Close observers of the Magic: the Gathering market have noticed a trend with the Collector Booster Boxes (CBBs) over the last few years. It goes something like this:

1. Game stores request a certain volume of collector booster boxes of the upcoming Magic expansion from their distributors.
2. Distributors only allot game stores a fraction of their request, citing supply issues, increased demand, etc.
3. For sets featuring serialized cards, the print run is theoretically fixed, ensuring consistent odds for the pre-set number of super rare chase cards.
4. The expectation of scarcity becomes news in the community and drives up demand, increasing the price of the CBB.
5. Additional allotments of CBBs are made available in the weeks/months following release, either by Magic-maker Wizards of the Coast or the distributor, and the price of the product quickly falls to a predictable range not too dissimilar from the expected value of the cards within.
6. Many Magic players forget this cycle and buy into the FOMO when the next CBB comes around.

This Friday, Magic’s “Universes Beyond” collaboration with the Bethesda video game franchise Fallout hits shelves in the form of four pre-constructed Commander decks and collector boosters, the latter featuring novel reprints in one of two Fallout styles, such as Ravages of War and Tarmogoyf, as well as other collector booster-exclusive styles for the cards featured in the Commander release.

In line with the trend, several retailers have cancelled pre-orders for CBBs. The price of the CBBs has, in turn, skyrocketed. Amazon is sold out of the product. Even in Europe, a continent where Magic players are less wooed by Commander cards or inclined to the same degree of FOMO, the average price of a Fallout Collector Booster Box has increased by almost 100 Euro in the last two weeks, per the popular TCG marketplace Cardmarket. But this is part of the cycle, no?

The data we’ve crunched here at Cardboard by the Numbers indicates that Fallout is likely going to be an exception to this trend, and a massive one at that. If our assumptions are right, Fallout Collector Booster Boxes have been under-printed relative to demand and consequently will be extremely scarce.

In short, here’s how we’ve come to this conclusion:

• Fallout has a significantly bigger total audience and overlap with existing Magic players relative to some other Universes Beyond IPs, in particular, with Doctor Who.

• Based on the odds given for the serialized cards and other print run trends, we can estimate that Fallout Collector Booster Boxes have a similar print run to Universes Beyond: Doctor Who.

• The Fallout Collector Booster Boxes have significantly more demand than supply, and cannot receive additional print runs, leading to true scarcity of the product.

And now for the math and assumptions for how we got there:

Figuring Fallout’s Popularity

The popularity of Fallout is hard to determine in 2024. The executives at Amazon seem to have high hopes: the tech giant is launching a TV show starring the excellent Walton Goggins and Yellowjacket’s Ella Purnell with the production and marketing indicators of a 2024 tentpole (we were unable to find the actual production cost of the title as of writing). But with the last mainline game of the franchise nearly a decade old, many of the indicators one would normally use seem fraught.

Using Meta’s ad platform, as we did for our article trying to understand WotC’s motivations for Doctor Who’s early entry in the Universes Beyond series, Fallout seems only reasonably popular. With an estimated 3.7M fans in the United States according to this method, Fallout would have a similar audience to Doctor Who’s 3.1M fans. The overlap between the two franchises is also about the same according to Meta estimates — 14% of Magic’s estimated 4.9M US fans also like Doctor Who, compared to 15.4% with Fallout. But for those following the spoilers, talking to local game store owners, or keeping up with these fandoms separate from the Magic community, this doesn’t necessarily match; Fallout seems to be much more hyped of a crossover, separate to the actual quality of individual cards. 

Ignoring the difference in overlap, the total audience estimated by Meta ads also mismatch with data from the Microsoft leaks during their acquisition of Fallout developer Bethesda. Per those internal documents, 25 million copies of Fallout 4 had already shipped by 2020. Using a conservative 30% estimate for the US, that’d give us 7.5M Americans who were willing to give the franchise’s weakest mainline game their hard-earned cash — a fandom lying in wait for more “good” Fallout content which may hav been harder to tag as part of the Fallout community on Meta’s ad platform.

Indeed, if WotC simply used that metric, or even English-language Wikipedia page views for the last year to try to understand the size of the Fallout audience, they’d underestimate the size of the community in the country where they expect to sell the most cardboard. This is to say, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for WotC to look at those stats, rather than something like Google Trends, and assume the audience sizes are roughly equal. Conventional wisdom in the community would say that the Fallout crossover audience with Magic is much bigger than Doctor Who, and while I generally disagree with the MtG community’s “conventional wisdom”, this is one place I would find common ground. But to do so, unlike most things on this blog, I’d have to pick and choose which sources I find more valid than others, or go extra steps into accounting for the limitations and biases of some of the more popular methods of analysis. 

