Update 4/29/2022: I’ve edited this to include the drops of New Capenna Commander cards in the last slot of Collector Boosters. Everything should be in multiples of 82 now.

Every set, Wizards is obligated to release a certain amount of information about the drop rate in the different booster products. They don’t want to be specific about things, though, so every new set, I have to look at the changes they’ve announced and figure out the odds of getting the cards we want in a Collector Booster.

It hasn’t been the same formula twice, and we keep getting variations. This time, the big news is the confirmation of a two-step process when determining how rare specific versions are. All versions of a card are combined to be as numerous as the total copies of another card at the same rarity.

So the total number of Extended Art Foil Luxior, Giada’s Gift (a mythic) is equal to the combined total number of Art Deco Foil, Phyrexian Foil, and Art Deco Etched Foil Urabrask, Heretic Praetor. As a result, each of those versions is three times rarer than the FEA Topiary Stomper.

The shorthand version is that first you roll your odds of getting any version of a card, and then you have to figure how many versions are possible for that card. I’ve done it all for you!

The slightly longer version, ignoring individual variations: If you want any card in any foil, looking at the last slot of a Collector Booster, you’ve got a 1/82 chance of getting it in a CB if it’s rare and 1/164 if it’s a mythic. Traditionally speaking, there’s twice as many of a given rare as there is for a mythic, so with 60 rares and 20 mythics from the main set, plus six rares and twelve mythics from New Capenna Commander, the pool is 2/164 or 1/82 for a rare and 1/164 for a mythic.

The annoying hurdle to this set is that you have to figure out how many options there are for a special frame. For some cards, there is only an EA version for you to pull. For others, you might have a chance at Borderless Foil, Art Deco Foil, or Etched Foil Art Deco. 

I’m a completionist by nature, a trait which helps and hinders me, so I’m going to lay out your options by number of variants, then card name, then rarity.

First of all, the cards that are available at rare with one variant frame, so you have a 1/82 chance to get these exact cards/versions when you open a Collector Booster:

Extended Art Foil (35) Frequency: 1/82

Main Set: Aven Heartstabber Black Market Tycoon Cemetery Tampering Corpse Explosion Cut of the Profits Cut Your Losses Depopulate Devilish Valet Evolving Door Extraction Specialist Fight Rigging Getaway Car Hoard Hauler Jaxis, the Troublemaker Ledger Shredder Mysterious Limousine Park Heights Pegasus Professional Face-Breaker Rabble Rousing Reservoir Kraken Sanguine Spy Shakedown Heavy Structural Assault Undercover Operative Unlicensed Hearse Widespread Thieving Wiretapping Workshop Warchief New Capenna Commander: Boxing Ring Mari, the Killing Quill Spiteful Repossession Swindler’s Scheme Tenuous Truce Vazi, Keen Negotiator

Borderless Foil (2) Frequency: 1/82

Shadow of Mortality Topiary Stomper

For reference, Jaxis, the Troublemaker also has a Buy-a-Box and Mysterious Limousine also has a Promo version from the Bundle, but those versions won’t pop up in the Collector Boosters.

Now, the list of mythics that have only one variation.

Extended Art Foil (18) Frequency: 1/164

Main Set: Angel of Suffering Arcane Bombardment Body Launderer Even the Score Luxior, Giada’s Gift Meeting of the Five New Capenna Commander: Bennie Bracks, Zoologist Threefold Signal Anhelo, the Painter Henzie “Toolbox” Torre Kamiz, Obscura Oculus Kitt Kanto, Mayhem Diva Kros, Defense Contractor Parnesse, the Subtle Brush Perrie, the Pulverizer Phabine, Boss’s Confidante The Beamtown Bullies Tivit, Seller of Secrets

Borderless Foil (4) Frequency: 1/164

All-Seeing Arbiter Bootleggers’ Stash Halo Fountain Titan of Industry

Just to be clear, there’s a Game Day Promo version of All-Seeing Arbiter, but we won’t see that in the Collector Boosters.

Now things get trickier. I’ve tried to break these rares into their combinations. I think I’ve got it right, but if you catch errors, please hop into our discord and let me know.

The frequency here is referring to any particular version. You still have a 1/82 chance to get any version of Brokers Ascendancy, but a 1/164 chance to get the Gilded Age foil.

Gilded Age Foil and Gilded Age Gilded Foil (20) Frequency: 1/164	Brokers Ascendancy Cabaretti Ascendancy Endless Detour Evelyn, the Covetous Fleetfoot Dancer Hostile Takeover Incandescent Aria Jinnie Fay, Jetmir’s Second Maestros Ascendancy Maestros Diabolist Obscura Ascendancy Obscura Interceptor Ognis, the Dragon’s Lash Rigo, Streetwise Mentor Riveteers Ascendancy Soul of Emancipation Toluz, Clever Conductor Unleash the Inferno Void Rend Ziatora’s Envoy
Art Deco Foil and Etched Foil Art Deco (4) Frequency: 1/164	Errant, Street Artist Giada, Font of Hope Scheming Fence Tenacious Underdog
Skyscraper Foil and Borderless Foil (5) Frequency: 1/164	Jetmir’s Garden Raffine’s Tower Spara’s Headquarters Xander’s Lounge Ziatora’s Proving Ground

Next, the list of mythics with two special frames.

