Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #438: Rarity

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

In this podcast, I talk about the nuts of bolts of rarity, including some history about how different rarities have worked over the years.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. So I dropped off my son at spring break camp. I'm about to take my daughter to school. So in between dropping off child one and child two, you guys get a podcast. Okay, so today my topic is rarity. Now I've talked before, I've made podcasts about how to design four different rarities, but today I'm talking more about the concept of rarity. I'm going to talk about sort of what exactly it means, sort of the history of it through magic, and then, I don't know, give you lots of facts that maybe you didn't know about rarities.

Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning, back to Alpha. So, actually, before we even get to Alpha, let me explain a little bit about how we print magic. Now, some of this is top secrets. I can't explain all of our coalition to you, but I can explain some of the basics. Okay, so when we print magic cards, we are actually printing a giant sheet. I don't know if you've ever seen a magic sheet. But there's different sizes. The traditional size is 11 by 11.

So what that means is take 11 magic cards wide and 11 magic cards down and that's the size of our average sheet some sheets are 110 some are 121 we've done sheets of other sizes um magic actually prints in a whole bunch of different printers and not every printer always treats things the same. But let's use 121. That's the most default sheet that we use. So the idea is, what they do is they take the sheets, they print the backs on a whole bunch of sheets, and then they take them and they feed them in and they print the fronts on them. And then they have a cutter that chops it up into 121 cards or how many of our cards there are.

Now, there are two different sizes of playing cards. There's what's called bridge size and poker size. Bridge size are a little narrower. I mean, magic are bridge size. Poker tend to be a little fatter. Just different, I mean, bridge and poker being two of the popular games for playing cards, and so the sizes were named after them. So the way it works is you have to have a certain number of sheets to print.

And then, because it's a trading card game, when Richard made Magic, he was following the principles of trading cards, because it was a trading card game. And something that trading cards have always had, or for quite a while have had, is rarity. What that means is, is that when you open up a booster pack, that some things are harder to get than others. So rarity essentially, well, originally what rarity meant was it had to do with how often something appears. How often do you get something?

meant was it had to do with how often something appears. How often do you get something? From a printing standpoint, what it means is that we print different cards on different sheets, and then there's a different drop rate for the sheets. So what that means is, let's go back to early, early magic. Early magic, the way it worked was you got one card from the rare sheet, three cards from the uncommon sheet, and 11 cards from the common sheet. But here's where things got a little weird. Land at the time was interspersed between the sheets. So you just got land. Land was, you know, there were lands that showed up on all the sheets.

In fact, there were even lands on the rare sheet. There were, in fact, islands on the rare sheet. So in your rare slot could be an island, which not too exciting. And the idea was, so when magic first came out, remember, what rarity things were were unknown. Richard really had a vision when the game started of you were exploring and you didn't know anything. And you didn't know how often things were going to happen or what all the cards were. And we really early on tried not to tell you things. Now, once again, this was kind of just on the cusp right before the Internet really became a big thing.

This was before the World Wide Web and, you know, before things were a little, like there were usernets and stuff at the time, but it wasn't. The information superhighway was more of an information dirt road at the time. And it really, it was a lot easier at the time to sort of hide information dirt road at the time. And it really, it was a lot easier at the time to sort of hide information. Now it's become near impossible. We don't try to hide it anymore. But if you go back to Alpha, to the first sheet,

there were three sheets. These two sheets were 121 cards. But because of the basic lands, which were repeated, there were not I think Alpha and Beta Alpha had 293 cards I think

and I think Beta had 301 something like that what happened was, they printed Alpha they accidentally left two cards off the sheet they left off Circle Protection off the common sheet, and they left off Volcanic Island off the rare sheet. And when they came back, they realized when they fixed

that, if they added one more picture of each of the basic lands, that there would be over 300 unique cards, and they could say over 300 cards. But anyway, the idea was that when we started, Magic had three rarities. We didn't tell you what the three rarities were,

but, so eventually we, we gave them names, uh, which hopefully, you know, so there's common, uncommon, and rare. Um, and that's where magic started. Magic started with three rarities. Um, and, uh, now where it got complicated was early magic sets that were small sets. So Alpha came out. Alpha had a common sheet, an uncommon sheet, and a rare sheet. Okay, so now comes Arabian Nights. Now, Arabian Nights, I think, was only 78 cards.