This is all to say: it wouldn’t be so strange if Fallout and Doctor Who CBBs had more or less the same print run.

Print Run Math

The reason this comparison to Doctor Who is so critical — particularly why Wizards of the Coast would reasonably assume that the audience sizes are in the same ballpark — is because they’ve shown a pattern with print runs. Last month, we investigated the Collector Booster odds for Murders at Karlov Manor. Based on the odds of recent expansions — particularly the explicit print run of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth indicated by stated odds for opening the 1 of 1 The One Ring — we concluded all draftable expansions of the last year or so had similar print runs.

But with Doctor Who collector booster boxes, if the odds of opening a serialized card was the same as it was for all the expansions released before and after it (just under 1%), we estimated that only 55,000 boxes were printed, compared to the 250-300k range of a draftable set. This is worked out backwards from the listed “less than 1%” odds of opening one of the 6,591 unique serialized cards. It also means that 55,000 is also the minimum print run of the expansion to meet the legally-guaranteed odds.

The gap in print run between draftable sets and Doctor Who CBBs makes plenty of sense: even putting aside that Doctor Who doesn’t have the biggest crossover audience with established Magic players, this was a new product, the first CBB to be associated solely with Commander precons. Unlike with Tales from Middle-earth or March of the Machine, most cards found in the box were not legal for play in competitive Magic constructed formats.

Presumably in response to fan outcry about how the repeated use of serialized cards no longer feel special, Murders at Karlov Manor changed the paradigm for serialized cards, only printing serialized versions of a handful of creatures, rather than the 50+ as had been the norm for the year prior. Fallout continues that trend, and I believe, will also follow the trend of decreased odds of opening a serialized card along with it.

According to Star City Games’ Ben Bleiweiss, Fallout’s 3,500 serialized cards have the same listed “less than 1%” odds to open printed on the bottom of the collector box. If the odds to open kept the same as we’ve estimated for Doctor Who, the print-run of the set would be roughly 30,000 boxes — the lowest CE print run ever. That wouldn’t make sense.  

According to Chris Cocks in his 2022 Fireside Chat, there are over 6,000 WPN-certified local game stores. Per game store owners, most are getting at least a few CBBs as part of this first wave of releases. It may be only a fraction of what they’ve requested, but with 70% of sales coming from LGSes (per Chris Cocks) and an estimated 5-8,000 boxes having been sold on Amazon since the set’s announcement per ZonGuru, we can safely assume that Fallout is being printed at least as much as Doctor Who’s minimum.

WotC is covering their bases and making it hard to estimate the odds of opening a serialized card with their “less than 1%” line. But if we assume the rate of opening a serialized card is half that, or 0.5%, that would indicate a print run of 58,000 boxes of Fallout collector booster boxes. Because this is within just a few thousand boxes of where Doctor Who CBBs were projected to be, I think this is the most likely scenario. 

So What?

Many CBBs of previous expansions are selling close to or even below distributor pricing, particularly the expansions prior to the regular inclusion of serialized cards. The implication of this? There’s more supply than demand, and the stores would rather take a hit on margin than have their cash tied up in inventory that’s hard to move.

Based on feedback from LGS owners, the average LGS is receiving 2-5 CBBs for Fallout, or 12,000 to 30,000 units. Add another 5-8k from Amazon, and this first allotment of Fallout CBBs would reflect a bit more than half of the total print run.

Doctor Who CBBs spiked with similar timing to Fallout’s. The difference in that case? After getting more accurate assessments of demand, distributors were able to fulfill most LGS requests in the weeks after release, and a majority of booster boxes were made available after that initial pre-release hype. In this case, if the print runs match up, it’s very likely that the majority of Fallout CBBs are accounted for already. 

Unlike with previous sets, the FOMO is real for Fallout CBBs. While Wizards of the Coast could theoretically print additional boxes while maintaining their “under 1%” chance of opening a serialized card, if that were ever discovered, it would create a huge rift of trust in these high-value cards that have helped make Magic: the Gathering a billion-dollar brand. I don’t believe WotC would be that short-sighted, and the lead times for their printers don’t necessarily allow for quick turnaround of that sort anyways.

Because there are almost certainly more CBBs yet to be allowed to local game stores, the price for these boxes, in the short term, will come down slightly from its current peak. But based on the numbers estimated above, Fallout’s CBBs will likely remain one of the highest-value products for quite some time.

Thanks so much for reading. We have basic land coverage on the regular as well as new Magic: the Gathering infographics and analysis every week, so if you’ve enjoyed this article, sign up for our newsletter and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Threads!!

Disclaimer: I pre-ordered two (2) Fallout Collector Booster Packs from my local game store and stand to theoretically make a huge profit (maybe $10!) on the one I don’t need for my Chaos Draft box if I’m right here.

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.