I know it seems odd to be writing about the Pro Tour in two weeks, when the new set is out now.

My financial advice for people playing in prerelease events remains the same as always: Sell it all. Find someone who wants your lands. Move it and don’t wait around. Someone will see the sweet foil you opened and want to trade for it right now, not realizing (or not caring) that it’ll be 1/3 the price in two weeks.

So whatever you can move, right now, do that.

As for the Pro Tour in Philadelphia, on Feb 17-19, that’s a more complicated plan.

It used to be that Pro Tours were such big events that we (MTGPrice writers) would do round-by-round coverage of the Constructed games. Being featured on camera tends to do amazing things to a card. Here’s an example I made money from:

For context: In July 2017, Pro Tour Hour of Devastation happened, and put six Mono-Red decks into the Top 8. All of them were running three or four copies of Hazoret, who is really the perfect top-end card for an aggro deck. Because so many top results included this card, and so many on-camera matches showed players just wrecking with the card, the price took a huge jump.

Personally, I bought copies that Friday for under $5 and resold them within two weeks at $15-$20, before fees. I even wrote about it that Friday, which when looking through the archives, you might note that we featured round-by-round coverage of the PT. Yes, Hazoret is an example from five years ago, but that’s a really clear example of on-camera play plus tournament results turning a $5 mythic into a $20 mythic.

Wizards really wants this era back. They don’t like to give away the money, to spend the cash on streaming and commentating, but there’s a measurable impact on card prices and therefore tournament participation. 

What we’re looking for is card prices moving because of these results. If the prices move significantly, and sell at the new prices, then we’re looking at a notable chunk of the population who meet the following characteristics:

1. They want to play in paper tournaments
2. They have a tournament in mind that they are buying for
3. They are willing to invest into a deck that is good for that format.

There’s a lot to be said for the growth of Arena during the pandemic, and how it papered over the complete loss of paper play/transitioned online play, but when Standard was a healthy, thriving format, everything at Wizards was that much better. A couple years after that PT, we got a Modern-lite format in Pioneer, which is notable for skipping the fetchlands and some of the more busted mechanics. 

Pioneer doesn’t rotate, and that’s the format that PT ONE will have. Standard can breed some resentment with more casual players, because your cards are probably going to lose value and they are definitely going to rotate out of the card pool. Pioneer skips that problem, but trades it for only some cards being relevant, both in the metagame and in the financial sense.

At this point, I’m waiting on seeing Pioneer pushing prices, and same with Standard. The smallest subgroup for those three characteristics is probably those who have a paper tournament that they want to play in, because so many stores closed and not many have opened. 

It’s not there yet. There’s a small effect, as we can see the card that Nathan Steuer used to overpower people over and over again in the October 2022 World Championships did bump from a dollar to $2.50:

As a counterexample, though, Haunted Ridge was in a tremendous number of decks that weekend, is a big-time Commander card, and is also used in Pioneer. It’s grown in price, but that’s started to trend downwards at it looks towards rotation in a few months:

This is the edition that paper tournaments would be exerting pressure on if there was a lot of demand. Not the foils, not the FEA, not the Double Feature versions. It’s hanging out at $10, which is still very good for a rare, but given the decks it is in, I would have expected it to keep the $12-$15 price a bit longer.

So to put it all together, I’m not expecting to see any big jumps this weekend, at least none that have staying power. I won’t be shocked at some cards having minor gains, but there’s nothing on the horizon that makes me think there’s long-term use going on. When I see cards getting big gains from tournament results, I’ll rethink this policy, but for now, I’m avoiding trying to cash in on one event’s results.

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Welcome back to this ongoing series of attempts to calculate exactly how lucky the luckiest pulls are for every set with Collector Boosters.

Phyrexia: All Will Be One (hereafter written as ONE) has some very interesting formulations, and every slot appears to have a variation in distribution. Thankfully, Wizards has given us a lot more information about ONE than they have for previous sets, making my task both easier and more difficult.

So let’s get into it, and calculate exactly our odds for opening certain packs, then compare those rates with chase cards from previous expansions.

