New Sets

I’ve been going through some life changes recently so when Return to Ravnica (RTR) came out, all I was able to do is to have the bots grab RTR cards and get back to trying to adapt to the other more important things going on around me.

About a week ago, things calmed down a bit and I decided to check on my bots to see what has happened since RTR was released.  Imagine my shock when I saw that not one RTR card had entered my bot empire.

This got me thinking of an experiment: What would happen if I bought a bunch of boosters, opened them up and immediately placed them on the bot?  Obviously the prices would reflect this strategy and few bots would even have cards from a new set. 

So, let’s go through the numbers: There are 101 commons, 80 uncommons, and 68 rares and mythics in RTR.  There are also 10 commons, 3 uncommons and 1 rare or mythic in each booster.  For the sake of arguments, let’s assume a perfect distribution.  The point of this exercise is to get a ballpark figure to see if this strategy is indeed viable, not a mathematical proof.

For our purposes, let’s assume we desire a playset, four (4) copies of each card, for each rarity.

101 commons * 4 = 404 cards divided by 10 per booster pack means we’d need 41 booster packs, at $4 each gives us $164 needed to obtain a playset of commons. 

80 uncommons * 4 = 320 cards divided by 3 per booster = 107 boosters *$4 = $428 for a playset of uncommons.

68 rares * 4 = 272 cards, or boosters, as there is only one per pack, costing $1,088.

So, in order to break even, each rare or mythic would have to cost 4 tickets.  (1,088/272)

Uncommons would have to cost $428/320 or 1.34 tickets each.

Commons would have to be prices at $164/404 or .41 each.  (5 cards for 2 tickets).

As we can see, these prices are not sustainable.  Throw in the renting fee for the bot, in addition to fact that there are always undesirable cards and reprints which will never sell for the break even price and it is not difficult to see why bots do not use this approach.