the last couple of sets, these treatments are downright easy to pull from the INR packs, especially compared to the drop rates of Fractured Foils in Foundations, as the most recent example. Those packs’ easiest foil drop were any Foil Extended-Art rare, at 131 packs to get a specific card. 

Innistrad Remastered is a bit more expensive, but to make up for it, nothing besides the serialized Edgar Markov is terribly difficult to get out of these packs. Statistically, you could get one of each of the special foils (aside from the serialized) in a mere ten boxes of Collector Boosters. 

I want to take a beat here and do some comparisons with Ravnica Remastered, a set that wildly underperformed expectations. There, the hardest pull was Traditional Foil Retro Frame Mythic Rares, and those took 245 packs to get a specific card, or a little over twice as many packs needed compared to this new set.

It’s also worth using RVR as a comparison point for trying to figure the relative rarity of the Edgar Markov. For RVR, and the 64 potential serialized cards, it was exactly 1% to get any card, and 6400 packs to get a specific card.

With that ratio of 6400 packs, and 500 Edgars out there, that’s a print run of 3.2 million Collector Boosters, same as RVR. The lower drop rate of the other cards has me thinking it’s likely around half that, if not less. The Holiday Edition of the Lord of the Rings set was 1.5 million. Let’s do a little more math, and see where we can land. Remember, we know it’s less than 1%, but it’s likely a lot less than that.

Our initial estimate for the print run was 1.25 million packs, but after some more checking, we think it’s higher, at around the 2.5 million mark. That would be lower than Ravnica Remastered’s number of 3.2 million, a set that was underwhelming at the drop but has grown over the past year.

That many packs means it’s about 5000 packs to crack a serialized Markov, which is pretty darn rare in the scheme of these things. Are there 500 Vampires players with the deep pockets needed? We’ll find out.

As we get more information, I’ll update this section with more concrete data, but for now, that’s the best estimate I’ve got.

As for the rest of the set, I hope that this glimpse at the underlying numbers will help you make good decisions about the things you want to buy and when you want to buy them. If you have questions about the math or the methods, please feel free to reach out on social media or 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.