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