Two weeks ago, in the Mana Math, I broke down the percentages and arrived at a number for how many Collector Boosters there are for Reality Fracture. Six million Collector Boosters out there, nearly double the amount there were for the first Lord of the Rings expansion in 2023.
So if there were 3.3 million packs then, and 6 million now, what happens if we extrapolate the sets in between?
And once we have a print run, we can unlock so many more numbers!
So let’s journey down a path of estimations, albeit good ones, and figure out what we can learn from a print run.
There have been 24 sets with Collector Boosters between Lord of the Rings and Reality Fracture. We have two endpoints, and it’s pretty straightforward to calculate the steps along the way if it was a smooth, linear progression.
| Set | Date Released | Approx # of CB packs |
| Lord of the Rings | 06/2023 | 3.3 million |
| Commander Masters | 08/2023 | 3,408,000 |
| Wilds of Eldraine | 09/2023 | 3,516,000 |
| Lost Caverns of Ixalan | 11/2023 | 3,624,000 |
| Ravnica Remastered | 01/2024 | 3,732,000 (Actually this was 3.2 million packs, according to WotC.) |
| Murders at Karlov Manor | 02/2024 | 3,840,000 |
| Fallout | 03/2024 | 3,948,000 |
| Outlaws of Thunder Junction | 04/2024 | 4,056,000 |
| Modern Horizons 3 | 06/2024 | 4,164,000 |
| Assassin’s Creed | 07/2024 | 4,272,000 |
| Bloomburrow | 08/2024 | 4,380,000 |
| Duskmourn | 09/2024 | 4,488,000 |
| Foundations | 11/2024 | 4,596,000 |
| Innistrad Remastered | 01/2025 | 4,704,000 |
| Aetherdrift | 02/2025 | 4,812,000 |
| Tarkir: Dragonstorm | 04/2025 | 4,920,000 |
| Final Fantasy | 06/2025 | 5,028,000 |
| Edge of Eternities | 08/2025 | 5,136,000 |
| Spider-Man | 09/2025 | 5,244,000 |
| Avatar: The Last Airbender | 11/2025 | 5,352,000 |
| Lorwyn Eclipsed | 01/2026 | 5,460,000 |
| Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles | 03/2026 | 5,568,000 |
| Secrets of Strixhaven | 04/2026 | 5,676,000 |
| Marvel Super Heroes | 06/2026 | 5,784,000 |
| The Hobbit | 08/2026 | 5,892,000 |
| Reality Fracture | 10/2026 | 6 million |
So many steps along the way!
As I do a lot of math for Magic, this is pretty straightforward: Difference between the start and end is 2.7 million, divided by 25, gives us roughly 108,000 more packs each time.
We need to give a caveat here: it’s highly unlikely that there was a smooth transition over the last three years. Incremental progress is possible, but it’s much more probable that there were bigger jumps every so often. Could have been quarterly, could have been every half year. I put it on the table above but I want to reiterate that Ravnica Remastered is a known number at 3.2 million packs, since they told us that you were 1% to get any serialized and there are 64 serialized cards with 500 copies each. I’m content with the average rate of progress here as my metric for all the sets, but I want to reiterate that this is an estimate, not a piece of hard data.
There were 20 mythics and 60 rares in Wilds of Eldraine, and there are 25 mythics and 65 rares in Reality Fracture. More Collector Boosters (nearly double!) means more copies of cards in the world. There’s more players, or at least we’re told that there is player growth, but that’s still a boatload of Collector Boosters filled with regular-frame cards (foil and nonfoil) and the proportion hasn’t grown at the same rate as the print run.
So for regular-frame rares and mythics, it seems clear that there’s more of those for new sets than there were for older sets. I’ll be looking into these numbers more closely in the future.
Having the print run does give us a very intriguing number, though: Once the odds for a specific card have been calculated (something I’ve done for literally every set that has Collector Boosters) and we have a number for the print run, now we have an estimate for how many copies there are of each card.
Have another table, this time focused on one specific type of card. (as an example, this is the number of copies for Dragonscale Scalding Tarn, not for all five fetches.)
| Card/Set/Treatment | Estimated Print Run | Estimated # of copies |
| WOT Confetti Foil | 3,516,000 | 3,981 |
| REX Emblem Variants (LCI Bonus) | 3,624,000 | 953 |
| OTP Textured Foil | 4,056,000 | 2,704 |
| BLB Raised Foil Anime | 4,380,000 | 7,633 |
| DSK Fracture Foils (English) | 4,488,000 | 1,346 |
| FDN Mythic Mana Foils | 4,596,000 | 4,325 |
| TDM Dragonscale Fetchland | 4,920,000 | 9,840 |
| FIN Neon Chocobo | 5,028,000 | 3,016 |
| EOS Galaxy Foil Poster Mythic Rare | 5,136,000 | 2,568 |
| SOA Silver Scroll JPN Mythic Rare | 5,676,000 | 8,705 |
Some of these numbers surprise me, and I want to think about them. The Textured Foils from OTP are likely the outlier in terms of rarity vs. price, with some of these available for under $20. I’m really surprised to see that there’s about 10k of each Dragonscale fetchland out there, considering the price, but we’re definitely looking at a confluence of ‘things that are commonly played’ and ‘the best creature type’ plus ‘unique foiling’.
Four thousand of each confetti foil from Eldraine’s Enchanting Tales seems about right, especially three years later. Same with the REX emblem cards, as we knew these were very difficult to get from packs even at the beginning.
The Chocobos are perhaps the biggest surprise for me here, as each of them are around two grand and there are more than twice as many of those as there are of the Duskmourn Fracture Foils.
Again, I want to reiterate the data that’s brought us here, and the chain of estimations. We’re pretty confident in the six million number for Reality Fracture CBs, and I plotted a linear graph from Lord of the Rings to the present. With that estimated print run, and the previous work I’ve done in the Mana Math series, I’m confident in these being good estimates, but far from perfect or precise.
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.




















