How do trading card companies (TOPPS, Pokémon, MTG, etc.) fairly distribute rare cards across all the manufactured packages?
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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.
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