Set Boosters - A Whole Lot of Value in One Little Pack
The design team at Wizards have a great history of innovative card and set design that has kept players coming back year after year. But one area that has often been neglected is the most fundamental way in which players interact with the game – buying and cracking booster packs. This is a system that hasn’t changed much since the very earliest days of the draft booster. Some valiant efforts have been made to change this in recent years, including Collectors Boosters, but they haven’t quite felt like the breakthrough that was really needed. With Set Boosters though, that breakthrough looks like it has finally come. The design team have clearly sat down and thought long and hard about what their players want when they crack a pack, and designed a booster from the ground up to deliver it. And it doesn’t disappoint.
Who Are Set Boosters For?
Wizards have been admirably open about the design process for Set Boosters, and their thinking makes a lot of sense. As fun as Limited Magic can be, the average player just doesn’t open packs to draft with them these days. They crack packs to find the cards they need for their constructed decks, across all formats, mostly at the highest rarities. And if that’s why you’re opening a pack, a standard draft booster can be …well, a little lackluster. We’ve all been there – you crack your pack, skip past a heap of commons almost without reading them (and probably most of the uncommons too once the set’s been out for a while), then jump right to that one rare slot.
That’s one moment of excitement and real value, and besides the chaff the pack is done. All of the design that goes into a draft booster – the careful colour and rarity balancing – is wasted if you’re never going to draft with it in the first place.
So how could Wizards make opening boosters fun for players with no interest in drafting? By redesigning the content of a booster from the ground up, with both fun and value in mind. That’s the concept of Set Boosters, which are consciously designed as an actual structured experience to open, with an array of goodies included.
What’s in the Pack?
This is actually a little difficult to answer, since the design of the Set Booster is layered and card rarities can rely a lot on chance unlike the guaranteed rarity slots in a traditional draft booster.
Set Boosters are designed in a lot of ways more like a piece of theatre rather than a pack, and Wizards have divided the pack’s sections into something akin to acts to show the impact each part is designed to have. These packs are very much intended to be opened in sequence front to back, and to keep the fun going throughout the whole opening process.
1. Welcome (1 Art Card, 7 Magic Cards)
This section eases you into the pack slowly, starting with an art card. These are a return of the non-playable art showpieces that are purely meant to display art from the set. They’re not adding value if you’re looking for playable Magic cards, but some players appreciate the artwork and have really enjoyed collecting them. They also serve as a smart way to immerse you immediately in the flavour of the set.
Next, we have the land slot. This slot will house a basic land from the set, which has a 15% chance of being a foil for a bit of added value or to help build your collection if you’re one of those Magpie players that must have a fully shiny deck.
Finally, the welcome ends with the ‘Connected Commons and Uncommons’. In a traditional booster pack, this is the great bulk of the pack and a lot of the time it will essentially be chaff. Here, Wizards are trying to both tell a story and provide more goodies. These six cards will be connected in the sense that adjacent cards might share a theme, or a creature type, or just work well together. This should help newer players in particular who are looking to get ideas for themed decks to get off to a flying start. For those cracking packs partly to hit key uncommons, this section is a juicy prospect too. The kicker is that every single one of these six slots has a chance to be an uncommon. 75% of the time you’ll get one or two uncommons, but the rest of the time you’ll hit 3 or more, right up to a 2% chance of opening 6 uncommons. Hitting these high numbers is unlikely, but it makes opening the pack more varied and fun, and adds real upside over a draft booster.
2. Fireworks (3 Magic Cards)
As you can guess from the name, Wizards have said they wanted this section to be “splashy and exciting”. As such, there’s more red meat here that’s again presented cleverly.
The first slot here is the ‘Head Turner’, a showcase card for the set in question that again has a chance to be an uncommon. These will be selected to show off key mechanics and flavour from the set. It’s a nice appetiser, but the main course is the next slot, the wildcard rarity slots. These two cards can be any rarity right up to Mythic. A little under half the time you’ll get two more commons, but 23.4% of the time, at least one of these will be a rare or a mythic rare. Again, we’re piling up expected value compared to an ordinary draft booster with its single rare slot.
3. Big Finish (2 Magic Cards)
And the pack isn’t done yet. The Big Finish starts with one guaranteed rare or mythic rare in the same way as a traditional booster, with the mythic rate at 13.5%. And on top of that, the Big Finish offers an additional guaranteed foil card right next to your rare. Even better, this offers yet another chance to pull a rare or mythic rare, as the foil can be at any rarity.
4. Epilogue (0-1 Magic Cards)
And the booster STILL isn’t done! The final slot, usually a throwaway token or ad, here has a 25% chance to be a card from The List. What is The List? That’s still something of a mystery, but we do know that it will be a 300 strong list of cards from across Magic’s history. These often won’t be Standard-playable, but will be playable across Magic’s legacy formats, including Commander. Confirmed cards already are Muscle Sliver, Cloudgoat Ranger and the number one cause of accidental game-losses in Magic history, Pact of Negation.
Are Set Boosters Worth Buying?
Yes! Unless you’re buying boosters specifically to draft with, it’s hard to overstate how much value and fun these boosters add. Let’s do a quick comparison between a classic draft booster and a Set Booster:
Draft Booster: 15 Magic Cards, of which 1 Rare or Mythic Rare, 3 uncommon, 10 common
Set Booster: 12-13 Magic Cards, of which 1-4 Rare or Mythic Rare, 0-10 uncommon, 0-10 common, 0-1 cards from The List (any rarity). 1 guaranteed foil.
Of course, as you’ll see from the comparison, there are downsides here. Most importantly, you’re pulling two or three less Magic cards from a Set Booster than a draft booster. It’s also theoretically possible (although very unlikely) to get only a single rare and only one or two uncommons for a worse rarity rate than a draft booster. Finally, if you open a booster box, you’ll get 30 of these packs instead of 36 in a draft booster box.
In the long run though, the upside will far outweigh the downsides. Excluding those packs where you pull a very abnormal number of commons, Set Boosters have the potential to be goldmines if you’re looking for higher rarity cards, and look like they’ll be great fun to open to boot. Cards from The List will be a draw for players who enjoy formats outside of Standard, and the art card slot is a boon for collectors. Overall, when I’m opening boosters outside of a draft in future, we can’t see past Set Boosters as our go-to packs.
Jonathan Widnall
- Jon Widnall