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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2024
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Booster Packs are by far the most abundant and affordable TCG product on the market, but they can be a tricky thing to get right. In this video we'll be covering the sorts of thing people probably never think of.
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Alt Title: 10 Commandments of TCGs 1: The Rare Slot is Sacred
He literally said that in the video
Ah yes, time for another episode of:
“How Yu-Gi-Oh! is the Black Sheep of Card Games”
at this point, he will need to make an exclusive 30+ min video explaining how even it still standing and being one of the most popular tcg
@@jotacatalan I think that'd be worth it just to learn why the big ones ARE the big ones, beyond just name recognition and seniority. You don't do that well without doing SOMETHING right.
I think Yu-Gi-Oh succeeds more than a lot of other card games at fulfilling what people imagine the game to be like. I play Final Fantasy XIV, and something they talk about with designing their player jobs is maintaining the 'class fantasy'; essentially, they want to make sure, at the end of the day, that if someone came in wanting to play a Black Mage, that Black Mage should feel as close to what they're picturing as possible.
Yu-Gi-Oh excels at that. Not only in a general sense--if you play the game 'right', it does feel like the sort of stuff you see in the anime--but also more specifically, archetypes tend to feel like you hope they do when you see them, no matter how weirdly specific the concept is. A deck built around big, scary dragons, absolutely gonna have some big boss monsters. A deck like Ghostrick, that looks like a bunch of little gremlins, is mostly full of annoying tricks that mess with your opponent. Shaddoll is basically a Borg invasion, and it feels like it with a slow but sure control style.
@@EinDose There is certainly something to that, but I think there are more archetypes where their mechanics are basically completely unrelated to their themes than ones like Ghostricks or Dragonmaid where they work together. I think the much bigger selling point is simply archetypes themselves. The fact you can pick a theme and then build an entire deck to have that theme. Even other games with deck type restrictions, like colour, mostly lack meaningful aesthetic coherency between cards. You will inevitably end up with a bunch of cards that don't look visually related to each other, sometimes even going as far as to have completely different artstyles like in Pokemon. Yugioh is the only card game I know of where you can say "I have a Shaddoll deck" - in every other game it's "I have a blue-green midrange deck" or something, and no one falls in love with "blue-green midrange" like they do with "Shaddolls".
sorry to not agree to you but YGO DOES make some moves which would kill any other new TCG in an instant. YGO can just go on with this since they had
a) the Anime to kick the hype of
b) a quick increase in the player base
c) survivied the 2 year curse and then the game kept expanding thanks to quickly building on the hype and
d) make a very competitive scene with Shonen Jumps (and the Promos) and the Pharaoh-Tour (in the EU) which attracted even MORE players
And having sets where most of the cards are utter trash and has only SOME playable cards (and of course all of them high rarity)
i mean you even say this in your Progression Series. A Pauper Format in YGO wouldn't be that much possible in YGO.
BUT it is SO BIG that it can sustain it since there are enough players so some smaller setbacks and sets that don't sell well (the constant set releases between regular sets, promo sets, side sets and stuff is another thing that similar tcgs couldn't afford to to) are not much of a problem
Also the point with the box ratios is also a valid point. Buying 2 boxes is kinda "throw most of the cards away since you have them already in an overload" just to get the rare cards (for which you will have WAY to few). This is (as he said) good for casuals but for "box buyers" really not that great
to be fair, common yugioh cards tend to be pretty *good.
also, most players have a playset per deck.
Oh you're totally gonna make a 10 Commandments of TCG Design series now, you put that energy out into the universe.
the lootboxes versus packs intro really made me stare at magic arena and its terrible economy
You should check out how Runeterra does its economy. Despite it being a digital medium, it's the best and most fair TCG monetisation I have ever come across, much better than even its physical counterparts from other games. Essentially you can collect every card in the game for free, and it won't take you a lifetime to get or collect the cards the need, nor do you need to break the bank to get even highly priced and good value cards in terms of gameplay. It's just good all around.
@@Yous0147 Ironic that the company that made Legue of Legends made one of the most fair online TCGs.
@@danielzakgaim2764 That is ironic. In reality it's just good business sense though, these kinds of strategies are an investment into the future, and they pay in dividends if you manage to run with it. LoR was actually not as popular in the beginning because despite the LoL media backing it, coming from a moba into a card game is a much harder proposition than from a show or manga. So they had to find ways to have player retention and they decided that the best way to do that was with an open and fair card collecting model alongside frequent updates and fixes. Super cool, it should really be the standard for all other digital card games.
@@Yous0147 @Daniel Zakgaim Why ironic? league of legends is fair, no p2w no lootboxes, you can talk about buying champions but even that is really easy
@@SuseiNoGantia Now league is like that yes, but I remember how it used to be over the years and it hasn't always been as open. Obtaining free currency for a champ (before blue shards was a thing) could easily take you a month of good playtime and unlocked characters were far less in number and rotated for less too. They've slowly opened things up over the years, even so much as making customizables and skins obtainable, and I'm very much certain that the success that brought them also partially carried over to the philosophy behind Runeterra. But even still LoL is less generous than Runeterra overall, which is understandable. But the background I come from with Lol is from a time when the game was still struggling to figure out what works and what doesn't
You know Kohdok, I think I just realized why I like your videos so much while watching this one. Yes your content is really good, but I really like your delivery. Your editing from shot to shot is really smooth. The actually visuals choices of showing off cards and the like really flow well. Also you don't overflow your videos with loud music, greenscreens, and stock images, making it feel like someone is talking to you rather than some power point presentation.
