Welcome back to another edition of Mana Math! The Secrets of Strixhaven have been revealed, and the Mystical Archive opened once again! This time, instead of etched foils that look disgustingly similar to the regular foils and have the same collector number (hurts my soul just to type that) we’ve got a return of one of my favorite foil treatments: The Silver Scroll.
Let’s get into the odds, the chances. Wizards is legally required to give a certain amount of information about your chances with booster packs, and they meet that standard by spreading the information way out. All I want to do is put it into a couple graphs, and answer the question: How many Collector Boosters do you need to open to get the card you want?
The overview, in case you like knowing the core methods I use: We’re given the chances of pulling a type of card from a slot in a booster pack. We’re also given how many of each of those types exist in a set. A little multiplication, then take the reciprocal, and there you go, an easy-to-understand number.
I’m not including Play Boosters in this breakdown, because the chances are so often ‘less than 1%’ that I’m estimating like mad. I prefer to do that as little as possible. Just know that if you snag a Japanese-language Mystical Archive mythic rare from an English-language Play Booster, you’re way ahead on your luck rolls!
To begin, let’s look at the main subset, the Mystical Archive. There’s actually three slots which can give you cards from this set, so yes, you can open a triple-MA pack, for better or for worse. Uncommons are in two early slots, nonfoils and regular foil English and Japanese versions are in a different one, and the final slot has the JPN Silver Scroll copies. I’ve collected them all into one table for you.
Yes, you’re seeing this correctly. There appears to be no traditional foil versions of the Japanese-language Mystical Archive cards. It’s nonfoil or the Silver Scrolls, nothing in the middle. There was a passage in the collecting article that made me think those existed:
It seems this was an error, but we’ll see. If traditional foils pop up, if our information is updated, I’ll update this set of tables.
What’s most interesting here is that the Uncommon Silver Scrolls are going to be proportionally rarer than the Rare/Mythic Rare ones. If you look at the number of packs needed, you need 6x the packs to get the Scrolls foil as opposed to the regular foils. By comparison, you’ll only need 3.3x the packs at the higher rarities. This also gives us an idea of what demand will be like, if the multipliers for the Silver Scrolls are higher or lower than the math would indicate.
Next, let’s look at the table for the nonfoils and then the foils. These are separate slots, but don’t add up to 100% due to the split of Mystical Archive cards.
Notably, the Extended-Art rare cards are very frequent hits here, and while Collector Boosters have always been swingy, you’re really going to feel it in this set. Keep in mind when you’re opening packs that 60% of CBs have an FEA rare in the last slot! That’s 7.2 of your 12 packs. And then for the nonfoils it is 70%, or 8.4 out of 12! Taken together, this means 42% (or about 5 of your 12) CBs are double-EA-rare packs. Blech.
Special Guest foils are about 15% harder to get this set than they were in Lorwyn Eclipsed, and roughly 25% tougher to pull than they were in Edge of Eternities. Notable increase, we’ll have to see if the market demand ends up causing a similar increase in prices.
As for the Textless Serialized Double Rainbow Foil Emeritus of Ideation, that’s a full-on guess. Here’s how it charts out:
We know that Wizards doesn’t like to give an exact print run anymore. However, we can estimate based on previous sets we did know, and the likely proportion of profit they report in. For a little context, Lord of the Rings Holiday edition was at 1.5 million packs, and the main summer set was 3.3 million. We’re estimating this is closer to Lorwyn Eclipsed’s print run, which was probably in the realm of 2 to 2.5 million packs. So I’m giving the estimate of about 1 in 5,000 Collector Boosters to snag a serialized card. Again, if we get better information, I’ll be happy to update this post.
Overall, note that the drop rates for this set are pretty reasonable. Mythic Rare Silver Scroll cards are less difficult to pull than Fracture Foils, and the Rares/Uncommons compare favorably to other recent chase cards. There’s other factors at play, of course, like Commander appeal and art quality, but mostly, this set has an easier time getting just about everything than recent sets have given us. I’m not saying they will be cheaper, or easier to get from folks who opened them, just that there’s a bit more out there than you might be expecting.
As always, if you’d like to discuss my methods or the results, please feel free to chime in on social media, or especially in the Protrader Discord. Good luck with whatever you decide to open!
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 an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.