Art Deco Foil and Art Deco Etched Foil (1) Frequency: 1/328	Sanctuary Warden
Golden Age Foil and Golden Age Gilded Foil (5)  Frequency: 1/328	Falco Spara, Pactweaver Jetmir, Nexus of Revels Lord Xander, the Collector Raffine, Scheming Seer Ziatora, the Incinerator

Finally, the mythics that have three special frames. There’s no rares with this many, they max out at two.

Borderless Foil, Art Deco Foil, Art Deco Etched Foil (3) Frequency: 1/492	Elspeth Resplendent Ob Nixilis, the Adversary Vivien on the Hunt
Art Deco Foil, Art Deco Etched Foil, Phyrexian Foil (1) Frequency: 1/492	Urabrask, Heretic Praetor

We can compare this set’s rarest cards to the rarest cards of previous sets, because I get to do this every couple months: 

set	Odds of a specific foil rare	Odds of a specific foil mythic
Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty	1/136	1/272 up to 1/544
Innistrad: Crimson Vow	1/74	1/171
Innistrad: Midnight Hunt	1/75.5	1/151
Forgotten Realms	1/63	1/126
Strixhaven	1/154.5	1/309
Kaldheim	1/64	1/128
Modern Horizons 2	1/126.5	1/253
Commander Legends EA Foils	1/204	1/400
Streets of New Capenna	1/82 to 1/164	1/164 to 1/492

That’s the general gist, but let’s talk about some card-to-card comparisons.

Card/Treatment	Set	Odds of pulling it from a Collector Booster (approx.)
Phyrexian Foil Vorinclex	Kaldheim	1/256
Japanese-Language Alternate Art Time Warp Foil	Strixhaven (Mystical Archive)	1/309
Foil Extended Art The Meathook Massacre	Innistrad: Midnight Hunt	1/151
Foil Fang Frame Sorin, the Mirthless by Ayami Kojima	Innistrad: Crimson Vow	1/171
Extended Art Foil Jeweled Lotus	Commander Legends	1/400
Phyrexian foil (or foil-etched) Jin-Gitaxias	Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty	1/544
Blue Soft Glow Hidetsugu	Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty	1/219
Green Soft Glow Hidetsugu	Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty	1/444
Red Soft Glow Hidetsugu	Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty	1/1828
Phyrexian Foil Urabrask, Heretic Praetor	Streets of New Capenna	1/492

Your eyes do not deceive you: The rarest mythics in SNC are more than twice as rare as a blue Hidetsugu, and slightly rarer than the green version. Additionally, they are slightly more rare than the FEA Jeweled Lotus, and the rarest cards from modern sets have that 1/400 target in mind for chase versions.

I hope that this breakdown of the math helps inform your buying, and if you have questions or caught errors, please let me know on Twitter or in the ProTrader Discord! I’m happy to discuss methods and results there.

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.

The Treasure token has gone through a lot of iterations. Once a throwaway, it has become an extremely useful piece of Magic design. We’re about to get a turbocharged look into what Treasures can do, with this Streets of New Capenna mythic:

Now it’s true that Jason wrote about some of its implications on Wednesday, but there’s a lot of cards that would love to have this in play, and today I want to go over them. Not only is this card going to interact well with the ones I’m picking, but these are cards that will love anything which makes Treasures now, or ones in the future.

I’m talking about sweet combos, like adding this to the new uncommon Stimulus Package, which lets you sacrifice a Treasure to make a 1/1 Citizen token. Every land is now a Squirrel Nest? Ding!

So let’s get into these cards, both old and new. 

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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.

We’re getting the first Streets of New Capenna previews in, and while my first impulse is to dive into those cards and immediately start speculating, there’s been a development that caught my eye: 

I warned of this two weeks ago, because the stock was low and the card is fire, but I didn’t expect to be that right so quickly. Retro border cards from Time Spiral Remastered are difficult to reprint, and there wasn’t all that much to begin with. Modern Horizons 2 also gave us some OBF cards, both of reprints and brand-new cards. 

The MH2 cards often have more stock, mainly due to the use of Collector Boosters, but both these sets offer us some opportunities to buy cheap now and sell when more expensive. Let’s get into it!

The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.

To learn how ProTrader can benefit YOU, click here to watch our short video.

ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

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.

We’re getting all sorts of good things going on right now. We’ve been given a taste of Commander Legends 2: Battle for Baldur’s Gate, we’ve got a peek at Unfinity, and preview season for Streets of New Capenna is just around the corner.