And Antiquities, which followed it, was, I think, 92 cards. So they were a small number of cards. And so it turned out that there weren't enough cards that it made sense to do three sheets. So instead what they did is they only used two sheets. And then to try to mimic three rarities, they chose how many they would print on a sheet. So for example, in, let's say, Raven Knights, there were some cards that appeared on the uncommon sheet just once, what are known as U1s. And the idea there was a U1 meant that this was the rarest thing in the pack. So that a rare, we ended up calling U1s rares because they're the rarest things.

And there also were, there were cards that showed up much more often, like U3s, U4s, U5s, I believe. And so the idea is, at the time, because we weren't labeling rarity, they were what they were. We later retroactively, once we sort of designated rarity, we went back and sort of claimed what was common, what was uncommon, what was rare.

That would later also become important on some of the later small sets because we differentiated the reserve list. We didn't reprint rares necessarily, but uncommons. Well, I guess early on, uncommons were off-limits, and then we later changed that. Anyway, lots of complications there. So, the idea was we would print in a small set,

you only got eight cards in a booster pack, and I think the way it worked was you got so many commons and so many uncommon off the uncommon sheet uh it was something like six and two like you got six cards off the common sheet and two cards off the uncommon sheet but because of the way the uncommon sheet worked you weren't necessarily guaranteed a rare because you could get multiple off the uncommon sheet that appeared many times um the other thing they did because of trying to get the rarities right is sometimes on

a common sheet, the common sheet would print at different numbers too. So a C1, which was a one time on the common sheet, could be of uncommon value. So the thing that was very confusing, and when you hear the numbers like C1, C5, C4, it just talks about what sheet it was and how often it appeared. And it was used as a designated early on for like collectors and things because it was before we were, in the early, early days, because we were not using rarities sort of,

it was more hidden. It became a lot harder for the collectors to identify and that's how we started showing up with the sheet numbers. Okay. But eventually in Exodus, so what happened was a guy named Joel Mick. So Joel Mick was actually the role of head designer and head developer used to be one position early on. Eventually it split up and two different people would take positions. Joel Mick had that position when I first got to Wizards. He was in charge of design and development.

Eventually, Joel would move to the Magic team and become the Magic brand manager. And Joel's team did many things, but one of the things they did is they were the ones that decided to put a rarity indicator on the cards. So as you guys probably know now, the expansion symbol is color-coded. It is black if it is common. It is silver if it's uncommon. And it is gold if it is rare. I will get to Mythic Rare. I'm just trying to go in order, by the way.

And that was the first time, Exodus was the first time that you actually knew what rarity things were. Early Magic, for those that like their history, I've talked about this a little bit, is Magic tried to hide, they obfuscated stuff like rarity, so they didn't put out lists of what cards were in the set. And there was a role-playing game,

role-playing magazine called Shadis that was the first one that I know of that actually printed, and what they did is they just opened boxes and boxes of cards, and then they sort of said, okay, we think we have them all. And I don't even know if they listed all the cards. I know some of the cards they listed, they had the rarities wrong. But they made an educated guess from opening up, you know, a couple cases of boxes.

Now, eventually, like I said, in Exodus, we decided, okay, we're going to start announcing what rarities are. We're going to start telling you that. And I think early in Magic, it wasn't really until around the time of Mirage that we thought about organized play, about

limited play, sorry, about limited play as a key part of design development. So it wasn't really until we were developing Mirage that we were like, oh, wow, rarities start to make a difference, not just from how often you see them, but

how often they come up for purposes of limited. So, by the way, something interesting happened when we started publishing the rarities on cards. Rarity started to take on a second meaning. So, originally, rarity just meant how often does the card show up, you know?

And then it started to become this thing where rarity started having an excitement value to it. Like, what was my rare? I was excited for my rare. We now sort of designated that every pack had a rare card in it. And there's only one of those, and those are less common. And so there was definitely some excitement value that the rarity symbol started taking on more than just sort of informational qualities. It took on sort of a sizzle, if you will. Now, one of the things to realize is, you know, so the early, early days, we just had three sheets.

