It’s been no secret that figuring out the odds of opening any given card in any given booster pack has been a bit of a mystery for the past few set releases. While Wizards of the Coast (WotC) does its best to give a broad overview of how to obtain each card, individual slot odds are a little more obtuse. Part of my job is figuring out the odds based on public information, and then pushing WotC to release even more odds via Twitter. For Streets of New Capenna (SNC), the only information I (and others) had to work with were two articles, one on collecting the set and the product overview.
Even with both of these articles, there were a number of questions that still needed answers. For instance, the release of Streets of New Capenna is the first time there will be foil extended art versions of Commander-only cards in Collector Boosters. It was unclear which slot these appeared in! Was it slot #15, listed as Gilded Foil, Foil-Etched or Traditional Foil Rare/Mythic (Gilded Foil Showcase; Foil-Etched Showcase; or Traditional Foil Extended-Art, Borderless, Phyrexian, or Showcase), or in slot #12 (Extended-Art Commander R/M)?
I’m happy to report the answer is slot #15, now that some people have opened product on social media, but A) I don’t have access to that information before it’s publicly available, and B) it greatly impacts the odds of getting any given card in slot #15.
Variant Odds
Slot #15 in Collector Boosters is the slot that usually contains the rarest, most valuable variants for any given set. It’s usually variant foil versions of all of the rare or mythic cards in a set release. As noted above, there are six different treatments that can be found in Streets of New Capenna Collector Boosters.
- Gilded Foil Showcase R/M
- Foil-Etched Showcase R/M
- Traditional Foil Extended Art R/M
- Traditional Foil Borderless Foil Extended Art R/M
- Traditional Foil Phyrexian Language Foil R/M
- Traditional Foil Showcase R/M
From the collecting article: “Many cards appear with multiple treatments—for such cards, each treatment appears proportionally less often to the number of treatments.” Which is to say, if there are four versions of a card, each version will appear 25% of the time in that card’s slot. If there are two versions, each version will appear 50% of the time. In the case of Streets of New Capenna, that is spread not only through the regular set, but the Commander cards that either only appear in Set Booster packs, or one of the mythic rare commanders from the Streets of New Capenna Commander decks.
Standard Disclaimer: All odds here are what I have personally reverse engineered based on public information. These are not official WotC odds. Do not take them as such.
There are twenty mythic rares and 60 rares in Streets of New Capenna proper. There are an additional twelve mythic rares and six rares added in from the Streets of New Capenna Commander decks. This makes for a total of 32 mythic rares and 66 rares in this slot. According to the typical distribution, there are two copies of each rare printed for every one copy of a mythic.
Projecting with the Formula
Using this formula (32M + 66R + 66R), we get to 164 cards in any given sheet rotation for slot #15.
- Rares with one variant: 37
- Rares with two variants: 29
- Mythic rares with one variant: 22
- Mythic rares with two variants: 6
- Mythic rares with three variants: 4
So, for every 164 Collector Boosters opened, there will be (on average) one of every mythic rare and two of each rare. Breaking this down even further, some of these slots have multiple variants. Rares with two variants will appear at one variant each at the 164-pack count.
Breaking it down more: some mythic rares have three variants. That means that you’d need to open 492 Collector Boosters to (theoretically) get one of each variant. That is a total of 41 boxes of product represented by any given Etched Foil Elspeth, Ob Nixilis, Urabrask, or Vivien opened. In 41 collector boxes / 492 collector packs, there’d be the following:
- Six copies of each rare with one variant. (222 packs)
- Three copies of each version of each rare with two variants. (174 packs)
- Three copies of each mythic rare with one variant. (66 packs)
- An average of one-and-a-half copies of each version of each mythic rare with two variants. (18 packs)
- One copy of each version of each mythic rare with three variants. (12 packs)
To put this in perspective, the odds of opening any one of among an etched foil mythic rare Elspeth, Ob Nixilis, Urabrask, or Vivien are equal to the odds of opening up a neon Hidetsugu, Devouring Chaos in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty!
So yeah, let’s expect the etched foil versions of these four cards to be at a high price point for the foreseeable futures.
Card Watch: Treasure Tokens
One of the biggest themes in SNC: Treasure tokens. The extreme proliferation of Treasure tokens has caused the market to react to previous cards that care about either multiple artifacts or specifically that type of token. The two biggest movers are Revel in Riches and Time Sieve. In particular, the new card Bootleggers’ Stash is making a huge splash at this time.
In response to pro-Treasure tech, many people have latched onto a particularly punishing anti-Treasure card: Viridian Revel. Every treasure sacrificed by an opponent is a card for the controller of Viridian Revel. This was already a popular uncommon from Scars of Mirrodin, but it has gone from $2 to $6 and climbing over the past week. I have a feeling that Revel in Riches will be the card that comes down the most from this spike, whereas Time Sieve was due to reclaim some price memory since its last reprint.
Baldur’s Gate (Spoiler Alert!)
Spoiler Alert! Don’t read this section unless you want information about Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate that were leaked last week. You’ve been warned!
Good luck at your Prerelease this weekend, and may you pull that lucky Etched Foil that you’ve always been dreaming of from a Collector Booster!