Keep up the good work!
Yeah, the into especially was top notch, really good humor on that one.
It's called the "God Pack" because the first time this was done was for the Theros MTG set, where the pack could contain all 15 God cards from the set.
I don't think that's correct. I used to play UFS when it first was released (2006) and the all-rare packs were referred to as god packs. I don't even think that was the first card game where that was the case.
I think another reason Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG packs have 9 cards is that the earliest TCG sets were slightly larger, because each was a combination of two OCG sets. Legend of Blue Eyes has 126 cards. 5% of 126 = 6.3, which rounds to 7 + 1 = 8, which is much closer to the stated ideal number (Metal Raiders has 143 cards, which comes out to 9).
Of course, at this time the OCG sets were *smaller*, with only ~60 cards, so it was the OCG getting some pack chaff (OCG packs have 5 cards, but 5%+1 of 60 is 4). And once the TCG caught up, they also had 60 card sets. Konami seems to have gradually figured out during GX that 60 cards wasn't enough, and the sets gradually trend upward to 100, at which point an OCG pack is exactly 5% of the set.
All this is to say that 9 cards made sense for LOB and Metal Raiders exactly, and nothing after that. Even if having half the cards of Pokemon or a third of Magic wasn't an issue (and I'm sure it would have been a huge issue), telling your customers they're going to be getting half the value for their buck is simply unfeasible, even if the bang is statistically better, and it improves the resale value.
That said, in very early Yu-Gi-Oh!, since any card can go in any deck, having a glut of commons was probably genuinely helpful for casual players.
One thing I feel should be mentioned about gachas is that they aren't all negatives either. In most cases, they are bought with an in-game currency that you can get by playing the game as well as by buying it with real money, so many players aren't paying anything, while with physical card games that is never an option. It's a system designed to prey upon gamblers and those desperate enough to whale, but in many cases it's totally possible to play normally for free. Your first example, Fate/Grand Order, I played for over 4 years and only spent like 40 dollars total, and that only for guaranteed super rares, and despite that I had a ton of high rarity characters with over a thousand of the premium currency (so, like, 400 rolls) saved up. It was incredibly generous both with good characters and with difficulty to not need specific good characters.
On the other hand there are many games that are extremely predatory, but a gacha system does not mean the game is guaranteed to be predatory.
I've played Azur Lane for 6 years and have never spent anything to roll for ships, yet still have 99.2% of all the ships in the game. At the start, that meant I missed out on a Kizuna Ai ship or two that will never come back because I was starting from 0 and they didn't make cubes as easy to get as they are now, but since then I've never felt pressured to spend money and have instead rewarded them by getting skins.
> Gacha is named after the sound an egg capsule makes when cranking it
i honestly thought it was named after the fact that it makes companies go "Gacha! Now we've made you spend all your money just to get that one rare item."
The gate ruler English release has insane pull rates. Every box gives you at least one copy of every high rarity card (except one). It also gives you 4 upgrade rarity cards, meaning you could get two copies of the uber rare. Buying 4 boxes means you have a complete set except for 3/4 singles.
Those Pekora pulls are pretty insane tho, she IS the lucky bunny after all.
16:21 Now that Digimon got all the rares foiled. WE ARE SAFE!!!
While you're right that Lootboxes are worse because you don't get to keep, re-use, trade or exchange the things that come out of it, they're still gambling mechanics designed to tempt people to part with more money than they otherwise might in the hopes of getting the things they want for a game they enjoy. The secondary market is a bandaid allowing you to make up for this by buying singles but those prices are dictated by a combination of demand and the artificial limiting factor of random chance pack opening.
TCGs are fundamentally economically abusive mechanically, there's no getting away from that.
Exactly, boosters actually could be fine if the ratios and availability was much more reasonable and fair, and if the way to get a good amount or maybe all of those cards were offset by guaranteed packages similar to structure decks (although not as pricy). The fun of boosters is the surprise and the possible utility they can bring in to your portfolio, but with boosters as they are designed now, this isn't the norm, rather it's the exception to the rule and that very thing makes it more like gambling than it feels like buying a small surprise gift.
Gacha games are literally a scam if you spend money. Those game are intended to force people into spending 100’s of dollars for a single PNG that they can’t even keep forever. TCG’s are far fairer. You can keep the cards and due to a second market existing, you can just buy the singles and don’t have to bother with luck at all.
my main argument against that is that there are loot boxes in TF2 and some other games where you can actually buy, sell, and trade them with other players.
Like, they really are just IRL loot boxes, to the point of that AND ante is the reason why Magic was almost labeled as illegal gambling.
@@ThatManOverThere Artifact, TF2, or any other Steam game isn't properly similar to IRL trading. Actually getting real money out of them involves account trading/offsite exchanges that aren't exactly encouraged by Valve, at which mobile gachas have the same sort of payoff for people that sell accounts.
Not to imply IRL packs aren't still equivalent to lootboxes. IDK about them being mechanically abusive, but they're just lootboxes with much higher liquidity and permanence. Unfortunately LCGs don't seem viable in comparison to TCGs.
I agree their is a reason magic packs are called card board crack. I dont know how many get rich quick schemes involve tcgs i heard over the years but its a lot
7:14
Funny thing is, even after that, there s still a chance that you won't have 3 of ALL commons
HMMMYESSS short prints :)
@@RyanAtlus Yeah, this whole shortprint nonsense, I m stil wondering what is even the point that at this point.
