The Art of Pulling the Rarest Cards

[Crusader22]

Hey!

Sorry if this is the wrong sub-forum.

I recently bought a Fellowship Booster Case (physically, not on Gemp). My reasoning was it would help alleviate any deck-building problems because mathematically, I should have pulled roughly 3.57 of each rare. 432 rares (not including foils) divided by 121 rares in Set 1. Obviously that's not an exact science and I expected some fluctuation. But the disparity ended up being quite large in some cases.

For example, I pulled 0x Hate, which sadly was the card I really needed. But I pulled 10x Aragorn's Bow, which is 6 more than I should have, mathematically. Obviously I'm not complaining about pulling 10 Aragorn's Bow, as it's an amazing card, but still. The disparity seems almost too great to be random. Another example is I pulled 10x Parry and only 1x Lurtz.

I suppose I'm wondering if it really is completely random (which I hope is the case, as that would be fair), or if there are some Rares that are in fact unspokenly Super Rares.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

[ArtificerAlf]

I opened 2 boxes of Fellowship, and walked away with a playset of Hate, including one foil version. I also ended up with 4 A Wizard is Never Late (one foil), 3 Savagery to Match Their Numbers, and 3 Double Shot.

I didn't open any Legolas, Greenleaf, Isildur's Bane, or Aragorn. I found that surprising, as I expected to hopefully get at least one. So who knows. I did feel like box 2 seemed to be a lot of the rares I opened from the first one, and I expected more variety.

[Air Power]

I remember people talking about how bad the randomization in FotR boxes was back in the day.  I'm not sure if it got better with later sets; I might have just not payed attention to it.

As I understood it, distinct patterns showed up in the boxes, so once you opened a few packs you basically knew what the rest of the rares were going to be.  It sounds like you got several of the "toy box", aka the one with lots of items.

There were no undeclared super rares, just poor distribution, so essentially there was another case out there with no Aragorn's Bow and too many Hate to compensate for your case.

[Legion]

I only ever noticed it with RotK. I bought two boosters and the commons were all the same in the same order. My experience with the smaller sets was actually the reverse: in a 36 pack box of Realms, I got 35 of the rares (only duplicating HttWC and Orc Commander which I was perfectly OK with, including one foil bonus rare). My experience with a Mount Doom box was the same (only 2 repeat rates and one pair was Cirdan).

[Crusader22]

Yeah, now that you mention it, my experience was very similar except TTT. In the past year, I've bought

17 Fellowship boxes - huge disparity, I either get 10-12 of a card or 0-2
2 Mines of Moria boxes - full set almost twice
2 Realms boxes - full set almost twice (pulled a foil Saruman KoI!)
6 TTT boxes - great dispersion, and tons of good ones like Hides and Simbelmyne
2 Battle boxes - full set almost twice
2 Ents boxes - full set almost twice
5 RotK boxes - wanted to get all the remaining rares (needed about 30) and I only got 3 that I needed
1 Siege of Gondor box, almost full set + Starter Box (3x cheaper than the booster box right now) and only got 1 double for rares - plenty of doubles for commons and uncommons
1 Mount Doom, box, almost full set, except pulled 3 Aragorn Elessar Telcontar

Another weird/amazing experience was I got 2 Reflections boxes and in one of them there was literally 6 booster packs that were 18 foil cards (no set 9, no non-foils, no non-English) from Set 5 and 6 with NO doubles. So I almost have a complete foil set for BoHD and EoF just from one Reflections booster box. This happen to anyone else?

And a couple years ago when I was much poorer, I bought several boxes of Shadows and Black Rider (not realizing how boring it is), and the dispersion was terrible. Tons of some cards, 0 of others, plus some booster backs that were back-to-back were literally identical.

[Kreggers]

Another weird/amazing experience was I got 2 Reflections boxes and in one of them there was literally 6 booster packs that were 18 foil cards (no set 9, no non-foils, no non-English) from Set 5 and 6 with NO doubles. So I almost have a complete foil set for BoHD and EoF just from one Reflections booster box. This happen to anyone else?

That is insane! I have opened several Reflections boxes but nothing strange like that. One of my boxes did have 25 boosters instead of 24 however.

I have opened a couple dozen of booster boxes in total (a few of each type) and typically get a good selection. I did notice in some of the smaller sets like ROTEL that I would get only 1-2 doubles out of 36 boosters, which is very rare to be completely random.