As someone entrenched in the latest Magic: the Gathering news and announcements, it’s hard to believe that numbered/serialized cards have only been a consistent part of the game for a year and change. Accounting for an incredible 70 of the top 100 most-expensive cards printed since 2017, serialized cards have changed the game in terms of finance, collectability, and “bling”: and as evidenced with the newest expansion, Murders at Karlov Manor, that trend is only going to continue.

As with so many of Magic’s other recent innovations, the cry of “when everything is special, nothing is” is frequently invoked in conversations around serialized cards online and in card shops around the world. About half of the expansions released in 2023 had serialized cards of some sort after their premiere in November 2022’s The Brothers’ War, with most expansions boasting north of 30,000 total cards to chose from.

In a game played by 30 million according to Hasbro leadership, having 30 odd thousand cards is still pretty “special”, statistically: that’s only one for every thousand players of the game! However, their (undeserved) perceived ubiquity was not helped by their execution. In most cases, serialized cards were identical to their foil showcase counterparts found in normal booster packs besides a sticker declaring “[xxx/500]”. Only the five new Praetor cards from March of the Machine, as well as a few Secret Lair-branded convention giveaways showed off bespoke art on their serialized releases. 

Murders at Karlov Manor is starting what appears to be a new trend when it comes to serialized cards. Rather than produce 500 numbered copies of 60+ different cards, MKM only had eight to receive the treatment. The biggest implication of this? The odds of opening a serialized card have plummeted, with even the team at Star City Games unable to pull one.

So, what are the odds, exactly?

With the “Collecting [Set Name]” series of articles on the Mothership, Wizards of the Coast staff detail the approximate pull-rates for each type of card in every style of booster pack. However, for serialized cards, the numbers given are an unbounded range, listed as “under 1%” for each of the premiere expansions to host them. Using print run estimations, we think we’ve figured out the math.

We have two figures that are more-or-less confirmed: the number of boxes printed for The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth and for Dominaria United. In LTR, the famous 1 of 1 The One Ring was listed with odds of 0.00003%. With only one in existence, this would put the total number of Collector Boosters at 3.33M, or 277,778 boxes. 

For Dominaria United, so-called “Lost Legends”, cards from a recently-discovered pallet of Legends booster packs, were included in exactly 3% of all Dominaria United collector booster packs. Our analysis puts the total number of Legends cards put into every 33.3 collector boosters of DMU at 152 booster boxes or 82,000 cards, accounting for a small amount of loss/removal — indicating a DMU print run of over 227,000 boxes. From these data points, we’ve got a good amount of context to try and estimate the print-runs of other sets.

For The Brothers’ War, March of the Machine, and Ravnica Remastered, there must be at least 262,500 booster boxes in total for serialized cards to be opened in under 1% of booster packs. Because this number is incredibly close to the print run for The Lord of the Rings, a set which Wizards of the Coast had anticipated would perform better overall, I think it’s safe to assume that the print run of collector booster boxes would be as close to that as possible, and these expansions would not be printed significantly more. As a result, we’ll use 0.99% as our estimation in the odds of opening a serialized card for these expansions, which also jives with a “one in eight boxes” open-rate we’ve heard from big stores anecdotally.

The only real assumption we have to make here is whether or not Murders at Karlov Manor would have the same print run as the previously mentioned expansions. Personally, I would never have projected the anticipated demand of collector boosters to be the same across such diverse sets, from an all-reprint set to multiple standard sets to a Universes Beyond crossover with one of fantasy’s most-beloved franchises, but since that seems to be the case here, I think it only makes sense to project Murders at Karlov Manor at the same level. The whole of Hasbro may be in an economically conservative mood at the moment, but the COGS of printing cards are a massively small part of the overall Magic financial picture, and Wizards of the Coast’s profit margin is a significant positive outlier within the Hasbro ecosystem. 

So if the print run of Murder at Karlov Manor collector boosters holds steady with that of March of the Machine, opening a serialized card in the newest expansion is going to be 18 times harder than it was just last month in Ravnica Remastered and morecomparable to the 1,900 serialized Sol Ring versions in Tales from Middle-earth. While this likely won’t affect the price premium for most of the specific cards in MKM compared to their non-serialized versions (a topic we’ll be discussing more on our social media int he coming days), this change will likely make collector boosters meaningful less valuable, and thus, less desirable, by comparison.

It’s interesting to see such a strong preemptive reaction to player fatigue with serialized cards on WotC’s part. Those who follow company communications closely know that the company works at least 18 months ahead of public releases to account for printing and distribution. Knowing they would need to pull back on the volume of serialized cards before The Brothers’ War even had hit the shelf speaks to a savviness in their understanding of their customer base, while still providing the cards as the ultimate lottery ticket in booster packs (and one of the few drivers of value in MKM’s collector boxes on an expected value basis). 

What do you think of this change? Should Wizards of the Coast be making serialized cards with such regularity? Does the upcoming Fallout set’s limit of seven cards to get this treatment mean that serialized cards will stay less common in the future? Let us know in the comments or on our social channels!

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Miles Atherton is the editor-in-chief of “Cardboard by the Numbers” and has been playing Magic since 2006. Since studying Agricultural Economics at UC Davis, he’s built a career as an award-winning marketing executive in the entertainment industry with a love of data journalism. He’s also written for Anime Buscience, Anime News Network, and Crunchyroll News, serving as Executive Editor of the latter from 2016 to 2021.