How do trading card companies (TOPPS, Pokémon, MTG, etc.) fairly distribute rare cards across all the manufactured packages?
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The answer is they don’t. That’s why collectors buy boxes of card packs from all over the country to find said rate cards.
Trading cards like these are printed on large uncut sheets, with usually more than 100 cards to a single sheet. There are multiple different sheets for any given set, usually separated by rarity.
This way when the cards all get cut out of the sheet, the packager is able to control how many cards of each rarity will end up in a single pack together while still being somewhat random.
The cards aren’t printed individually, they’re printed on massive sheets then cut and packed. So on each sheet they’ll change up the rare slot during printing but not the land/common/uncommon slots so different rares/mythics get mixed in. This is how % can remain constant.
Depends on what you mean. MtG, at least, has “slots” so that each pack of 15 cards has 10 common cards, 3 uncommon cards, 1 basic land, and 1 rare. This way, every pack has at least a rare, and that rare slot has a chance of being a mythic rare, and one of the common slots has a chance of being a foil version of any rarity. These slots can be adjusted, depending on the set.
If you mean how they distribute rare card X, which is worth $1, vs rare card Y, which is worth $150, then they kinda… don’t. It’s all random, but there are always trends. You’ll see people buying the same packs from more than one area so they get a “fair” shake at getting the good stuff.
The cards are cut apart and then stacks of cards (sometimes random and some times in a set order) are inserted into a collator. Each tower of the collator can hold whatever cards you want and can be programmed as to when to drop a card into a pack. So you can have a several towers of regular cards and one tower of rare cards. If a pack is supposed to have 7 regular cards and 1 rare card you would have 8 towers of cards and the pack would pass under each tower and get one card. Video shows a pretty good sample. Skip to around 1:10 to see collator.
For trading card games (can’t speak to sports cards), cards are typically divided by rarity. When cards are being designed, the designers will ensure that a few are especially powerful/cool/unique and designate these as rare cards. There may also be other tiers of rarity, like uncommon or mythic rare.
Then cards are primarily sold in packs.* Each pack has a fixed number of cards, each with a certain rarity. In Magic, for example, a pack will have 10 common cards, 3 uncommon, and 1 rare. This ensures that rare cards actually remain rare. It’s not possible to buy one without also buying 10 commons.
Of course, some rares are more powerful or valuable than others, and this is where chance starts to play a role. If you really have your heart set on “pulling” a particular rare card out of a pack, then get ready to buy *a lot* of packs, because there’s no way to know ahead of time which rare is in which pack.** This can make trading card games *a little* like gambling, because it means that you could pull a “bad” rare from your $4 pack, while your buddy pays the same amount but pulls the rare currently selling for $100. Rather than flattening that luck out, trading card games tend to encourage it. It makes the experience of opening a pack more exciting and could encourage players (who maybe have a bit of a gambling problem) to buy a lot of them.
*Sometimes cards are sold in other formats like promo decks. In this case, there’s no randomness, but the ratio of rares to commons is maintained. A 40-card promo deck will usually have just 3 or 4 rares in it. Designers are usually pretty careful about what rares go into these decks and ensure they’re not too competitively powerful. If they screw this up, players know exactly how to get that rare, and it becomes much more common than intended.
**This is actually a somewhat recent development! In the past, math nerds figured out ways to predict what rare was in what pack by buying a box of packs and opening just a few of them. You still had to buy the box, but you could save a bit on your investment by selling the packs with bad rares to suckers. So if you bought a lot of packs from your local game store but never pulled a money rare, you were probably that sucker.
HEY! I was a CCG designer for about 10 years and I know EXACTLY how this works.
Cards with the same rarity are all printed on a sheet together – different sheets for different rarity. Each sheet is chopped up into individual cards that dropped into a hopper on an assembly line. As a pack moves down the assembly line, the control system drops a certain number of cards from each hopper, based on the desired amount of each rarity to go into each pack.
For example, an MTG pack that goes down the assembly line would get 3 cards each from three hoppers with ‘common cards’ (one hopper drops 4 instead of 3), then 1 card from the ‘rare cards’ hopper, 3 from an ‘uncommon cards’ hopper, and finally a single card each from hoppers with random land cards and marketing cards:
* 15 (16) total cards:
* 10 common (4+3+3)
* 3 uncommon
* 1 rare
* 1 basic land
* 1 marketing card (non playable)
As you can expect, this means that the common sheet must be printed 10 times as many times as the rare sheet to fill up all the packs. For anything other than simple 10:3:1 ratios or with “ultra-rares” and so-on, special sheets can be printed and special rules for the control system can be set up.
This, like many things, is likely accomplished through hoppers, industrial engineers and workers, and programmable logic controllers or PLCs, industrial computers that can be programmed to add a few from the common cards Hopper, one from the rate hopper, and so on, to each pack
Well long story short, they aren’t fair. When buying cards for a TCG online the biggest prevailing advice is to either buy singles or to buy factory sealed booster boxes and never to buy loose packs. Even if you order a factory sealed booster box and it looks like a repackage you’re better off not opening it and contacting whatever customer service options you have. Buying packs can generally be considered a gamble and your return will always be less than what you paid for the packs but bad actors have taken that gambling and made it a guaranteed loss for you.
Everyone else is getting to how things are done mechanically which is interesting but we care more about what that all means to the end consumer. The sheets they are talking about, for instance, are going to be the same every time for that set. The way the cards go into the hoppers is the same and the way the cards are packed up is the same and the way those packs get distributed into boxes is the same. This is random enough for general use but bad actors get involved and ruin everything.
Those bad actors open a lot of boost boxes. Enough that they figure out the sorting algorithms the manufacturers use. They can take any booster box of a set they have cracked, open a few select packs, and then determine which packs in the box will have valuable cards. They then open those packs to resell the valuable cards and then sell the garbage packs loosely or in randomly sized bundles on Ebay or an equivalent. This can sound like tin foil hat crap to some people but it’s a legitimate problem across multiple communities.
For example, in Magic the Gathering you can’t predict where the foil cards will show up but you could predict the rare slot in the packs. In recent years they’ve also been actively working to make their algorithms harder to predict as well as creating tons of alternate artworks and rarities to every set distributed throughout them like foils as well as creating 3 separate types of card packs all with their own rarity distributions and sorting methods to create them. Even still it is only recommended to buy sealed booster boxes though because it’s really just a numbers game and the patterns for every box will be cracked with enough data.
Pokemon on the other hand has been struggling with this so much that local game stores have needed to take extra precautions when selling single packs. My game store in particular had to start opening boxes in front of people, shuffling the packs around, and had to stop letting people “pick their packs” because a 14 year old kid had done the research and bought out the good packs from probably 5-6 different booster boxes. The parents were spending hundreds of dollars on pokemon cards for their kids to sit there and get sad that they didn’t open a single worthwhile card. They would spend $100 to open literally just $10 worth of cards and that’s only if you consider the value of the bulk which you can’t sell to most places. Then they started buying the full booster boxes and were shocked at how much better their finds were on average and put 2 and 2 together. This wasn’t a decade ago either it was only after in-store play was reopened after covid.
TL&DR:
Don’t buy loose packs for any TCG online. Only buy factory sealed booster boxes. If you get a “factory sealed” box that is clearly a repackage then don’t open it and start your ticket with customer service. Bad actors have mapped out booster boxes allowing them to remove any packs containing valuable cards. Buying loose packs is no longer a gamble but a guaranteed loss. There is no TCG that is completely mapping proof although some will claim to be.
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