@@RyanAtlus Short prints don't happen in Main Sets (such as Phantom Rage), starting with Rise of the Duelist. Randomness can still hit though, there have been a few times where I've opened a box and don't have three of every common, but 4 or 5 of a few of them.
You couldn't really expect it even if there was no short prints. It's equally likely that you get 6 of one common and 0 of another as it is to get 3 of each essentially, if the ratios aren't in your favor. Those 3 extra copies are also chaff, and this could and does happen in the Digimon example too though it's better than just outright chaff.
The set booster is great when you realize that buying them by the box eliminates chaff while providing pretty solid rare/ premium card output.
Exactly, I honestly don't know of a game that reasonably has done this though. I don't feel like the big 3 and Digimon does this to a good degree.
I actually love the set boosters. They force the commons and uncommons to have some mechanical or flavor theme with each other, meaning that even when I only get one rare, I still feel like the majority of the pack might end up together in a deck at some point. I still buy singles for most purposes, but when I want to just drop a few bucks and jam some packs from the newest set, the set boosters are a much more enjoyable open than draft boosters, which are ideal for their one specific purpose… drafting.
This might be your most ingenious and thought-provoking video to date. And that means a lot, considering the usual quality of your videos.
That sponsor was so well executed, well done.
New idea for Errata Text: Building Better First Sets
The first set of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) had 295 cards. It showed players endless possibilities. It allowed them to construct all sorts of decks.
The first set of the Yu-Gi-Oh! (YGO) only had 126 cards. It more or less only allowed players to build beatdown decks. It more or less did not show players endless possibilities. It instead made it easier for players to learn YGO, making it easier for them to get started with YGO, making it easier for them to buy YGO. The next sets of YGO later introduced new mechanics and new possibilities. YGO eventually showed players endless possibilities when they noticed that it had a lot of sets.
You cannot escape the Hololive
If there's one thing I didn't expect, it's a Pekora clip being used in this video
These videos are INCREDIBLE. Hope you make more TCG analysis vids.
More to come!
'"Now, a Booster Pack of Phantom Rage has 24 Booster Packs"
Great video regardless
And each of those booster packs holds 24 booster packs
The name god pack comes from a very small percentage of journey into nyx packs that had one of every god from the theros block.
One single google search would have told you that "god pack" is just a generic term. It existed waaaaaaay before theros came out
Words cannot express how much I love the first 30 seconds of this video
Loot boxes are more predatory but they're still basically the same.
I think there are a few differences between typical TCG packs and lootboxes/gacha mechanics - and IMO the latter are (currently) probably more predatory than the former. Ultimately, though, I think they're more similar in spirit than not, as booster packs still push players to spend more money in hopes of pulling a chase rare or tournament staple. I feel the secondary market, in-game currency, and other features are more "additional" characteristics than intrinsic aspects of a TCG or gacha - that is, those things can be added/removed or modified with relative ease.
A TCG can't really do anything about its secordary market.
@@AztecCroc Not directly, but they've got at least some influence over it - their reprint policy will largely affect secondary market prices, and games like MTG are careful when reprinting cards because they don't want to destabilize the secondary market too much.
@@victort.2583 Exactly, the demand pressure is directly proportional to how much in circulation the card is which is directly affected by pull rate. It's actually very easy for a game developer/publisher to estimate the value of a card based on its possible use and strength and the desired rarity. Of course they don't benefit from the secondary market value directly, but they hugely benefit from the chase card mentality it promotes and consequent booster sales, as well as the value boom it brings into the product. The problem is that this is really just a bubble that only a huge game with a killer media can semi-sustain, and it comes at the cost of player-retention and overall health of the game.
its worth noting that magic the gathering actually has just been emulating gacha mechanics for the last two years entirely through what they've set up. a lot of the recent sets have introduced incredibly powerful, game breaking cards like oko, cards that are so strong that you have no reason not run them, which they then ban once that set has run its course, reducing the value of the card to nothing. they then do it again in the next set.
gacha games do shit like this all the time, mostly through greatly nerfing characters under the guise of balance, but only after that character has gone off market. it is an inherently scummy business tactic. admittedly, i have not checked on the last few magic sets, but i doubt the trend has stopped
@@bionichuteagain2583 Oh, for sure - Modern Horizons, War of the Spark, Throne of Eldraine, Ikoria, and Theros: Beyond Death had a number of cards that really pushed the power limits (Hogaak/Astrolabe, Narset/Karn/Teferi, Companions, Uro, etc.). Even Zendikar Rising had Omnath. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future (they were fairly quick to act with Omnath, and both Kaldheim and Strixhaven were quite nice), but Modern Horizons 2 will likely be a bit unpredictable.
My favorite example of rush packs is back in Journey Into Nyx in the first Theros block of Magic, there was a literal "god" pack where the 15 cards was one of each of the 15 gods of Theros (before one of them was killed). I didn't even open it myself, just hearing that someone else opened it from the other side of room for my first sealed event was epic.
Pretty sure that playing a duel with Yu-Gi-Oh cards on fire was the gimmick of at least one episode.
Nah we only played with motorcycle
Along with the saws... I mean dark energy disks that send the loser to the shadow realm.
@@akl2k7 Honestly, isn't being sent to a realm of misery and torment for eternity _even worse_ than just death? I think 4Kids actually make it more terrifying.
