Welcome to the latest installment of Mana Math, where I take a bunch of facts and figures that Wizards dumps on us and I turn it into a simple, understandable answer to the burning question: How hard is it to get the cards we want?

The math is pretty straightforward, but Wizards likes to obfuscate things, because they don’t want us to know specifics. As an example, thanks to The One Ring and the other serialized cards, we know exactly how many Collector Booster packs they printed of both the Holiday Edition and the summer edition. And from there, we know how many copies there are of each mythic, rare, uncommon and common from those packs. 

They don’t like it when we know all of that, so they try to hide a lot of it, but they are required by assorted laws to print your odds for each potential pull. So let’s break down the numbers, and see what we can see. 

To be clear, I’m focused on the Collector Boosters, for two reasons: First, they have never gone back and reprinted Collector Boosters, as far as we know. Closest is the LOTR Holiday Edition, and there’s no sign that they are going to do something like that here.

Our focus will be the last five slots of the Collector Booster. Let’s begin with three of those slots, and if you want Wizards’ breakdown, here is the link. Here’s my table to translate:

For the purposes of these tables, MSRP is $38 per CB, which is $456/box. They are currently selling for more than $750/box, and so I’m rounding the pack cost to $60/pack, or $720/box. I realize prices are fluctuating, and you might be able to get them cheaper, but you can’t get a large amount for a lot less, and the average is easier to comprehend.

Also, for this set, when they refer to Booster Fun, they mean one of the following treatments: Artist Rare, Woodblock Rare, Borderless Character, Borderless Lands, and EA Legendary Cards. 

It’s notable that you have three chances at a specific card with these slots, but they are guaranteeing that a maximum of one will be foil. You might get zero. The chances are a touch conditional, but not enough to make a notable difference when you’re at percentages like these. Keep in mind that you’re only at 8% per slot to get a foil anyway, so only about 32% of Collector Boosters would have even one foil. Further, of that 8%, 5.8% is going to be Traditional Foil EA rares from the Commander set. (Some awesome rares in there, though!) Diabolical!

I also want to point out that there’s a treatment which isn’t on this list: EA versions of the original art for the 8 face commanders, which can only be opened in the bundles that comes with two legendary EA cards, and the Collector Booster Sample packs. We aren’t given percentages, so I’m running with the idea that all are equal and with 163 options, over two slots, you’ve got a 1/81.5 of getting the specific EA you want.

Then we get to what might be the sweetest slot of all, but also the most swingy. The FCA slot, FINAL FANTASY Through the Ages, has an array of cards, and here’s the breakdown:

Most interesting tidbit here is that the foils and nonfoils will have exactly the same amount in circulation from Collector Boosters, but nonfoils can be opened in Play Boosters. According to Wizards, you have a 1 in 3 chance of opening a nonfoil FCA in Play Boosters, with a 63.25% for that card to be uncommon, 29.75% to be rare, and 7% to be foil.

So if you open 1000 Play Boosters, statistics say you’ll get 210 Uncommons, 99 rares, 23 mythics. Roughly, that would be 12 of each uncommon, 3 of each rare, and 1.5 of each mythic. Out of a thousand packs!

I fully expect the price on nonfoil uncommon FCAs to drop dramatically over time, rares and mythics will still be hard to pull but there will be a fair amount more of the nonfoils out there, thanks to the Play Boosters.

The last slot has all foils, including some Surge foils, and maybe even some Chocobos!

I’m estimating your chances at a colored Chocobo at 0.03% because all the others add up to 99.97% and the serialized is such a tiny percentage that it doesn’t matter. 

Look again, your eyes don’t lie. It will be twice as difficult to pull a FCA foil of one rarity as it will a Surge Foil Borderless (with the number in the background) of that same rarity. The Chocobos might have all the attention, but I will be watching early prices closely to see if people underprice the FCA foils or overprice the Surge Borderless. 

You may have noticed some overlap, and for the sake of being a completionist, here’s a table with your chances for some specific subtypes that show up in more than one slot. It’s not a big bump, but it’s a bump and we’re going for the 100% here.

Finally, let’s talk about the xx/77 Golden Chocobos. We know how many there are, and if we fill in the print run, we can get to percentages and odds. Here’s a table for you:

We think the print run for FIN will be a bit bigger than the LOTR main set, and we’re estimating that the Collector Booster print run is just under 4 million packs. Roughly, it’ll take you 50,000 packs to catch the golden bird, and if you do, there’s enough collectors out there to give you a sweet pack of greens. 

If you have questions or god forbid, I made errors, please reach out to me on social media. The ProTrader Discord is the best choice by far, and we can merrily argue over thousandths of a percent. Good luck in 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 co-host 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.