What Are Play Boosters?
magic.wizards.com
Arriving in 2024 with Murders at Karlov Manor, the Play Booster combines everything fans love about Draft and Set Boosters.

“The Set Booster and Draft Booster are being combined into a new type of booster we’re calling the Play Booster.”

  • @[email protected]
    4•1 year ago

    It’s actually not a huge change. Four common slots from the current draft booster are turning into three slots:

    • 87.5% common/12.5% list
    • Wildcard - Literally anything, including just another normal common from the main set
    • Foil - Usually common, but same foil rarity distribution as far as I can tell

    So for draft, not much is changing in the average pack.

    • EchEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Considering about 33% of a set is rares, yeah, it is a big change. Looking at draft, that’s a 96% chance to open one more rare, and 83% chance to open two. If my math is right, that’s 13 more rares in a pod on average. (Don’t math while waking up) The correct figure would be ~16 extra rares per pod.

      • @[email protected]
        4•1 year ago

        I think it’s just 8 extra rares/mythics per pod.

        Assuming all the special guests are r/m, The List slot has 3.12% chance of being a rare.

        About 1/7 (14.3%) foils is r/m.

        We don’t know the distribution of rarity in the wildcard slot, but I’ll use the same distribution as the foils for a reasonable estimate.

        That makes (3.12+14.3+14.3 ~=) 32 extra rares per 100 packs, or just under 8 per 24 packs.

        • EchEnglish
          4•1 year ago

          Regarding the specific chances, considering they detailed the odds for the List spot but not the wildcards, I think it’s more reasonable to assume chances are equal to the percentage of rares in a given set, which can vary dramatically, but I believe it’s usually about 33%.

          As for the math, I definitely went about it wrong (I was using 1-pn for some reason, and I also did that wrong somehow). The right result would be closer to 16 rares per pod.

          • @[email protected]
            4•1 year ago

            I think it’s more reasonable to assume chances are equal to the percentage of rares in a given set, which can vary dramatically, but I believe it’s usually about 33%.

            Why would they not adjust for rarity in this slot? They do it in all the other slots - it seems like a big leap to think that any specific common that can appear in this slot is equally as likely as any specific mythic.

          • @[email protected]
            4•1 year ago

            Sorry for the double post, but I thought you might be interested to see this.

            MaRo has posted the odds. So looks like 8.88 packs per draft will have 2 rares, 0.96 packs per draft will have 3 rares, and <0.24 packs per draft will have 4 rares, for resulting in roughly (8.88 + 0.96*2 + 0.24*3 =) 11.52 extra rares per draft.

            • EchEnglish
              3•1 year ago

              All good! Thanks for sharing. Ultimately still too much variation, imo.