@@Shenaldrac True. It's like how in the old 90s Batman cartoon, they said they couldn't have the Joker killing anyone, so the writing staff made him do things worse than killing.
@@akl2k7 0000000000
You know, most of these videos get me excited to make my own TCG, which I don't really have the capacity to do. Which is disappointing, but fun.
This video is dangerous, because it got me excited to open booster packs, which I CAN do. ...even though my TCG of choice is Yu-Gi-Oh, this video's Goofus to Digimon's Gallant.
@Andrew Ruffing We all know that's not nearly as fun!
Plus, I prefer to use boosters to get a starter on decks rather than completely picking and building from scratch. Modern Yu-Gi-Oh is super focused on very specific archetypes, it can be overwhelming to try to start picking and building a new deck. But if I get a booster box and walk away with a handful of high-rarity Virtual Worlds, I have a place to build from.
Great discussion, my friend and I love just cracking packs, I've been doing so for the last 18 years. I have always found it interesting how different games organize their packs or how different sets within the same game organize them.
just got this in my recommended, opening animation is god tier
This was so incredibly helpful and fascinating to me, as are all the videos of yours I've been binging the past few days, so thank you! Looking forward to sharing my game with you sometime later this year!
Cracked a box of FoW with a friend back in the days just for building decks and play, and the first pack was a Rush Pack. Insane feeling and that in a game where opening packs already felt satisfying!
Coming back to this banger. 8:25 got me good. Recently retired from YGO, because I despise the way the game is now and wanted to focus on Digimon. Sold my stuff for very very cheap, even the expensive things. A whole common/rare/super rare box was still there after I sold everything else, around 600 cards. Had trouble to find someone to buy the box for 50 reais (that's 10 USD at most). Imagine selling hundreds of cards for basically the price you pay for a pack... And they weren't even all garbo, there were some useful stuff there, not the whole box was good but it's still amazing that I basically sold years of cards collected for less than 2 cents each.
I argue that Booster Packs ARE Gacha and Loot Boxes.
It’s just that they suck less. But they still suck
Fully agree
Technically, the Haters are tight...
Lootboxes are Cancerous Boosters!
XD
Yup. They are loot boxes. The fact that they're slightly less bad in that they can't be taken away with servers going down doesn't make them not every bit as bad and malicious as loot boxes. They are still incredibly manipulative and get you to gamble money on maybe getting something you want while having a significant chance of getting nothing you actually wanted. The fact that there's a secondary market doesn't matter. There could be a secondary market for gatcha games _and loot boxes would still be awful and gambling._
I'm just reminded of that guy who went mental for bending "fat gay pikachu" on stream when people try to argue that booster packs are somehow exempt from the same "it's gambling" argument. To me it's all the same lol.
Kohdok, I'm a huge fan, and I'd like it if you reviewed Keyforge, the primary gimmick of which is that, simultaneously, the decks are mostly random, and the game has no boosters
and also is just really, horribly unbalanced.
@@ThatManOverThere I disagree. The deck design algorithm works very hard to make sure most decks are 100% viable in a competitive setting.
@@sarahfay5280 viable, yes. But balanced?
13:03 Hey, what happened here? It looks like some text is layered on top of itself in this section.
I just noticed that too!
Oh dear. That's an export issue I missed. It's supposed to look like how it appears a few seconds down.
wow that ad in the beginning after what happened a week or two before this comment hit me like a truck
One of the most instructive video of the series, and the level was high!
Star Wars Unlimited seems to have taken these lessons to heart. 1st set is 252 cards so using your formula you get a pack size of 14. SWU packs have 16 slots but 1 slot is always a leader and 1 a location. This is really good for limited formats. Also, they have foil slot and a rare slot. Your uncommon slots have a chance of being a higher rarity. Finally, the rarest cards in the game are showcase leaders and they only affect the leader slot so you could still get a legendary in the same pack!
Yoo, Arid Mesa pull lol
The more staples you print at ultra-mega-super-rare, the more like a lootbox your booster pack becomes.
3:00 I understand the distinction you're making and why to a player that matters but like you did just describe a loot box that has more stakes in it which in the eyes of the law doesn't make it better but worse.
I think gacha mechanics and most TCG boosters rely on pretty much the same things. In most gacha games, the lowest rarity units can offer multiple copies and can help make the unit stronger. Having low rarity units can be the foundation in many gacha games. The same can be said about C/U/R rarity cards because as a collector of TCGs, at some point, the box with commons/uncommons and even rares becomes meaningles cardboard and you're just searching for higher rarity like Super/Awesome/Fabled just get that shot of dopamine. That's pretty much also the same with gacha mechanics - a 5-star or max rarity character is also the most sought after collectible.
Now, how the gacha mechanics are implemented is a different story. See, if a gacha game has a "pity" reward, meaning, after certain amount of summons/pulls you don't get the rarest unit, you are guaranteed after x-amount of failed attempts to finally get it. I look at this "pity" rate as the same thing as purchasing a booster box - you are guaranteed some rare stuff, like certain amount of Majestic cards in FAB booster box. BUT wait - what if you do not purchase a booster box case, then you might miss out on some extremely rare card that shows up 1 in every 4 boxes but the 2 boxes you've ordered came from 2 different cases or someone else purchased them earlier and already got the extremely rare card.
Point is - both gacha and TCG boosters rely on baiting collectors like myself and it always depends on the eye of the beholder what value you're getting out of C/U/R cards or 3-star/4-star units in a gacha game. The best way to fight against these addicting vices is by purchasing singles to avoid gambling on booster boxes and building up enough resources to summon on the "pity" rate in one go in a gacha game.
