April 22, 2020
lemming – noun : a person who unthinkingly joins a mass movement, especially a headlong rush to destruction
Last Thursday, the day Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths became available on Arena, I shoveled 100,000 gold into the store and walked away with 100 packs of the new set. As someone who has been opening boosters for over 20 years, I don’t know that I’d ever been so excited to open Magic boosters. Which, let’s be honest, is a little sad, seeing as how these are “virtual” cards that will disappear into internet vapor the day Wizards shuts down the Arena servers.
But Arena is the ONLY way to enjoy Ikoria currently (in North America, at least) and it’s nearly my only way of playing any form of Magic. When you only have a little, make the most of it, right?
I’d looked at the spoilers, read discussions about many of the new IKO cards, and read much of the “official” Wizards Ikoria propaganda. Call me impressionable, call me susceptible, call me a sucker…but I was ready to buy what Wizards was selling. Figuratively AND literally.
OK, I wasn’t going to be spending any actual cash, thanks to my Arena gold stockpile. Still, I was ready to empty my Arena pockets for whatever was inside Ikoria.
Arena allows you to open packs individually or 10 at a time, and I stubbornly went the former route. I decided to revel in each pack – re-read the cards, peruse the art, and – for purely scientific (i.e. blogging) purposes – log the results.
This was done Thursday evening, after my wife had gone to bed and my kid was lost in the warm glow of his cellphone screen.
Fifty packs later, I gave up. Partly because it was 11:00pm, and partly because I felt utterly defeated. If this had been the Super Bowl, I would have been the Patriots in the first half of Super Bowl LI:
At halftime, things looked bleak for the Patsies. As they did for my pack stash. Let’s check the replay…
The odds of opening a mythic in a pack on Arena (as well as in paper) is about 1 in 8. So 50 packs in, I should have seen 6 mythics. I’d opened 3 – two mythics from IKO, and a pack that contained a mythic wildcard. My first mythic, in pack 6, was this bad boy (girl?):
Pack 22 was a mythic wildcard, and pack 26 contained a Chevill, Bane of Monsters. After that…24 packs without a mythic.
To be fair, Magic isn’t just about the mythics (I suppose) so how about my rares?
In 50 packs I’d already gotten playsets (4 copies) of Extinction Event (a card I’d have been thrilled to never open a single copy of) and Yorion, Sky Nomad (I was ambivalent about this.)
I’d also opened 3 copies of Mythos of Snapdax (all within 7 packs of each other) and two copies of 6 other rares. Nine different rares accounted for the rare/mythic slot for 23 of my 50 packs. So…hardly any mythics, little variety in my rares, and only a couple copies of cards I was eager to build with/around. And I’d yet to even open a single Almighty Brushwagg (not that this mattered – I had over 100 common wildcards – it was just salt in the wound.)
I closed Arena and slunk dejectedly to bed, truly feeling like the King of Bobo Rares.
Sleep came easy, as it usually does for me, but I awoke strangely early, at 4:00am. Unable to fall back asleep, I lay in bed pondering the first half of my pack cache. A lot of questions swirled.
- Had I really been so unlucky?
- Did it really matter how many mythics I opened?
- Did I really even need specific rares or mythics to brew with Ikoria?
The answers to all of these questions came back…”yes.”
But…
But…
I still had 50 packs left. That’s significantly more than a standard paper booster box (36 packs per box.) And all 100 packs had come free, thanks to months of Arena grinding (which, honestly, I had largely enjoyed.)
Could the second half of my packs be just as putrid? Of course.
Was that likely? Maybe.
Did it realistically matter in the great, grand scheme? I suppose not.
Friday evening I returned to Arena feeling refreshed, even optimistic.
If the first 50 packs had been the equivalent to the Patriots’ first half of Super Bowl LI, the other 50 were the Patriots in the second half.
If, like me, you’d desperately tried to block Super Bowl LI from your memories, you may not remember that the Falcons held a 28-3 lead late in the third quarter before collapsing in hilarious (or hilariously hideous) fashion and losing to the Patriots in overtime.
You know what? I hate the Patriots. I don’t want to compare any of this to them anymore. And the greatest second-half comeback in NFL history involves the Bills overcoming a 32-point deficit to beat the Oilers, the team that I’d loved as a kid while growing up near Houston.
Apparently finding a better sports reference is hard.
Baseball games don’t really split neatly into halves, and the greatest second-half season comeback in MLB history belongs to the Yankees, so I refuse to reference that.
Gotta dig deep…
Oh! I’ve got it! My second half was like Red Rum coming from 15 lengths back to beat Crisp in the 1973 Grand National steeplechase.
NOW you assuredly understand. Yes, those 50 second-half packs were 1973 Red Rum good!
After an Obosh, the Preypiercer in pack 51, I opened a Vadrok, Apex of Thunder in pack 52 (and two more in packs 79 and 93), a General Kudro of Drannith in pack 58, a Rielle, the Everwise in pack 60, a second Chevill in pack 75, two Vivien, Monsters’ Advocate in packs 76 and 89, a Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast in pack 80, a Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy in pack 91, and a Winota, Joiner of Forces in pack 96.
Eleven mythics in 50 packs (actually, in 44 packs, since they all came between packs 52 and 96.) That’s not even counting two packs with mythic rare wildcards in packs 73 and 97. That’s…pretty spectacular.
The second half rares were not quite as spectacular as the mythics, but I got fewer duplicates (not counting 4 copies of Colossification in a 20-pack stretch). I ended with at least one copy of all but 6 mythics, 10 rares and 7 uncommons. It took until pack 98 to get at least one of every common, but I the Raking Claws in that pack completed the IKO commons.
I got 4 copies of 3 different Triomes. How many wildcards I end up spending on them remains to be seen – I stubbornly refused to use wildcards for the rare Shocklands for months on end, and I still don’t have 4 copies of most of the rare Scrylands. Using wildcards on lands…sucks.
To my great shock and disappointment, my Arena vault was at 69% before I started cracking packs and it was at a paltry 83% when I finished. That thing grows slower than Groot.
Oh, and I finally got an Almighty Brushwagg in pack 65.
I ended the opening spree with the following Arena wildcards:
Commons: 121
Uncommons: 136
Rares: 58
Mythic: 40
Though I initially thought I’d immediately and readily use up those wildcards on all the awesome new IKO cards, the first deck I saw someone play that I wanted to try out (a Mardu mutate deck) was missing 13 rares and 9 mythics once I imported it to Arena. I couldn’t bring myself to press “Craft All” and reluctantly deleted the deck a few days later. I just couldn’t blow through so many wildcards so easily. I mean, I may need those for…something…someday.
Some habits die hard, man.
Casual Magicking 