We've got a lot more complicated since then. Like I said, I'm not going to go into too much, but one of the things that we do now is we are able to, we actually print on more than one sheet per rarity, because one, so collation is the thing we refer to that talks about how cards end up in your packs. Like, one of the things we care about is we want things to be, we want a mix of cards.

We don't want you knowing if you open card A that you're guaranteed to have card B right after it. And so we do a bunch of things to help mix things up a little bit and make it a little harder to sort of track what's in what booster pack and create a little more randomness to the boosters. At the same time, well, one of the things is I'll do a collation podcast, talk about what exactly collation is and how we do it and stuff, one of these days I'll do a coalition podcast, talk about what exactly a coalition is

and how we do it and stuff or as much as I can talk about it. Okay, so eventually we got to the point where, so when Magic first came out there were what we call starters and boosters. So boosters had one rare,

three iron commons, and 11 commons. A starter deck had two rares when we started. Two rares, I think it was somewhere between 11 and 13 uncommons. And then it had a whole bunch of commons, and it

had something like 20 land when we started. Over the time, we adjusted. Eventually we got three rares and starters, and the land ratio changed a little bit, so it played better out of we adjusted. Eventually, we got three rares and starters, and the land ratio changed a little bit, so it played better out of the box. But we eventually did away with starters, and we just did boosters.

And when we did that, we realized we had this problem of how exactly do we get lands to people? It used to be when you first started playing, you'd buy a starter. That would get you a lot of your lands. And there would be lands in the booster packs, but it was more, you know, it wasn't on any regular basis and finally we decided you know what in order to make sure that people get lands and lands get into the system because we knew that people who didn't need the lands could give them off people who needed them we made a land sheet so

land actually is its own rarity now. We don't really name it. We just call it the land rarity. And the idea there is it shows up once per pack. Now, there are a bunch of different ways that you could... So, for example, we made a set called Time Spiral that had a time-shifted sheet. In fact, each set had a different sheet. And that was another thing. So one of the things we've done over the years is beyond the normal

sheet, sometimes we'll make a special sheet if we want things to show up usually once per booster. So lands have their own sheet, although once again there's duplications of a land. So like look at the time shifted sheet from Time Spiral. That had 121 cards on it. And we ended up putting a special rarity symbol on that. A purple rarity symbol, because that was his own rarity. Land, by the way, we actually mark as if they're common. They have common rarity symbols on them,

but they actually are their own rarity. They're more common than common, so we sort of said, well, common means this or below, fine. They're more common than the average common, but that's okay. The other thing we do sometimes on the sheets is we will people ask all the time, do cards appear in the same amount? Because people are like, oh, I opened up a whole bunch of packs and this one uncommon seems to be less common than others. And my answer

is the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, all cards of the same rarity show up in the exact same number. There's a few exceptions, but not a lot. One of the exceptions is, normally in large sets we have 101 commons. The 101st common, the way we do printing, usually shows up in a rarity a little bit lower than the other 100 cards. It actually is a weird card that's kind of in between common and uncommon. But that's one singular card.

That has to do with how we print it. And also sometimes cards will show up in other things, in dual decks or different products. different products like you know we'll often throw cards in other sort of supplemental products so the rarity of cards can change a little bit in the

you know if it shows up in the starter deck or it shows up in you know one of these side products that might be a small number the actual it is possible that things aren't the same because of external things another product but within the booster uh like i said with probably the only exception of the 101st the cards are of all same rarity all same equality okay so now um the next thing we started

adding was i'm trying to order this i think add cards came next we started adding was, I'm trying to order this. I think add cards came next. We started deciding that we would advertise stuff and we put those in. Um, add cards, by the way, people always ask me when I say that double-faced cards are hard to do, but add cards are, are, uh, double-faced. Uh, add cards are not printed at the same quality of the rest of the magic cards. Magic cards are printed at a very high quality so you can play again and again and again and they won't bleed or anything on you. The add cards, they do not have, they, we do not need them to have, you know, you're not gonna have to play with the add card for a thousand times, so the quality of the add card is a little different. So that's,

when we do double-faced cards, we need to make sure that they are of proper quality on both sides. So double-faced cards, by the way, are another thing, a good example of we occasionally do sheets. So the interesting thing about that is like double-faced cards, what we did was it had a drop rate where it was one per pack. So we had a dedicated sheet to doing double-faced cards. But what we did then is we printed them on the sheet to match rarities.