So far, we’ve got a cycle of lands and an incomplete cycle of Charms, but knowing the shards, we’ve got enough to make some moves, or at least think about making some moves. What I’m looking for today are things that are good with the shards and that are good in Commander anyway.

We don’t know the themes for the shards yet, and honestly, I’m expecting new paths (or attempts thereof) for each shard, much like we weren’t expecting Boros to be Spirits and ‘cards leaving the graveyard’ theme in Strixhaven. Still, good picks are good picks, and let’s see what we can see.

Dovin’s Veto – 62k EDHREC decks – This is one of the banner cards for Commander. Of decks that can run it, 27% are doing so. There’s some ways around it, like Ashiok’s Erasure, but the feeling of ‘I’ve got this in hand, and when I hate something it stays hated’ is a lovely one indeed. Of note, there’s some special versions running around: we have the original version, plus its foil, and then we have a promo version in the used-to-be-FNM frame, and then the Retro Frame from Time Spiral Remastered. The OBF versions are clearly the superior choice, but are already a pretty penny. Still, $3 uncommons with multiple versions and rank as Commander staples offer a real appeal. I think the FNM foils in the $6 range offer the best chance for growth, but there’s so few OBF versions under $50 that I can totally see those few copies getting snapped up and the card hitting $100.

Sanctum Weaver – 17k decks – There’s a lot to be said for Enchantments as a theme. Sythis and now the Go-Shintai have set a very high bar for what an enchantment deck can do, and the Weaver is a staple of the archetype, no matter which color combination you’re in. FEA versions have doubled in the last few months, but I think there’s going to be more demand for this card going forward. I’d be in on EA before I picked up regular frame foils, because Commander players do love things that look different.

Sterling Grove – 20k decks – Green and White are traditionally the colors for enchantment shenanigans, and giving them protection from spot removal is a powerful thing. The price of nonfoils dropped when the reprint hit in MH2, and now we have a judge foil as well. This is a great time to get in on one of the must-have cards when building a deck with this theme, and I’m fully expecting something sweet to come along soon.

Damn – 28k decks – I thought that this card would be a Modern staple, being so spoiled for choices and options and lands in that format, but Commander players have really run with it too, and in surprising numbers. There’s a lot of control decks out there, and while there’s protections from these sorts of board wipes, it’s nice to have. The target here is the retro frame versions, foil and nonfoil, as they haven’t popped yet but they are excellent candidates to do so.

Niv-Mizzet, Parun – 4500 as commander, 21k as card – I did not think that this version would be getting as much play as he does, but as either a commander or part of the 99 it’s an amazing card. We’re only going to have one shard that uses red and blue, but ‘spells matter’ is an enduring trait of the color pair and this is nicely set for long-term growth. There’s only a few vendors with NM foils, and the card predates the Collector Booster era, so it’s pack foils or nothing.

Scute Swarm – 42k decks – Does your deck play lands? Then have I got a card for you! People have also been messing around with mutating this card and then playing lands, which works! The simplicity of the card, and the potential for breaking out the graphing calculator in order to figure out just what happens with Scapeshift + Parallel Lives…Commander players can’t stay away from this. Showcase foils are where I’d prefer to be, especially because the ramp from $5 copies to $10 copies is quite apparent.

Rhythm of the Wild – 52k decks – We are going to get two Commander decks with GR as colors (Naya and Jund) and Rhythm is a staple for those colors. If holding a Dovin’s Veto gives you a warm happy feeling, then getting Rhythm of the Wild into play with your creature-based deck is the whole dang hot tub of bliss. No counterspells and your stuff will be either bigger or faster? Sold. Foils are $20, and that’s pretty high for a recent uncommon. My concern here is that it’s a very popular card, and an uncommon, and would be an excellent addition to a Secret Lair sometime soon. On the other hand, there’s less than thirty NM foils on all of TCG right now, so a big jump upwards wouldn’t require a lot of sales.

Aura Shards – 26k decks – Honestly, this is an impressive number considering the two main printings of this card are the original in Invasion and then the Commander 2011 copies. We’ve gotten a Mystery Booster version of the CMD frame, and then The List has the Invasion frame. Even with those additional printings, there’s still only one foil (astronomically priced). With both Naya and Bant decks around, this is something that’s almost too good for Commander. It’s extremely effective at what it does, destroying a wide swath of problematic cards and invalidating some strategies entirely. We’ve got a whole lot of copies out there, but it sells 5-10 copies per day. I like that velocity, and so I like some List copies at sub-$5 to grow over time.

Felidar Retreat – 26k decks – This card is at a great intersection of colors and themes. Token decks love the card, as do +1/+1 counter decks, and being only one color means it can go into decks that much easier. Again, Showcase foils are where I want to be, with less than 50 vendors for NM foils, only a few of them having 4+ copies, and no big restocks coming.

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.