Magic: The Gathering has announced ‘god packs’, a random chance to open up a booster pack filled entirely with rare or mythic cards. At the same time, it’s slightly reducing the offering found in regular boosters. For starters, you’re no longer guaranteed a foil card in every pack. For main course, Collector boosters are losing three cards: two commons, and one uncommon.
These changes start next year with Nauctis, the first in-universe set on the MTG release schedule. Any Magic Multiverse set has a random chance to be a god pack. For regular boosties (they’re dropping ‘Play’ from the name, also) it’s 1-in-1000, for collector boosters it’s 1-in-300. I’ll let you check out the graphic below or Wizards’ own article to get the nitty-gritty details, but the TLDR here is that collector booster god packs have more booster fun and foil rares. Oh, and also, this starts with in-universe but is expected to come in for Universes Beyond in 2028.
What about those cheeky cuts? Well as Wizards’ article explains (in a rather em-dash heavy sentence, ahem-hem) “Removing them isn’t about shrinking the experience; it’s about making room-in terms of both printing capacity and player psychology-for cards people actually get excited about.”
Printing capacity I can buy it. Player psychology, well I feel much more iffy about Wizards’ whole attitude to player psychology right now, but that’s an article for another time.
WotC reasons, and its logic does make sense, that most players don’t get excited about common foils anymore. They don’t serve as an incentive to buy a regular booster and in collector booster openings, many players just skip straight to the first rare card.
“The items we’re removing are both unlikely to be missed and create enough space in our capacity to enable the cool things,” Blake Rasmussen writes.
Besides fuelling a whole new generation of pack-opening videos with that irritating YouTube thumbnail face (you know the one), what impact will these changes have?
Well the reductions will make ‘mythic uncommons’ like Stock It Up significantly more expensive to obtain in foil, but judging by the reaction online, players’ main concern is about how this will impact paper Limited games.
In an exclusive talk with Polygon, Wizards has said it recommends WPN stores replace the booster for free if someone hits a god pack, to remove the incentive to just take their cards and dip out of the event.
While they exist in other TCGs, most notably Pokémon, god packs’ name may originate from Magic: The Gathering originally. In 2014’s Journey Into Nix expansion, Wizards experimented with a random chance to hit a pack stuffed full of rare Theros gods – the first ‘god’ packs. Years later, when Pokémon introduced them to its game, the name stuck.
Source: Wargamer