All of today’s math will come from the Collecting Phyrexia: All Will Be One article, or explained using that math as a basis. That article has specific percentages, which I’ll copy over.

Also, we need to refer to this image to talk about what slot has what:

We are going to focus on the step-and-compleat slot, and the final slot with all of the Booster Fun treatments. 

All of the numbers we’ve been given are percentages that have been rounded, and that’s a source of error I can’t control for.

In the Step-and Compleat slot, we’re given these percentages: “There are 6 commons (38%), 7 uncommons (29%), 26 rares (22%), and 28 mythic rares (11%)” Normally, I’d talk about the distribution of 10:3:1:0.5 that Draft Boosters have, but that math doesn’t work out. What we do know is that the cards which appear the least, the 28 mythics, make up 11% of your potential pulls.

What we do is multiply the percentage by the number of potential cards. In this case, that’s 11% times 1/28 to get a chance of 0.39% for a certain mythic. In terms of packs opened, you need to divide the denominator by the numerator, also known as taking the reciprocal. That gives you approximately 254.5 packs to open a certain mythic.

Let’s make this into a table for the Step-and-Compleat categories:

Step-and-Compleat Foils	Percent chance for any card of that category	Percent chance for a specific card of that category	# of CBs to open one specific card from that category
Mythic Rare	28%	0.39%	254.5
Rare	22%	0.84%	118.2
Uncommon	29%	4.14%	24.1
Common	38%	6.3%	15.7

One thing we need to pay attention to: There are multiple versions of cards available in this slot, such as four different Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines with this foil treatment. You’ve got the same odds to pull any variation from the slot. 

The other important slot is the final one, that compares everything possible except for the Step-and-Compleat versions. This includes something we usually don’t get: Foil Extended-Art versions of Commander and Jumpstart cards. Now here, we’ve been given some percentages for individual variations, rather than the overall number like we’re used to. As an example, we get “5 mythic rare Phyrexian-language planeswalkers (3%)” in the nonfoil slot. Because the nonfoil slot makes up 51% of the distribution of cards in the foil slot, I’m going to go ahead and run these rates in another table, taking the nonfoil rates and multiplying by .51:

Nonfoil Booster Fun Treatment	Percent chance for any card of that category	Percent chance for a specific card of that category	# of CBs to open one specific card from that category
5 rare borderless “fast lands”	13%	2.6%	38.4
16 rare borderless ichor cards	41%	2.54%	39.3
10 rare borderless manga cards	25%	2.5%	40
10 mythic rare borderless ichor cards	13%	1.3%	76.9
5 mythic rare borderless manga planeswalkers	3%	0.6%	166.7
5 mythic rare Phyrexian-language planeswalkers	3%	0.6%	166.7
5 mythic rare borderless concept praetors	2%	0.4%	250
Borderless Elesh Norn by Junji Ito	<1%	0.2%	500
Phyrexian-language Elesh Norn	<1%	0.2%	500

The estimate of 500 packs is because Elesh Norn has two extra variants, the borderless manga and the Phyrexian, that the other Praetors don’t have in this set. Five variants in one set! 

(If you really want the math: All copies of all variants for one card should be equal to all variants of another card at the same rarity. Since Elesh Norn has two extra variants, I split the rarity for the borderless concept Praetors, as those are all add-ins to this set. When we get to foils, these will be plenty rare enough. If I get more concrete data, fromWizards or large operations, I will update this and the running tally.)

Now we’re basically going to take everything in this table and multiply by .51, because we’re told that for foils, 49% of that slot is the extended-art rares from the set, plus select extended-art Commander and Jumpstart foils. They don’t tell us exactly which are foil options in the article, which is incredibly frustrating. When I have better information there, I will update the section about the FEA cards. There’s no FEA mythics in the main set this time around either–they all got one of the other variant frames.

So here’s the table with everything you can get in that slot, along with my estimates for the FEA cards.