P.S. Yes, I fully know some gacha games do not have pity rates (like Fate/Grand Order, although I heard they've introduced some kind of bingo pity rate in JP) and that's why my comparison was made against some really annoying rarities in TCGs where you can only get a card 1 out of 4 booster boxes or something.
I remember in the original Innistrad set of MTG, I once got a "bomb" pack. It had a mythic rare in the rare slot, a mythic rare in the foil slot, and a mythic rare in the flip card slot (Innistrad was the first set to do the double sided cards and they all had a bonus slot akin to the foil slot).
Booster packs are still gambling man, there's no way around it
"still"
You act like any players cared.
@@eavyeavy2864 I use "still" as in, "despite your arguments that it's not, it is." And yeah, players care. I care. Learn how companies use gambling mechanics to get players hooked.
@@0Enigmatic0 they do care, but in ways that they like it or hate it, depending on who you ask?
@@revimfadli4666 if there is a person who "likes" companies exploiting their fellow man, they should *ähem* be removed from the field :)
@@ich3730 well I was talking about those exploited men liking it themselves lol
Fun fact - There were LITERAL god packs in MTG's Theros block, where all the cards in a pack were replaced with the 15 mythic rare Gods.
Now I need this, this is going to be saved in a list
Nice voice work at the start there haha👌🏿
In WWE Raw Deal the "God Pack" was named "Hot Pack" and contained all the foil only that were character specific that normally would fall in to the Mythic Rarity.
Well Ill argue the difference in the Pokemon and Genshin is that every one of those pulls is possible to get a rare. Meaning you could get multiple rares. It would be somewhere inbetween Normal packs and Magics "Collector Boosters". Which those collector boosters are roughly 15 to 20 dollars a booster.
The fact of the matter is booster packs have similarities with loot boxes even if they aren't the same, even the way that there's a secondary market exists albeit to a lesser extent with lootbox games where a lot of gacha games have the whales(the equivalent of people who buy booster cases) where when they leave a game they might sell their account to someone else to use(which is against terms of service but is done anyways.)
In fact, while loot boxes are more predatory and try to be more limiting about the secondary market there are some elements in which they are less abusive than trading card games in that there have been laws passed that requires them to have publicly available the exact percentage of the chance you are to get any given unit/character/item for any box that can use the premium currency. This means that unlike side sets in YuGiOh there can be no true short printing.
There's a reason why Cimoo is right about buying singles and that video game youtubers are right when saying that micro-transactions are bad and that it's best to buy games that just have stand alone content where unlike gacha or trading card games there is a clear upper limit for how much money you have to spend. Ring Fit Adventure or Pokemon Sword and Shield, not Fate Grand Order or YuGiOh Duel Links.
I agree. To add on top of that, buying singles is really just a bandaid to an open wound, because in reality you're just offseting the opening of booster packs on to someone else. The only real fix would be for the game to actually give alternative ways to get the card that are less predicated on random chance and loot mechanics, or to atleast make the ratios reasonable and fair for a given player so that they can atleast get some value in terms of gameplay and purpose out of a pack.
@@Yous0147 I do think one of the issues is what would be the way to have cards be less predicated on random chance and loot mechanics, would it be make sure that a case of booster boxes must have at least one copy of every secret rare for Yugioh, but even then you aren't guaranteed to have a playset of the new Pot of card and you are spending 700 USD. While Yugioh does do unlimited runs and reprint sets which tries to help with it I do wonder if the solution isn't to have some product that costs a good amount that comes out like a month or two after the set which can be ordered where for like 300 $ you can get a playset of all the cards as common. This would really help decrease the chance of having something like Ash Blossom being 20$ even with all of its reprints. It also allows for a reason to buy sealed rather than these factory deals because you have the cards there as higher rarity and you get to play them earlier.
My rule for packs is simple don't get them expecting to get a specific card if there's a card you want and you happen to get it from a pack that's great but at the end of the day if you want a specific card buy singles
I buy packs when I just want more cards and cus opening packs is so satisfying and a great way to cheer me up (digital ones don't do it for me)
I like how video from fgo (2:32) has the banner from this week's event and everything summoned is new so there's a high chance that the account was created just for this video.
Also getting kaleidscope on first roll is great luck.
also some year 1 f2p servants still useful to this day on both na and jp servers
Are you reading my mind Kohdok? I was just thinking about my booster packs when your video was shown to me by TH-cam. ;) Love it! A lot of good information here.
Wow, The Spoils! I didn't know they existed outside the back of Dragon Shields boxes.
I've been trying to make a card game based in the world I am making a book on, and watching these videos gives me at the same time inspiration and disheartens me. There's so much that needs to be done and frankly as someone working and having to do it on my own its incredibly hard. Hopefully one day I can actually send you it to review.
Anyways, one idea I mulled about with selling cards was just to sell the archetypes of the set together in packs where you get playsets of all the stuff in that archetype. You buy theoretically four packs you have all the cards in the set.
Tbh, I don't really care about people having to spend a ton of money on my game opening packs. I just would want them to have the cards.
Pack opening is fun though sooo... Idk :/
I love this type of content. Keep up the good work, mate!
Does the term "God pack" have any origin in the packs from MTG's journey into Nyx that contain only beyond rares with the god creature type?
I play magic and didn't even know this existed!
