Should there always be a foil in a tournament pack?

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Hello, all,
I don't know where to find the official info (any links will be
appreciated) but I always thought that a tournament pack contains 30
basic lands, 3 rares, 10 uncommons, 32 commons and one random foil
card. Today, however, I opened a Champions of Kamigawa which contained
no additional foil. Is this normal or should I confront the store with
that?

Thanks in advance,
Arkady.

 

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arkadyz1@yahoo.com writes:
> Hello, all,
> I don't know where to find the official info (any links will be
> appreciated) but I always thought that a tournament pack contains 30
> basic lands, 3 rares, 10 uncommons, 32 commons and one random foil
> card. Today, however, I opened a Champions of Kamigawa which contained
> no additional foil. Is this normal or should I confront the store with
> that?

The exact formulas used in Wizards's card sorting aren't publicly
available, but the chances of getting a foil are on the package as
being 1:70. Since there are 75 cards in a tournament pack, there very
often is 1 in there. However, I've opened tournament packs with 0, and
I've opened tournament packs with 2.

The only known constants are that you'll get 3/10/32/30 R/U/C/L.
Anything else is guesswork based on empirical evidence, I think.

--
Peter C.
"As part of the conversion, computer specialists rewrote 1,500
programs; a process that traditionally requires some debugging."
-- USA Today, referring to the IRS switchover to a new computer system.

 

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Peter Cooper Jr. wrote:

> arkadyz1@yahoo.com writes:
>
>>Hello, all,
>>I don't know where to find the official info (any links will be
>>appreciated) but I always thought that a tournament pack contains 30
>>basic lands, 3 rares, 10 uncommons, 32 commons and one random foil
>>card. Today, however, I opened a Champions of Kamigawa which contained
>>no additional foil. Is this normal or should I confront the store with
>>that?
>
> The exact formulas used in Wizards's card sorting aren't publicly
> available, but the chances of getting a foil are on the package as
> being 1:70. Since there are 75 cards in a tournament pack, there very
> often is 1 in there. However, I've opened tournament packs with 0, and
> I've opened tournament packs with 2.
>
> The only known constants are that you'll get 3/10/32/30 R/U/C/L.
> Anything else is guesswork based on empirical evidence, I think.

Hm, I thought one of our players this weekend got no foil, but an
extra rare (4 total) in his, but maybe he was wrong. ;(

 

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Archived from groups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.misc (More info?)

On 7 Feb 2005 11:32:53 -0800, arkadyz1@yahoo.com <arkadyz1@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Hello, all,
>I don't know where to find the official info (any links will be
>appreciated) but I always thought that a tournament pack contains 30
>basic lands, 3 rares, 10 uncommons, 32 commons and one random foil
>card.

Nope. Some have a foil card; many do not.

> Today, however, I opened a Champions of Kamigawa which contained
>no additional foil. Is this normal or should I confront the store with that?

You may just have been lucky in your previous packs. Consider: the chances
of any given card being replaced with a foil card are small, but in a starter
deck you have 75 cards... so there's Not That Small a chance for at least one
of them to be so replaced. (And more than one, of different rarities, can be,
to boot.) Foils are not guaranteed in any Magic starter deck or booster pack
that I know of.

On average, I think, you'll get about six or seven foil non-basicland cards in
a _box_ of starters, maybe one rare, two uncommons, the rest common, and maybe
one to three will have a foil basic land. But some of these might be in the
same starter deck out of the twelve, so it's virtually guaranteed that there
will be starter decks in that box that do NOT have any foil cards.

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from dbd@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.