Foil Booster Fun Treatment	Percent chance for any card of that category	Percent chance for a specific card of that category	# of CBs to open one specific card from that category
5 rare borderless “fast lands”	6.63%	1.33%	75.41
16 rare borderless ichor cards	20.91%	1.30%	77.20
10 rare borderless manga cards	12.75%	1.28%	78.43
10 mythic rare borderless ichor cards	6.63%	0.66%	150.83
5 mythic rare borderless manga planeswalkers	1.53%	0.31%	326.80
5 mythic rare Phyrexian-language planeswalkers	1.53%	0.31%	326.80
5 mythic rare borderless concept praetors	1.02%	0.20%	490.20
Borderless Elesh Norn by Junji Ito	0.10%	0.10%	980.39
Phyrexian-language Elesh Norn	0.10%	0.10%	980.39
FEA Main Set Rares	23.89%	0.82%	121.43
FEA JMP/Commander Rares	23.06%	0.82%	121.43
FEA JMP/Commander Mythics	2.06%	0.41%	242.85

Again, as I find out which FEAs are an option and which aren’t, I’ll update this table. This is the rarest possible outcome for the FEA rares/mythics, your odds will only get better from here.

As always, if you notice errors or want to talk about my methods, please reach out in the comments or the ProTrader discord!

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) 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.

Yes, I’m finishing the cycle, the set, I’m covering all the bases.

This week, I’m giving us the math of the last sets I never wrote for, and after that, I can have a full comparison going on for every Collector Booster set. 

These aren’t terribly complicated, and frankly, I’m used to how these stack up, so let’s get to the sets.

Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths

We didn’t have anything fancy going on with the main set here, but we did get a slot dedicated to reskinned monsters. Remember when they had to rename ‘Spacegodzilla, Death Corona’ and it spiked as a meme-level interaction?

Also, the Showcase cards are separate from the FEA cards. The FEA are instead mixed in with the regular foil rares/mythics again. I appreciate that even though a sheet is 121 cards, they have found so many ways to mix and match.

Frame	# at rare	# at mythic
Regular	53	15
Borderless PW	0	3
Showcase	10	5
EA	43	7
Godzilla	6	7

For anything where different rarities are mixed, Wizards uses the booster pack model of distribution, as far as we know. This means for every one copy of a mythic rare, there’s 2 copies of a regular rare, 6 copies of an uncommon, and 20 copies of a common. So in the Godzilla slot, there’s going to be a whole lot of Mothra’s Great Cocoon going around. The pool of options for that slot is 20 Cocoons, 30 of the uncommons (6×5), 10 of the rares(5×2), and 7 mythics, a total of 67.

In the Showcase/Borderless slot, it’s 5/15/20/8 for the C/U/R/M numbers, and given our ratio, the pool of options is 218. Neat trick, pushing in 5 commons and 15 uncommons that will make up about 87% of the pulls from that slot.

For the FEA slot, we’ve got only rares and mythics, but a full set of the regulars mixed in. That means 53 plus 43, doubled, and then add the 22 mythics, for 214. So close!

Frame/Rarity	% chance of any card with that frame/rarity	% chance to open a specific card with that frame/rarity	Approximate number of packs to open a specific card with that frame/rarity
Borderless Planeswalker – Mythic	1.37%	0.46%	218
Showcase Rare	9.17%	0.92%	109
Showcase Mythic	3.2%	0.46%	218
FEA Rare	20.1%	0.93%	107
FEA Mythic	3.3%	0.47%	214
Godzilla Rare	14.9%	2.98%	33.5
Godzilla Mythic	10.4%	1.49%	67

Zendikar Rising

The return of Expeditions, and the unapologetic ‘everyone gets nonfoils as a box topper, but only Collector Boosters get foils’ of this arrangement. 

This was the first set where they just crammed all the good stuff into one slot, and then didn’t mix in the regulars. Separating the regular frame cards just made sure that the value dropped, as it used to be that regular foil mythics and borderless planeswalker mythics were dropping at equal rates. No more of that!