I think that's where it came from!
honestly i've been hearing the phrase "god pack" sense i was little and kids on the playground told tales of getting pokemon packs of all shiny cards
I think it's more actually the other way around. Magic finally had a God type and exactly as many Mythic Rare Gods as there were cards in a booster, so it felt appropriate to make a God Pack.
That's my theory, at least, it could be the other way round tho
15:11 Hitting us with that Pokemon Snap music lol Professor Oak is going to rate your booster packs "Wonderful!"
I've seen The Meta Zoo cards at Target next to the other trading cards, they look cute like Pokemon kind of
I appreciate the Dragon Quest music in the background. I have found another TH-camr of culture.
Good to have you back with a new commentary!
I have a lot to say on your defense of boosters over loot boxes, but the thing that weirds me out the most is the...hatred of duplicate pities.
Games like Dragalia Lost and Another Eden gives you alternate currency cause they aren't designed to make using duplicates an effective process of advancing through the game and they don't feel great to have for the casual player. There isn't much use out of having more than one copy of a unit outside of weirdo meme team setups, so its more reasonable to just give you an additional currency that is more effective in gettomg through the game's content. There's also the fact that in PvP-focused games, an entire team setup of the same uber-powerfu; unit can be nightmarish to face and a massive dealbreaker for most people. You can argue that those game's PvP content should have more blockades for such, but it can make the single-player content even more of a "courtesy". These are RPGs first, gambling sims second, after all.
There's also just how...predatory the notion of needing multiple copies of the same unit for maximum effectiveness is by design. TCGs can somewhat get away with that notion, as the randomness of a deck is an inherent mechanic of the game itself. And even then, people having to drop $20-60 bucks on multiple big boxes to not only get the best of the best but also enough to actually play them even casually in a reasonable manner (not a lot of kids have the time for best 2 outta 3 games nowadays, unfortunately...) can feel at least disheartening for most people trying to break into the competitive scene. If you only need the one copy, it is hard to feel gipped or walled off away from the game's content because you were unlucky with you were unlucky with your draws.
Most duplicate pity currencies essentially sidesteps the problems of such by equating the power of getting that unit with the power of being able to improve, refine, and make your favorites more powerful. Don't think of it as the game devs robbing you of power and ideas, so much as it is spreading out and distributing that power into your entire collection. It's not to say it is a perfect system, hell, my favorite gacha, Fire Emblem Heroes, RUNS with the idea of utilizing duplicate copies of a unit for all its worth, but there is some desogm benefits to avoiding the dupes problem entirely..
I know of "rush packs" as god packs because my exposure to them were the journey into nyx god packs where each card in the pack were the 15 different gods of theros.
Lootboxes are an improved version of booster pack: they are designed to force you to buy more and more of them, but they run on the same concept, to buy random stuff that you may not need.
Both system are enjoyable in they way, personally i hate both bevause i was NEVER lucky with opening stuff (and, generally, you can buy the card you need at the same price of 5 booster packs, so...)
Booster packs could be good if they were used as a way to make you excited and genuinely hopeful for something useful and fun to come out of them. Essentially they could be similar to a Pokemon battle. And that's also why they're alluring, but most often than not the way they're implemented you don't get any value at all because most if not all of the cards in a pack ends up being without gameplay or aesthethic value, again because the only cards worth playing and any fun are 30% of a given set. And that's too bad.
But when you don’t have the money to buy singles... You Pray and Pull...
XD
But did you try the chili recipe?
i can't hate on the chili recipe. i think magic should do that and not as an Un set joke
Couldn't help but notice the Pokemon Snap music ya used. Good choice.
I'm gonna have to say gacha are a lot like booster packs and physical gacha machines. So booster packs you do usually get some physical object you own and can sell, if MtG is discontinued you can still play with what you have just can't buy more, virtual cards and characters go down with the servers. But I don't care what anyone says, 90% of commons are drink coasters once you have a full set or are just unusable, you'd barely be able to sell them for pennies unless proxy cards take off and someone needs any disposable physical card as a backing. Most people don't care a whole lot about trading their collection assuming there's a rubberband system to guarantee you get something decent or a ticket to get exactly what you wanted. There are lots of bad gacha and lootbox mechanics like weighted statistics of getting useful items or the game requiring high level rare stuff in order to progress but those same mechanics can apply to cards in some way, except instead of manipulating the odds of getting a virtual card you just print less rares in general. I'm not trying to sell lootboxes over physical card packs just saying collectible card games have always had these mechanics under the table, most are just smart enough not to use them recklessly unlike EA's bs or some other games.
10:12 - In Yugioh, the Deck-build packs have this problem. In a 60 card set, you have 10 Ultra rare, you get 3 in a booster box. The problem is, with 3 archetypes inside, all of the Ultra rares are mostly cards that you need a full playset, so there is no way that you can build a deck with only one box, even if you get the ultras you need.
Its called a god pack because magic had a pack back in Journey into Nyx that had all 15 gods in it.
Average lootbox fan: 🤬
Average booster pack enjoyer: 😎
I had no idea god packs were a thing
Im shocked that Yugioh hasnt even tried this before, it would be awesome
Yugioh misread it as "gold packs".
I was surprised you went with Digimon's 1.0 box as the example, when 1.5 is even better and is closer to their standard for rarity breakdown going forward, that being 10-12 Super Rares per set instead of the whopping 20 in 1.0.
