Spider-Man will be completely previewed by the end of today, which is two weeks ahead of the prerelease. I have to admit, the schedule feels funky, like Final Fantasy was ended a bit fast and Edge of Eternities has lasted a bit longer than usual, but with so many sets, everything is different from the times that used to be.
This set has an MSRP of $38 for a Collector Booster, but on TCGPlayer, they are going for at least double that, on an individual or a box price. It’s also a smaller set, in terms of the number of cards, so they have filled the Collector Boosters with a range of treatments and styles, then given us an article with lots of obfuscations. My goal today is to break it all down and tell you have many packs you’d have to open to pull the cards you want.
Generally speaking, it’s easier to buy the singles you want rather than open packs and hope for those specific cards. Your odds are better in Spider-Man than they were in Final Fantasy for most things because of the smaller set size, and that’s a theme you’ll see in these numbers. I’ve put in the MSRP price of the packs, just because I can easily imagine the prices of these packs varying widely. Right now it’s double, could go up, could go lower.
There’s four slots we care most about in the Collector Boosters, and the first two are nonfoil Booster Fun:
All of these drop rates are within expectations, although the mythic rare scene cards are pretty high at 125 packs to get a single copy. Nonfoils will drain out a lot slower than the foil versions will, though, but tournament players might well go for nonfoils first.
Borderless Source Material Cards: This is very similar to the FCA sheet, although it’s got the MAR set code. Formally known as Source Material, it’s a series of iconic comic book covers done into Magic cards. I have high hopes for this sheet, especially at these drop rates:
As a point of comparison, in the Final Fantasy sheet, it was 250 packs to get a foil rare from that set and 500 to get a foil mythic. So yes, it’s about 5-10 times easier to get a nonfoil, and 2-3 times easier to get a foil, depending on if the card would be rare or uncommon. They could have put those designations in again, but no, they made it easy on us for the Spider-Man sheet, designating all of the cards as mythic. (If they had done the same in FCA, everything the same rarity, it would have been 128 packs for a specific foil.)
I wanted to take this a step further, since they made these much more common than the Final Fantasy bonus sheet. So I sat down with the mythic drop rates, for foils and nonfoils, and tried to figure out how the drop rates on the MAR sheet compare to an actual in-set mythic rare in a regular frame.
To do this, I had to estimate the relative number of Play Boosters sold vs. the number of Collector Boosters sold. We don’t have exact figures on this but based on assorted industry chatter we’ve decided on a ratio of one Collector Booster sold for every three Play Boosters sold. Expressed as percentages, that means Play Boosters are 75% of the number of total packs sold for Spider-Man. The absence of Commander decks with sample packs for this set eliminates a variable that has been present with other sets.
Again, that’s an estimate, and if we get better info, we’ll update this post accordingly. But with that ratio, and with the drop rates in both types of boosters, I estimate that the ratio of mythics to MAR cards is about 3:2, meaning that for every two copies of a particular MAR card, there’s three copies of a particular in-set mythic.
This ratio is present for foils and nonfoils, which is an interesting surprise.
Now as a reminder, we’re starting from a hype cycle that is already inflated, and so we’ll see some sky-high prices for cards from this sheet, especially as people notice the same visual features as the FCA sheet. My initial expectation here will be to sell early, and wait a couple of weeks to get what you can as people crack boxes and put their stock online. Given the higher prices of boxes, the individual card prices may never come down, but FCA prices have mostly trended downwards and I hope the MAR cards will as well.
Complicating this plan is that these cards, as reskins of some legendary comic book covers, will pull interest from those same comic collectors. Just like we weren’t ready for the Final Fantasy collectors, we might not be ready for the comic folks to come storming into this hobby too. It is entirely possible that the extra collecting pressure on these cards, plus the rising price of boxes, leads to everything only going up.
I don’t think that will happen, but it’s definitely possible. I’d still be on the ‘sell into early hype, then wait’ plan.
The final slot in the Collector Booster will be filled with all sorts of wonderful shiny goodies:
Now note that these categories leave out four types of pulls, and only add up to 98.1%. In the Collecting article, we’re told that all four of these groups of cards are each less than 1%:
7 Textured Foil Costume Change
1 Borderless Gauntlet Soul Stone
2 Mythic Rare Scene Cards
1 Borderless Cosmic Foil Soul Stone
Now we’ve got to get into some assumptions. I’m being as logical as I can from here on out, but these are still guesses. Please feel free to disagree, I can only make my best guesses about the data in the absence of specifics.
There’s 1.9% left over, and 11 cards. If it’s evenly split, that’s 1 in 579 packs to get any of these eleven particular cards. That’s already a lot harder to get, as each of the other mythics are at most 187 packs. I think we can do better, though, especially knowing that the Soul Stone variants are hyper-premium.
I’m going to presume that the two mythic rare scene cards have a total drop rate of 0.9%, to fit the <1% designation. I’ll do the same for the seven textured foils. That leaves us with 0.1% for all special Soul Stones. Already a 1 in 1,000 drop rate at that point, I went with two possible ratios of Gauntlet to Cosmic. Here’s a table with these presumptions, and the two possible distributions.
In the first pair of lines, the two sets of Soul Stones are in a 3:1 ratio (three Gauntlet foils for every Cosmic foil) and the second is 19:1, leading to some absurd rarities for the most chase versions. I think the first set of numbers is more likely, because it’s in line with what the super-rare drops have been in the past. As examples, the rarest non-serialized drops have been the Lost Legends rares (Roughly 46,700 packs for a specific Legends rare out of DMU), the first set of Surge Foil Realms and Relics (~3,900 packs),and the Jurassic Park Emblem Foils (3,800). We estimated Sothera’s super-rare version to be around two to three thousand packs for a single copy, but it’s impossible for outsiders to know for sure.
I repeat, I do not know what the actual drop rates are for these eleven cards, and these numbers are estimates. If Wizards gives us better data (they likely won’t, alas) then I’ll update this with more precise and attributable numbers.
If you want to discuss the percentages and math from this article, please reach out on social media or the ProTrader Discord. And good luck, if you decide to open some 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.