So there were commons and uncommons. I think there were two different sheets. One sheet was commons and uncommons, and one sheet I think was rarities and mythics. That's how we did it. But the idea is the commons would show up more often. Kind of like how we did the U1s and the U2s and stuff, is that the commons will show up more often on that sheet, so the ratio of commons to uncommons,

which I think is about three to one, holds true. Okay, now eventually comes Shards of Alara. So one of the things that, we were the first trading card game. Obviously we've had a huge influence on other trading card games. But one of the things that we want to do is look what other people are doing.

Does anybody else have an innovation that we're not taking advantage of? And what we started seeing is most other trading card games had a rarity that was rarer than the booster pack. Like for Magic, the rarest thing we had was rare. And oh, wait, wait, wait. I forgot something. I forgot something. Try to go in order here. We did add something. During Urza's Saga block, we added premium cards. What premium cards were was a foil version of each card that showed up in a much rarer state, although they match rarity,

meaning a foil common will show up more often than a foil rare. But those show up at a completely different rarity, and we don't really mark those rarities other than you sort of understand there's premiumness of common, uncommon, rare and then those rarities show up

common is more often than uncommon uncommon is more often than rare so we did do premium cards and that we added in the reason I say premium and not foil by the way is Magic, not Magic, Wizards has a bunch of different card games. Right now we have two

major ones, but we had a lot more in the past. And we will often do special things, and those special things aren't always a foiling process. So we refer to them as premium internally because we refer to everything, so all cards like that are premium. Magic, most of the premiums are just foils. But if it looks like Dual Masters or other big projects we make, we've made metal cards, we've made all all cards like that are premium. Magic, most of the premiums are just foils, but it looks like Dual Masters

are another big project we make. We've made metal cards, we've made all sorts of cards that are not premiums in the way you think of Magic, but they're premiums. Okay, so we looked around, we realized that most other trading card games had a rarity that was happening less often

than once a pack. And so we decided we would introduce a new rarity, which is called Mythic Rare. So the way Mythic Rare works is Mythic Rares go on the rare sheet, they just get printed at half the rate and there's less of them. Normally on a rare sheet there's 53 rares and there's 15 Mythic Rares. So how do we do that? So I'll show you a little bit of math. If you take 53 and double it, that's 106. Add 15, that's 121. So if you take a rare sheet and put every rare on it twice and every mythic rare on it once, you have 121 cards.

That's the kind of math we talk about doing sheet math. That is what we're talking about. And that, if you ever wonder how we choose the numbers for our cards, it has to do with numbers that fit neatly onto the sheets. Now, 120, if you take off the 121st card, 120 has a lot of things that go into it, so it gives you a decent amount of flexibility of how many cards you can make. But anyway, we decided to add Mythic Rare.

And Mythic Rare show up one out of every eight rare packs, instead of a rare as a Mythic Rare on average. As always, by the way, when I talk about cards, printing has some variance. I'm telling you the default. Yeah, be aware, you know, that there is some variance. And so I'm not promising you that everything matches the default. I'm saying that that's the most common outcome.

Although if you ever have a pack that is weird, you always call our customer service and they will help you. So, we introduced Mythic Rare, and we needed to get an expansion symbol for Mythic Rare. So, Brady Daubermuth, who was in charge of the creative team at the time, was tasked with coming up with a new symbol. He actually

wanted to look into things like, oh, we can do some special new treatments, but it turned out we, because it was printed on the rare sheet and the rares didn't have the treatment, it needed to be something that we could print together with the rares. So he ended up going, he ended up choosing the orange as he liked the idea that had a little bit of sparkle to it, a little bit of almost fire to it. And so he chose what we now call Mythic Orange to be the new Mythic Rarity. So Shards of Alara introduced Mythic Rarity.

