The Making of Alter Ego - Part 3 | Booster Packs!

The Making of Alter Ego - Part 3 | Booster Packs!

Let’s talk about Booster Packs! Here’s a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes of how the manufacturing process works, expected distributions, and a few more details.

This is what other card game makers won’t tell you!

To start - what is randomization?

As with (almost) every other aspect of the natural and human-made world, true randomization does not really exist. In almost every seemingly-random distribution, there is almost always a pattern of some kind, if you look closely enough.

And TCG Booster Packs are no exception! 

That said - this is actually a good thing. With true ‘randomization’ there is actually a much higher likelihood of getting duplicate cards, or cards from a certain ‘category’ that outweigh the others. For example, if we completely randomized the cards in our packs, you could theoretically get a pack with all items, all effects, or even a booster box with no Hermits at all.

In order for our customers to have the best possible experience opening our packs, we are trying to optimize for the following:

  • Best possible distribution of cards amongst single Booster Boxes
  • Making the Rare cards ‘feel rare’ without being too hard to obtain

The process:

Step 1: Card Categorization

  • Cards are sorted into “Categories”
    • Typically these Categories are determined based on a concatenation of their card Finish, Rarity, and Type.
    • For Series 2, we have the following Categories
      • Standard - Common - Hermit 
      • Standard - Rare - Hermit 
      • Standard - Common (Alter Ego) - Hermit 
      • Standard - Rare (Alter Ego) - Hermit 
      • Standard - Common - Item 
      • Standard - Rare - Item 
      • Standard - Common - Effect 
      • Standard - Rare - Effect 
      • Standard - Ultra Rare - Effect 
      • Holographic - Rare - Item
      • Holographic - Rare - Hermit  
      • Holographic - Rare (Alter Ego) - Hermit 
      • Holographic - Rare - Effect
      • Holographic - Ultra Rare - Effect

Step 2: Card Quantities

  • Each card Category is then assigned a % of the total cards printed
    • For example, Standard - Common - Hermit cards should represent X% of the total cards printed, Standard - Rare - Hermit should be Y%, etc.
    • Before you ask, no we will not be publishing this information! These percentages really are estimates, and have the potential to set an unrealistic expectation as to rarity distributions. The reality of manufacturing is that we overprint every card by a specific margin to account for damaged cards, misprints, etc, and this process tends to skew the numbers slightly.
      • However, you can assume that higher Rarity cards will be printed less frequently.
  • A final important note is that the Booster Pack % distribution is completely separate from the Starter Deck printing. 
    • Therefore, even if one specific Starter Deck is ordered way more frequently than the others, this does not mean that we will reduce the amount of the cards included in that Starter Deck for the Booster Pack printing.
      • This ensures that we have an even distribution of all cards in the Booster Boxes.

Step 3: Slot Assignment

Next: How does Packing the Booster Packs actually work?

As background - Booster Packs are packed using a Collation Machine. The Collation machine has “Slots” with one for each card in the Booster Pack.

  • We then look at how many cards are included in a Booster Pack, and each card spot is assigned a “Slot”.

For Alter Ego Booster Packs, there are 8 Slots.

We take each of the Categories, and assign them to a Slot.

Some Slots are ‘guaranteed’, while others are mixed between various Categories.

The Alter Ego Booster Packs have the following distribution:

Slot 1:

  • Standard - Common - Item

Slot 2:

  • Standard - Common - Hermit
  • Standard - Common (Alter Ego) - Hermit

Slot 3:

  • Standard - Common - Effect

Slot 4:

  • Standard - Common - Hermit
  • Standard - Common (Alter Ego) - Hermit
  • Standard - Rare - Hermit
  • Standard - Rare (Alter Ego) - Hermit

Slot 5:

  • Holographic - Rare - Hermit
  • Holographic - Rare (Alter Ego) - Hermit

Slot 6:

  • Standard - Common - Effect
  • Standard - Rare - Effect
  • Standard - Ultra Rare - Effect

Slot 7:

  • Standard - Rare - Effect
  • Standard - Ultra Rare - Effect
  • Holographic - Rare - Effect
  • Holographic - Ultra Rare - Effect

Slot 8:

  • Standard - Common - Item
  • Standard - Rare - Item
  • Holographic - Rare - Item

Therefore in summary, with each Booster Pack you can expect (an average of):

  • 3 x Hermit Cards
  • 2 x Item Cards
  • 3 x Effect Cards

Important Note: the above distribution is an estimation.

Like any manufacturing process, there is variability in the final outcome. You may find a card in a slot that it’s not supposed to be in, and while that’s unusual, it’s also completely normal.

The reason why most companies don’t publish this information, is that it has the potential to set unrealistic expectations from the consumer (“you told me I’d get 3 Hermits in every Booster, and I had one that only contained 2!!”).

While this is our goal, this is not a guarantee.

That said, we’ve always made a point of being radically transparent with everything we do, and I thought y'all might find this interesting!

As a reminder, the signed cards will not impact the above Booster Pack distribution - the signed cards will be randomly added to specific Booster Packs as a 9th card, and are handled through an entirely separate process.

Step 4: Packing Booster Boxes

Once the Booster Packs are packed, there will be 100s (if not 1000s) of unique combinations of Booster Packs. 

The final step in the process is to ensure that each Booster Box gets a unique set of Booster Packs packed inside. While it’s possible to get two of the same Booster Pack in a single box, the odds of this happening are extremely low and we do our best to prevent this from happening. 

With a previous project we’ve learned the hard way what happens if this goes wrong, but that’s a story for another day (that involved our team personally opening over 100k cards and re-sorting them manually).

Additional Considerations:

Have you ever wondered in other TCGs why the “Rare”-est card in a Booster Pack is typically not the last card in a pack? You’ll notice that we have the guaranteed Holo card in Slot 5, rather than Slot 8.

This is because the first and last card in a pack are the most likely to get damaged during packing, transportation, and opening of a pack. By keeping the most valuable card in the middle, it’s protected by the cards around it.

Conclusion:

Thank you for coming to my Booster Pack TedTalk! If you made it this far, I appreciate you humoring my lengthy post. ❤️

Hope y’all have been enjoying the Series 2: Alter Ego so far! 

Cheers,

- Luke Chesney

Founder, CREO

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