Friday, June 7, 2013

What does a booster box get you?

As you saw in yesterday's post, I opened up 4 Madoka Magica booster boxes (80 booster packs) and tracked what cards I got. In today's post, I'll be talking about how many copies of each card I got in total. I'm focusing on each card number and getting a playset of 4 copies, so I'll be merging R/RRs with the SRs, RRRs, and SPs that are parallel copies of them.

Here they are, sorted by card number:

Summary of the data:
  • I got at least 1 of every non-parallel card, and the parallels helped me hit 4 copies on several cards.
  • There are only 2 cards with only 1 copy and both are RRs.
  • I got at least 2 copies of each rare, and 4 copies of several.
  • I got 3 copies of only two RRs, and my SP pushed one of those to 4.
  • I got an average of 2.85 copies of each card.
Based on that, here are some estimations:
  • Opening 4 boxes will get you at least 1 copy of each card.
  • 6 boxes will get you a an average of 4 copies of each card, but you'll have some cards with less than 4.
  • A case (16 boxes) will have at least 4 copies of every card.
  • 4 boxes gives you no extras (over 4 copies) to trade.
  • A case will give you almost 320 extras.
And from those estimates, I can give this advice:
  • Buy 2 boxes if you want to build just one specific deck, since you can trade the cards you don't care about for the ones you need.
  • Buy 4 boxes if you want at least 1 of each card, but you'll probably need to trade away non-extra cards to get some cards you want.
  • Buy 6 boxes if you want 4 of each card, since you can trade your extras for the ones you opened need more of.
  • Buy 16 boxes if you want 4 of everything without needing to trade.
Have you had different experiences, or do you have different strategies when buying boxes? Let me know below.

1 comment:

  1. I bought three boxes and a couple packs, which gave me most of the rares and 2-3 of each RR. I filled that out by ordering the cards to complete sets, which ended up costing about the same as a box. At a certain point, buying boxes loses value for me because there isn't much of a community in my area; I can't really trade away extras. I may not have received a RRR+, but I bought over the number of RRs I would have pulled from that box. RRR+ cards are kind of frustrating; they're rare, but who wants them? I would actually rather have an extra three packs or so.

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