I wrote a whole article about it. It's funny. The article is called Living Changerously or something. But it talks about, I introduced the idea of the Mythic Rare. And, oh, so one of the things I explain is, if you look at the history of Magic, and you look at what rare means, meaning, let's look at some small set where rare was like one out of 50, and let me look at some big sets where rare was like one out of 121, that's a giant gap. You know, we're talking about more than two times a difference. So what we decided with Mythic Rare was, let's just take something we already do and chop it up and say that the bottom half is rare and the top half is Mythic

Rare. So it's not really that Mythic Rare introduced a new rarity as much as it separated out what once was called rare into two groupings and labeled them. It did mean that rare showed up at, on average, more common frequency. And so that was one of the side effects. Okay. But even more rarities. So, so far, we've talked about common, uncommon, rare, mythic rare, land rarity. Also, there is token rarity. We have, so what happens is the add card on the back has tokens. A lot of them have tokens. And then

even tokens have a rarity to them. Now that rarity is more about designating two things. One, what card does it go with? Because we match the rarity of the card it goes with, the lowest rarity of the card it goes with. And it sort of tells you about how often they show up. The rarity of the token does not necessarily exactly match the normal rarity of cards. But if you see, for example, a Mythic Rare token or emblem, usually, that just says, oh, it's a lot rarer than sort of the common things you'll see.

We do stuff like the time-shifted cheat, where things just show up in a rarity that's different from everything else. But finally, the newest thing that we did was mythic rare. Not mythic rare. It was the expeditions in Battle for Zendikar, and then later we started calling them masterpieces.

The inventions in Kaladesh and the invocations in Amangat. So these show up at a much, much higher rarity. The idea of being a masterpieces is they are old cards with new treatments. So they are not considered part of the set from a collecting standpoint. You can't play them in limited, but they're just legal in the formats that those cards are legal in. Because they're all reprinted cards, although a few of them sometimes are cards from that very set but at a higher rarity. There's always a different frame and a different treatment to them.

So Mythic Rare, you have a chance of opening up a Mythic Rare one out of every eight. I believe Masterpieces, you have a chance of opening them about one out of every 144 you have a chance of opening them about one out of every 144 packs, I believe. And those, I think they're all premium. And like I said, they are cards from the past. Usually with a theme. Expeditions with land. Kaladesh with artifacts.

Invocation is a little more flavor-based. the, the gods and their spells and their servants. So it's God related. It was a little, because it was creative, it was a little less clear. It's not, there's just so many, like,

it's artifacts or it's land. There's just only so many definitions like that. So we start experimenting with other things. So, the one other thing

I want to talk about because I'm not too far from Rachel's is sometimes we do rarity on supplemental products. And what does that mean? So remember that rarities come to mean two things. The rarity means how often something shows up and it has a splash value. The problem with a supplemental product is those two things no longer align.

In magic, normally, the thing that's exciting is probably the thing you're going to see less often, and the thing you see less often is the higher rarity. But in supplemental sets, that's not always the case. So, for example, let's take From the Vault. From the Vault, we're like, well, these versions of the cards

are going to be pretty rare. Okay, we'll just say that all of them are Mythic Rare, even though some of them formerly weren't mythic rare. And by the way, we will change rarity of things. There's a certain guideline of what we think belongs and what rarity, but for different reasons, we will move around rarities. And literally, I don't think there's ever been a rarity swap we haven't done. We've done rare to common.

We've done common to rare. Those two we don't do often. We often will go common, uncommon, uncommon, uncommon. We do that stuff all the time. Okay, so the idea from the vault is, like, okay, fine. They're all just mythic rare. And you go, well, they're all hard to get. You know, the actual versions of these cards are pretty hard to get.

