Welcome to the latest in the ongoing saga to take one set of numbers, spread out over many pages, and create easy-to-understand numbers. I do the work and the calculations To figure out the things we all want most: What am I likely to get when I open a Collector Booster?
My data is all taken from the Collecting Tarkir: Dragonstorm article and from the numbers of cards available in the set. Let’s get into it!
There’s three sets of numbers we need to look at today. This is information that ever since the Lord of the Rings sets, Wizards tries to obfuscate. They don’t want us to know how many of each card is printed, and that’s information we perfectly had in both LTR sets because they gave us the drop rate for those serialized cards.
Since then, they don’t tell us exact information, just enough to avoid lawsuits. They also move around the information they are required to tell us, to make it difficult, but I’ve got the measure of their current methods, and while they might get more obscure later, right now, we can get lots of information.
Today, we’re going to focus on the last three cards in a Collector Booster. The other slots have lands, commons and uncommons, and the Commander reprints, and those are much more prevalent than the cards put into these last slots. They are also generally worth less money, and so we don’t need to focus on them. If you really want to know about foil Dragon’s Eye lands (some badass lands, respectable) then you’ll get one about every 13 packs. If you want a specific land, multiply that by five for 65 packs, or just about two and a half boxes.
Our first table is going to address the two special nonfoil slots in a Collector Booster.
This is relatively straightforward. Nothing is crazy rare, especially because you’re getting two slots. The odds per pack are in bold, because you get a second bite at the apple. Should some of the mythics in a Draconic frame become tournament staples, it’ll be good to know how often they were pulled from packs as people build nonfoil playsets. I especially want to call out the lands, at roughly 1 in 34 packs. These lands have a lot of potential, especially the blue one if control decks get out of hand (or in the mirror!) and we might need to know how many of those were running around.
Also note that rare clan frame cards with the solid black text box are going to be the pull half the time per slot. Just over 25% of Collector Boosters are going to have two of those, back to back. These Boosters have always been swingy, but barring some awesome rares, those are going to sting pretty badly.
Now, let’s get to the spicy things. The last slot in a Collector Booster is where all the juicy foils can be found. Here’s the complete breakdown.
The mythics are pretty darn rare, but numbers in the range of 250 are pretty standard by now. We’re used to that, and while it’s not common…it’s not going to be mega-difficult either, for the Draconic, Clan, or Reversible cards. That sort of drop rate tracks with the ‘premium but not top-tier’ level of rarity we’ve been seeing in Standard sets for a while, so that distribution hasn’t been changed much.
There is a change past that, though. The Special Guests for TDM are about a third more likely to show up than they were in Aetherdrift and twice as likely as in Duskmourn Collector Boosters. No one’s going to be complaining about extra fetchlands, though, so while we might get to spec on them I’ll be paying closer attention to the Ultimatums.
Rarest of all will be the Dragonscale fetches and in a tier beyond that, the Halo Foil Ghostfire cards. We don’t have any Fracture Foils showing up at 1 in 1500 or anything wild like previous sets had. Instead, the Dragonscale fetches are twice as likely to show up in a pack as a Halo Foil Ghostfire Dracogenesis. Each category is 1%, yes, but because there’s five fetches and ten Halo Foil Ghostfire cards, we’ll end up with twice the quantity of Dragonscale lands. (Which is good. I need a set.)
I’m surprised they went away from the Fracture Foil model, considering how successful that treatment has been, but there’s unique art to the Ghostfire cards and that helps. Still, it’s important to know that for every two Fracture Foils of a card, there’s three Halo Foil Ghostfire of a card. (For English language, anyway. Japanese-language Fracture Foils are criminally underrated and overlooked, as I’ve written about and as we’ve covered on MTG Fast Finance)
Finally, let’s talk about the serialized Mox Jasper. Wizards no longer gives us precise information about the drop rate as they did early on, instead relying on the vague “less than 1%” but we can make some estimations. We know roughly how much profit Wizards makes from a Standard set’s Collector Boosters, and we can also surmise that because LOTR was a premium set, there’s more Standard printed.
From there, it’s math:
Our estimates indicate that the print run for Collector Boosters is something like 4 million packs, or about 167,000 boxes of product. This is based on the print run of the two LOTR sets, the distributor pricing, and the relative profit gained. This is not locked in the way we were in Lord of the Rings, and if I could give you such certainty I would. If Wizards released the right data, I’d update this chart. With this model, it should take around 8,000 Collector Booster packs to open a serialized Mox Jasper. Or your odds are 0.013%, if that number is easier for you to think of.
I’ve also included a breakdown of what those numbers mean for the cards that will be the most widely used, the Dragonscale fetches. At our estimate, there’s 40,000 total, or eight thousand of each land. That means each Dragonscale land will have roughly 16 copies in circulation for each serialized Mox Jasper.
I understand that there will be greater demand for the special fetches, and so the ratio isn’t as important as the play pattern, but useful data remains useful data.
If you have questions about my methods or the outcomes, please stop by my social media pages, leave a comment, or join the ProTrader Discord for lots more insights. Good luck cracking your packs!
Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) 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.