Shards of Alara - Rare Commons?
So I just finished cataloguing my first box of Shards of Alara having opened them over the past couple of days with many duels in between. I bought four boxes from my regular cardboard crack dealer at dogstargames.com - he sells on eBay and directly from his site; his customer service is excellent and he ships on the spot. If you’re looking for magic cards, check out the site and shoot an email if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
Anyway, enough shameless plugs.
My Chupys and I always tend to christen a new expansion with some sealed deck games. So we open our 5 packs, add land as we see fit, and then duke it out. To make things exciting, after the first few games, we add two more expansions, shift around decks (if it seems prudent) etc etc.
I must say, Shards of Alara so far is a challenge for a straight up sealed deck. You’re ramrodded into one of the shards pretty easily and there’s basically just very little room to maneuver. That, however, is content enough for a separate post.
The thing I’m most annoyed with is:
WTF are all the commons? So a booster box is:
36 packs of 16 cards == 576
minus 36 x 1 marketing cards == 540
minus 36 x 1 land cards == 504
So we’ve got 504 cards to work with. I ended up with:
- 7 mythic rares
- 29 rares
- 110 uncommons
- 357 commons
The astute will note a series of discrepancies here. We’re minus one common due to a foil land and minus two more commons due to foil uncommons. The number of distinct commons received was 101, which means at least one of each common is represented.
Now, this is only one box, so this spread may not be representative if the distribution is truly random, but I thought these numbers seemed a little suspect. (Once I open my second box, I’ll update this and see how it turned out.)
- 1x distinct common x8
- 2x distinct commons x7
- 4x distinct commons x6
- 16x distinct commons x5
- 27x distinct commons x4
- 28x distinct commons x3
- 16x distinct commons x2
- 7x distinct commons x1
Not even paying attention to which had only one or two, doesn’t this distribution seem out of whack? I’m well aware of the C-N ratings given to prints of card sheets, but this seems extreme. I’ve opened a non-trivial number of booster boxes for my own collection and I don’t think I’ve ever seen any commons with only 1 received per box. Let alone 7 distinct ones.
I hope this isn’t another way for wizards to skim some more fat off the milk and leave us with the water. I could be wrong, of course, but it seems like this only requires people to purchase more boosters. It’s like the fat-pack decision to remove the book…? Big 
on that one. Apparently both the books and the fat packs were selling well enough that they could decouple them and make a little more profit.
Well, as an owner of Hasbro, I can’t say I dislike it… but as a player, I can say I definitely dislike it.