Where it gets tricky is commander. So the way commander works is we make some number of decks, and then what we define as common because there's new content so we define as common is anything that shows up in more than one deck outside shows up in all decks common is a card that shows up in all the decks usually there's not that many comments um and uncommon is a card that shows up in more than one deck and then a rare or mythic rare only shows up in a single deck and the way we differentiate rare from mythic rare or mythic rare only shows up in a single deck. And the way we differentiate rare from mythic rare is mythic rare are kind of the build around

me, the standout cards, like the commanders and the legendary creatures. And so one of the things that people ask all the time is, and this is why the definition starts to split, is, but wait a minute, the rare in that deck and the mythic rare they both only show up once they're showing up the same rarity from how often they show up but once again there's an excitement value thing and we've made the decision that in products like that we want to sort of make people excited like you just get more excited when you open a mythic rare and that's true even in a a set product that has always has the same cards in it. The people just value Mythic Rares more because they've been trained in normal boosters to value

Mythics more. And so we've made the conscious effort when talking about them to do that. So much to talk about today. So the next time you're looking through... Oh, the other question people ask all the time is, is there a way... Do rarities go in the booster in any set order? And the answer is no. So the way it works is... So let's say we print a whole bunch of magic backs. And so there's a lot of cards that have magic backs

and just have a lot of blank fronts. And then they'll print the commons. And so what they do is they print them up they chop them all up and they put them in a hopper or they put them in up they hold on to them and then when we're all done when it's time to make the boosters what you do is you fill the hoppers there's three hoppers there's a common hopper an uncommon hopper and a rare hop rare mythic rare hopper and what that means is it's a rare hopper, rare mythic rare hopper. And what that means is it's, it let, you know, it lets out the right number of cards for each of the things. So, oh, and there's a land hopper. Sorry. So you get one land, you get 10 commons, you get three uncommons, and you get one rare. Okay, but what about the premium cards? So the way the premium cards work is that there's a separate hopper that gets used much,

much, much less. And usually the way it works is you allocate where it's going. So I think the premium card goes in place of a common, which means that when you get a premium card, you could also get, let's say you get a premium mythic rare, you could also get a normal mythic Rare in the pack. So that has to do with sort of, when we print it, it has to do with putting the cards together.

And the reason, for example, something like double-faced cards are so tricky is it requires sort of printing once and going back and printing again. And there's just a lot of extra logistics and cost and stuff with doing that. I mean, we do do it. We like double-faced cards.

You guys like double-faced cards. But it's not something we can necessarily do all the time. Maybe as technology gets better. Like, printing technology has changed radically since I first came to Wizards. You know, early days of Magic, we were printing on films, and now it's all digital. Anyway, lots and lots has changed. So, because they're dropping the hopper, it's not in the set order necessarily.

It has to do with who puts what in what hopper, meaning let's say there's hopper A, hopper B, hopper C. If they always put the commons in hopper A and always put the uncommons in hopper B and always put the rares in hopper C, yeah, you'd have a set order, but they don't. They get mixed up. If you ever open up a pack and your, you know,

your uncommons are replaced by rares, or your commons are uncommons, or your rares are commons, if ever you have something in which it's not matching the normal thing, most likely what has happened is someone fed a hopper wrong. Like, you know, what we call god packs, or packs that are all mythics. This is hard to do, but if you fill all three hoppers with with Mythic, rare Mythic rare cards, then it'll just feed into the set. More often what happens is one of the hoppers will be misfed. So like, we've seen

times where the uncommon is fed with the rare cards instead. But anyway, so common, uncommon, rare, mythic rare, land, tokens, time-shifted sheets, masterpieces. There are lots and lots and lots of rarities in magic. And like I said, one of the things that sort of drive the whole thing is that, you know, it's very easy to forget that, you know, there's a lot of emphasis on the game,

but the trading card aspect actually is a pretty big aspect. And the idea that different things show up at different rarities not only makes it exciting, not only does it make it more collectible, but it also actually has an impact on how we make limited formats and limited environments.

So it has proven to be something that's quite useful. And if you're curious how you use Commons, Uncommons, Rares, and Mythic Rares, I've done three podcasts. One on Commons, one on Uncommons, one on Rares and Mythic Rares. So you can go listen to those if you haven't. In those, I talk about sort of what impact on gameplay and design being each rarity has. But anyway, I think hopefully that is everything you possibly want to know about rarity on one podcast. By the way, I've been trying to mix up my podcast. This is a little more informative behind the scenes, just sort of giving you stats with a touch of history behind them.

If you guys like this, please let me know. I can always do more. So anyway, I'm now at Rachel's school, so we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye.