Droprates in packs

ArielSira

Just bought a Rav Allegiance premium pack cos I had crystals saved. Not only did it just have the bonus rare (like half the premium packs), 2 of the packs were 5 commons. Something that happens quite a lot with reward boosters too.

Imagine spending actual money (€15) to buy crystals for these packs.

Imagine asking actual money for these.

Tremayne

Drop rates may not be doubted!!! If you feel there is something wrong with the drop rates, you are the one that is wrong!

That is my experience when I have raised this subject, so sit back and prepare to be shouted down.

ArielSira

Oh I know the droprates are as displayed (aside that 30% actually is 6% per pack) but they're disgustingly bad. I also recall the 5 common packs were at some point gone.

Asking that much money is just bad (I've raised this before too), you can get a lot better buying real MTG packs. That alone should have made them reconsider prices already.

wereotter

ArielSira said:

Oh I know the droprates are as displayed (aside that 30% actually is 6% per pack) but they're disgustingly bad. I also recall the 5 common packs were at some point gone.

Asking that much money is just bad (I've raised this before too), you can get a lot better buying real MTG packs. That alone should have made them reconsider prices already.

The all commons packs are still very much alive and well... I get them pretty often. Also still alive are the packs with multiple copies of the same card in them. My record so far is four of the same common in a pack. 

Volrak

Single packs were prevented from dropping 5 commons from around Dec 2016 until Feb 2018.  Since then, it's happened at the normal rate you'd expect from randomness (once every 60-70 packs).

It's always been possible to get multiple copies of the same card from a pack; unlike real MtG card packs, there's no special action taken to prevent that.

(I hope nobody sees this as "shouting down"; given that the answers are known, my assumption is that anyone with an interest in this thread would be interested in knowing them too.)

ShaarkBiite

It would seem that the probability in getting a duplicate within the same 5 card pack has to be tiny, but yet it happens all the time. Anyone out there do the math? 

Tilwin90

5% duplicate chance in a 200 cards set, naively assuming all cards are evenly distributed regardless of rarity. Looking at 5 boosters this chance gets bumped up to 79%. 

Volrak

Tilwin90 said:

5% duplicate chance in a 200 cards set, naively assuming all cards are evenly distributed regardless of rarity. Looking at 5 boosters this chance gets bumped up to 79%. 

Yep.  And considering rarity, dupe rates are higher, since most cards drop as common or uncommon. From simulating opening thousands of RNA packs, around 1 in 13 boosters (7.5%) has a repeated card, and it goes up to 91% for PPs.

Tourmaline

I pulled a card pack a few sets ago that gave me 4 copies of the same common in one pack. 😂😂

Bil

I recently opened a 5 card booster with 3 cards being the same common ... RNG rules ...

ShaarkBiite

Thanks @Tilwin90 @Volrak .  It's been a while since I've done that kind of math. I thought it was more like pulling any one card out of a 50 card deck is 1/50 and pulling the same card twice is 1/50 x 1/50, but I didn't remember how to figure in that you have 5 chances. 

Tilwin90

ShaarkBiite said:

Thanks @Tilwin90 @Volrak .  It's been a while since I've done that kind of math. I thought it was more like pulling any one card out of a 50 card deck is 1/50 and pulling the same card twice is 1/50 x 1/50, but I didn't remember how to figure in that you have 5 chances. 

The math behind this calculation is inspired from the Birthday Paradox problem. 

The initial problem asks how many people should be in a room, as to have favorable odds (>50%) for at least two people with the same birthdate in the room.

Naive logic would say something like 180 people but in reality you need somewhere around 26 (I don't remember the lowest value for which p > 50%). The reasoning is that you don't ask for a specific birth date, or for specific people to be born on the same date or even to have exactly two people and not more born in the same day.

Therefore we initially calculate the chance for the opposite condition: having no two people in the room with the same birthday. To calculate it for n people you do 365*364*...*(366-n) / 365^n. Then just subtract this value from 1 to get the chance of the opposite condition (at least two people in the room that share a birthday)

For booster pack it's the same. We simply replace 365 with the number of different cards in the set and n with the number of cards in the pack (5 or 15 or 25). First we calculate the chance of a pack with no duplicates. Then just subtract from 100% to get your probability. 

Again note that I don't factor in that different card rarities appear with different frequency but it gives you a pretty rough approximation.