With five boxes of 1.5 you would have almost 40 SRs (depending on alternate arts), which is potentially enough to have a playset of all of them, while being at:
• 840 Commons out of 64 types, avg 13 copies each
• 360 Uncommons out of 40 types, avg 9 copies each
• 195 Rares out of 35 types, avg ~5.5 copies each.
It's nice to still get some excitement out of those Rare and even Uncommon slots even after the second box!
The lower rarities are accessible enough for players who don't want to buy too much sealed, but not so abundant they quickly become box chaff.
(There is also the funny way that some of the regular Rare cards, such as BT3 Veemon, are actually valued higher than some of the Super Rares, making even a 'miss' pack into a potential good pull that you won't want to just skip over when you see there's no foil in the pack.)
Really great video, I already know all this stuff and but it was still interesting to hear you talk about it.
To be fair, the set booster was meant for people who just bought packs to open and see if they pull anything cool. They made the two separate packs so casual buyers didn't get left out because the draft players bought up all the booster packs..
What's a good ratio for the composition rarities within a set, rather than within a pack or box? Like... is there a magic formula for how much of a set should be rare vs common?
This helped me out tremendously, you have no idea. Thank you.
This is a good video. timeless knowledge.
Great videos. These will greatly help with the TCG I'm working on.
This has great application for thinking about setting up cube drafts as well imo!
The quality of this vid is honest amazing. Keep it up XD
Also with magic set boosters, you have THE LIST. A chance at pulling a reprint from a select list of cards printed throughout magic’s history. And, starting with midnight hunt, some commander only cards
The funny thing about Yu Gi Oh is that it suffers both from box schaff and box anemia at the same time. it is borderline impossible to have a deck that even functions after opening a box because all the duplicates + extra deck cards you get that aren't even summonable without card from outside the set.
In Yu-Gi-Oh's Duel Links version, they take some things a step further. In Duel Links, they offer two forms of boxes. Main boxes, and Mini boxes. Main boxes consist of 180 packs using three cards per pack, while Mini boxes consist of 100 cards with three cards per pack. However, the innovation comes with a unique guarantee, one that can only be afforded due to it's online status. It guarantees that if you go through the entire box, you are getting at least one copy of each ultra and super rare card.
In Main boxes, if you were to go through an entire main box, you would get one copy of 8 different ultra rares, while also getting two copies of the 15 different super rares in the box (I think it might actually be 12). Mini boxes on the other hand, only contain 3 different ultra rares and 8 super rares, with only one copy of each. However, what I find so fantastic about this system is that if you want to build a deck, you don't have to go through multiple boxes to a get a copy of one ultra rare, one box is guaranteed to suffice. This also means that you have a definitive endpoint to how far you have to go through the box to get what you want. Furthermore, there several boxes that a new player can use to build a competent deck using only 2-3 go throughs of a single box, with mini boxes being the most popular due to their affordability. I really wish that more online games implemented a feature like this, because it far friendlier to the player than even other TCG boxes.
3:49 bushiroad pretty much has this with all their reinventions of VG.
Also standard Pokemon effectively is the same thing since competitive play only supports standard format with rotation.
We have to admit that anyone who would buy something without knowing what they're buying has little self-respect and is probably acting according to their addiction, rather than reason.
And, of course, if you don't have much respect yourself, you certainly can't expect any from someone pitted against you in competition (which is the core nature of all business interactions). There--I just explained how TCG's work.
The annoying thing about yugioh pack structure is that in the OCG, cards get printed in multiple rarities in the same set to make the game cheaper. They dont do this in the TCG, which leads to huge cost issues, like how a recent errata of Firewall Dragon's effect text is only available as a ghost rare, something that costs hundreds of dollars.
In general japanese tcgs are cheaper to play partly because they tend to bloat packs here over seas with commons and uncommons. I think the justification is the same as Kohdok talks about that people will feel cheated by only a 5 card booster maybe because they're used to 9 cards, but I think it's more likely that it just gives a higher profit per booster sold.
also tcg censorship
Digimon is a rad game for many reasons, but in particular the way they handle rarity and packs is excellent. First of all, plenty of cards in the game are available with at least 2 different art styles. You can find the regular version of the card in the wild pretty easily, but you can occasionally find an extremely rare alternate art version of a ton of cards. A full booster box contains 1 (or 2) alt arts only! Even better, they routinely reprint old cards in new art styles in their tournament packs. Some of these tournament cards are absurdly rare, so even if the original card is dirt cheap, the tournament version can go for a lot on the secondary market.
This sort of thing is great for consumers, because if you're a casual or have a limited budget, that means you can probably find the cards you're after for a reasonable price if you stick to the regular version, while the sky's the limit for a big spender seeking to bling out their collection with max rarity playsets. All of this is concerning the same cards, with the same exact in-game utility. It doesn't matter what version of the card you use, it is functionally the same. This is just for cosmetic purposes.
Compare that to a game like MTG where the "cheapest" (or only) version of staple competitive cards go for so much that its shameful. Sure, there will always be some exceptions, but when you compare Digimon to other games, it really is more friendly to the consumer on the whole. Best of all, they do go back and reprint old cards that become harder to collect in random places like structure decks or as box toppers.
- If you want 5% of the set size, which set size are you talking about? ZNR has 280 if you count the basic land, but the real number is actually 265.
- Misprints can interfere with the rare slot.
- 1.66 and .34? I don't see people rounding number like that.
- I mean you can include 2 rares if you charge $16 per pack.