Frame	# at rare	# at mythic
Regular	64	20
Borderless	6	3
Showcase	7	2
EA	51	15
Expeditions	0	30

What we do get, though, is a whole lot. 64 rares, 50 mythics, for a pool of 178. Better odds than a lot of sets! The number of mythics is clearly goosed by the presence of all 30 Expeditions, each of which is classified as a mythic.

Frame/Rarity	% chance of any card with that frame/rarity	% chance to open a specific card with that frame/rarity	Approximate number of packs to open a specific card with that frame/rarity
Borderless Planeswalker – Mythic	1.6%	0.56%	178
Borderless Land – Rare	6.7%	1.1%	89
Showcase Rare	7.9%	1.1%	89
Showcase Mythic	1.1%	0.56%	178
FEA Rare	57.3%	1.1%	89
FEA Mythic	8.4%	0.56%	178
Expedition Mythic	16.9%	0.56%	178

Happily, this works out almost exactly to a point referenced in the Collecting article, that one in six Collector Boosters will have a foil Expedition land. I do love it when a plan comes together.

Core Set 2021

This is where things start getting unusual. This represents the first time that we got multiple versions of the same card, and it’s not just two versions of Ugin, the Spirit Dragon but a full four different versions of Teferi, Master of Time! Later on, they would adjust the collations so that no one card was more plentiful than the others, but this time, each version is expressly added to the pool as its own card.

Frame	# at rare	# at mythic
Regular	53	18
Borderless PW & Reprints	4	8
Showcase	5	9
EA	45	7

The numbers don’t all add up this time, and that’s entirely due to the multiple frames. Irks me, really, but they fix this issue later.

There’s two slots we care about: The last one, with the foil Showcase and Borderless treatments, and the two middle slots that can give FEA rares and mythics. For this set, they dipped back into mixing regular frame foils in. What I haven’t been able to verify is which borderless cards from this set are uncommon. If you know, hit me up on Twitter or our Discord, tell me what research I missed, and I’ll adjust this table.

The Showcase slot has five commons and five uncommons, to go with 18 rares and 17 mythics, for a pool of 175. In the doubled-up slot, there’s 53 regular rares and 18 regular mythics to go with the Extended Art numbers, and that means our magic number is 221. However, there’s two bites at this particular apple, which the table will reflect.

Frame/Rarity	% chance of any card with that frame/rarity	% chance to open a specific card with that frame/rarity	Approximate number of packs to open a specific card with that frame/rarity
Borderless Mythic	4.58%	0.57%	175
Borderless Rare	4.58%	1.14%	87.5
Showcase Mythic	5.1%	0.57%	175
Showcase Rare	5.7%	1.14%	87.5
FEA Mythic	6.3%	0.90%	110.5
FEA Rare	40.7%	1.8%	55.25

Normally, at the end of these articles, I put in a comparison table, but I’m reworking those tables into a living spreadsheet, which will allow me to rank where certain cards fall in comparison to each other. I can tell you, though, that these three sets had better odds than just about anything in more recent times, as Wizards figured out how to balance individual variations and lower chances. The set after ZNR was Commander Legends, where you had a 30% chance of having your foil rare/mythic turn into an Extended Art version, and that’s where the odds skyrocketed.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) 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.

While Throne of Eldraine has been out for several years, it represents the first set with Collector Boosters and therefore, the first time we had a real change in booster packs. Now we could get regular nonfoils, regular foils, Showcase/Extended Art nonfoils, and Showcase/Extended Art foils, the latter of which quickly became THE cards to have in Commander decks. Theros: Beyond Death follows suit, witha special slot for the Constellation foils

We’ve gotten a lot of variations on frames and special subsets since ELD came out, but I’ve had a few requests to run the math on the first sets and see how rare things were from those boosters, as compared to more recent sets.

So with that in mind, let’s do some Fae math!

Throne of Eldraine was the first set to systematically use Extended Art frames. Until then, we did get frameless/borderless treatments, but those always had new art. Extended Art was the same art as the original card, just zoomed in a little to show off more. It also turns the card type into white-text-on-black-background, a reverse of the card name. 

Impressively, Wizards showed some restraint when launching this project. Every card had exactly one variation:

Card Frame	# at Rare	# at Mythic
Regular	53	15
Borderless	0	3
Showcase	5	2
EA	48	10

You could get one of four versions of the card, ranging from most common (regular nonfoil) to most out there (special foil) and the prices of the cards reflects this range.

In the Collector Booster, Wizards had “One slot with 1 foil rare/mythic rare.” Given the incredible shenanigans of a Mystic Archive, Phyrexian Text, or the Lost Legends, this seems almost quaint. Thankfully for us, it’s also very easy to calculate the odds of pulling the more chase cards.

We know that Wizards follows a 10:3:1:0.5 rarity ratio when it comes to commons/uncommons/rares/mythic rares. That means there will be two of any rare for every one of a mythic, and the numbers are simple: 2×53 plus 15 is 121, but doubled because we’ve got all the regular foils and all the special frame foils.

It’s therefore that any particular foil rare is 1:121 to come out of a ELD Collector Booster, and any given foil mythic is 1:242. Interestingly, you have the same odds to pull a regular foil The Great Henge as you do an Extended Art version, but we’ve made the special frame that much more expensive.

Theros: Beyond Death is also a very straightforward calculation, made slightly more complicated by some of the choices Wizards made with the Showcase Constellation frames. Very little of this set is done with different art, something that they don’t really do anymore. 

Frame	# at rare	# at mythic
Regular	53	15
Borderless PW	0	3
Showcase	0	6
EA	50	5

Sagas have no special version, and that’s why the numbers don’t add up cleanly. 

Luckily, Wizards had a handy graphic for what was in these boosters, explaining how Constellation cards wouldn’t be in the same slot as FEA cards.

One slot has the foil Demigods, Gods, and Borderless Planeswalkers. The Demigods are all uncommon, which means there’s six of each in the pool of cards for that slot, and only one of each mythic. You have a 1:39 chance to pull a specific foil mythic from that slot, and a 1:5 chance to get a specific foil Demigod.

That leaves only Foil Extended Art in the other foil slot, and with 50 rares and 5 mythics, plus the regular foils, the total pool of possible cards is 226. That means 1:226 for any particular foil mythic, and 1:113 for any given foil rare.

Card/Set	Collector Boosters to open one (approx.)	Card/Set	Collector Boosters to open one (approx.)
Extended Art Foil The Great Henge (ELD)	242	Constellation Foil Klothys, God of Destiny (THB)	39
Extended Art Foil Nyxbloom Ancient (THB)	226	Extended Art Foil Thassa’s Oracle (THB)	113
Phyrexian Foil Vorinclex (KHM)	256	Foil Etched Food Chain (2X2)	280
Japanese- Language Alternate Art Time Warp Foil (STX:MA)	309	Red Soft Glow Hidetsugu (NEO)	1,828
Foil Extended Art The Meathook Massacre (MID)	151	Phyrexian Foil Sheoldred, the Apocalypse (DMU)	346
Foil Fang Frame Sorin, the Mirthless by Ayami Kojima (VOW)	171	Phyrexian Foil Ajani, Sleeper Agent (DMU)	692
Extended Art Foil Jeweled Lotus (CMR)	400	Foil Alternate-Art Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim (BRO)	299
Phyrexian Foil Urabrask, Heretic Praetor (SNC)	492	Retro Foil Sulfuric Vortex (DMR)	70
Borderless Foil Ancient Brass Dragon (CLB)	352	Retro Foil Sneak Attack (DMR)	140
Phyrexian foil (or foil-etched) Jin-Gitaxias (NEO)	544	Borderless Foil or Retro Foil Force of Will (DMR)	280

We can see that these first two Booster Fun sets have drop rates that are better than most of the more recent sets, when it comes to the most desired versions of chase cards. Nothing is extra-rare, even the mythics. It’s much easier to grasp these sets that have only a single special frame, instead of having a Showcase AND a Phyrexian AND a Borderless.

Eldraine and Theros cards have had some time for the prices to settle out, and we have a clear picture of what the cards go for. Those reprints should affect the prices, even things like Brazen Borrower being in The List, so plan accordingly.