- make more blank cards
- 10/36 isn't half. less than a third. would say it's more like 6^(4/3)
- yes collector boosters suck
i suck at timestamping
Ok, pack design idea, assuming a 9 card pack and resource cards:
1 Rare
2 Uncommons, one of which cannot be an uncommon resource card in order to avoid doubling special resource cards at the expense of non-resource uncommons
1 Common _or_ Uncommon
1 Common _or_ "Beyond Rare"
2 Common
1 Resource card slot for resource cards of _any_ rarity
1 Foil slot of any rarity, or premium alt-art or full-art card
Thanks to the Pandemic, traditional "Draft" Booster boxes for the latest sets of Magic have become very rare to find. How rare? When the set booster was first shown off last year, For every set booster box, you had about 3-4 Draft boxes in the wild. For Strixhaven, the ratio has inverted if not gotten worse. There are times when I wonder if that really was an R&D call or if it was marketing's when the collector booster was first come up. The Idea of the set booster makes somewhat sense, but as was said in the vid the math isn't quite right with it.
I like the idea, but I still have no clue how the ratio works. And I've been playing since 2014.
I started playing Magic in between Homelands and Alliances, and I have seen how Magic has changed over the quarter century since I started. In terms of the changes to the booster packs, I have actually posted a comment about that state of confusion in the Rarity iceberg section.
When it come to how hard it is to find the product on actual stores the last year+ has had me mostly home bound to keep family alive and not in a poking at the [human malware] manor. The amount of sheer "what were they thinking?" for Time Spiral Remaster and Strixhaven has me confused and angry. I already pointed out Strixhaven, so let's talk about the latest "Remaster" set.
TSR was making a print version of a concept made for Arena, "What if we made a cube draft set that only used x block?" The trouble starts when you consider that Amonkhet and kaladesh blocks were simpler blocks to contend with mechanics wise amd only being 2 est each compared to Time Spiral. For starters, It had 20 mechanics to sift through, having been the starting point of R&D making sure that when they could they can reuse mechanics in any given set. Most of those mechanics came from the third set Future Sight, and for comparisons the amount of interplay in keyword mechanics in THAT set alone would not be seen until Modern Horizons came out 13 years later. They then decided to add to that confusion of slimming down 726 cards to 289, They added in the bonus sheet in the style of the Classic Timeshifted cards using the Odyssey block version of the original border. This bonus sheet had cards printed from Mirrodin to Modern Horizons. And they made one small print run...
@@tipulsar85 The small print run truly was a tragedy. I got my hands on one box to draft for 200$ and I consider myself lucky.
2:41
Damn! KScope and Lan Ling on one of your first tenners. Add in that Salieri and you've got a decent Arts setup.
Wait, this isn't an FGO vid.
@Kohdok - My name is Mark. I'm working on a TCG where my 1st set is 19 cards in a pack. The way the game is designed, you have a deck of 45 cards which 20 cards for your deck must be common cards. To me this brings value to the common cards. In a pack, I have 19 cards. 1 Rare/Ultra Rare, 3 Common, and 15 common cards. The reason for the big packs was honestly from a counting mistake where I originally was to only have 150 cards but ended up with 260. Even though I had this mistake, due to the mechanics, there are creatures that need the same creature or creature type to do certain mechanics which the bigger packs actually help. I'd love to get your take on this if you are ever able to try the game. The beauty of things are also where even common cards can defeat rare and ultra rare ones, where the value of things is more in how the player plays their decks. This doesn't mean the uncommons, rares, and ultra rares have no value, but I think I crafted something where playability vs rarity is a definite thing.
At the current moment I'm looking for players to "break the game" which no one has been able yet. Anyways, definitely appreciate the video :)
1. Papa Hasbro doesn't want there to be a secondary market
2. Pokemon sets have 5 card booster packs in Portugal, Spain and Italy to sell packs in weaker economies.
3. Pokemon might have sets of 180 cards, but 20-40 of those cards are in the Super Rare rarity which only are included 2 per case. So that golden ratio is skewed, a lot.
4. Pokemon suffers from same pack junk as YGO. Commons and uncommons are worthless (€0.02 for playset) because meta decks run on Rares and higher rarity with the super easy to obtain uncommons (usually 2-3 copies per starter deck like Ultra Ball).
2:51 as a nousagi im obligated to say PEKO!
My getaway from this: Yugi Oh! Booster Set are awful, go buy singles.
comment endorsed by CIMOOOOOO
*laughs in OCG packs having just 5 cards*
That's the way for every card game.
make those ten commandments
I feel the “are booster packs loot boxes?” debate is more complicated than that. I generally see booster packs as “loot boxes that don’t take the piss out of the concept and just fling it around”. Hell, going by a lot of governments’ definition of gambling, booster packs violate it by providing something of value and said value being random. It’s why most companies pretend the secondary market doesn’t exist (but will totally make products with the secondary market in mind secretly, see “secret lairs” as an example of that).
Basically, what I’m getting at is that booster packs are essentially loot boxes that don’t do most of the horrible stuff that most loot boxes do. There’s a reason the complaints that revolve around loot boxes didn’t happen until they started becoming common in video games. Just beware of game companies (cough EA cough) that might try to exclaim that since TCGs aren’t considered gambling, neither should they...and that might cause legal issues to come knocking on the doors of TCG companies. If you’re skeptical of such a thing, think about the average intelligence and age of a typical legislator and get back to me.
The biggest thing to remember is.....Trading card games ARE regulated. Magic had to do a bunch of legal stuff when it first came out. Which means things like pull ratios needing to be made available.