what mtg card sets will be printed this year

#WHAT MTG CARD SETS WILL BE PRINTED THIS YEAR UPDATE#

OK, back to the original post! AlphaĪlpha most likely had 2.5 million cards printed. Over 1,000'), which would have us reject the 2.5 million figure for the Our assumption of a 50/50 split of cards betweenĭifferent packages was the core source of mistakes (a 60/40 split with 2.5 million cards would lead to a bit underġ,000 copies of each Alpha rare (rather than the frequently cited 'just Sources and assumptions, how we did the calculations, and where we went Think it can be interesting from an historical context to see our old

#WHAT MTG CARD SETS WILL BE PRINTED THIS YEAR UPDATE#

Opted not to update or edit this post apart from this disclaimer. So screw you, mid 90s WotC Usenet NetReps, for giving us bad intel on that a quarter century ago I guess ) All in all, these are the numbers of each rare, uncommon, andĬommon shipped from Carta Mundi for Alpha and Beta according to their Particular our presumption that there was a 50/50 split of cards betweenīoosters and starters was our undoing. While our guesses for those sets turned out to be very close, they were slightly wrong. Responsibilities after his retirement, and after digging through theĪrchives they found the actual, exact numbers for Alpha and Beta. Luc compared notes with one Peter de Weerdt, who had taken over Luc's (the founder of WotC) personally reached out to Luc Mertens (the salesĮxecutive at Carta Mundi throughout the 90s) to clear up what they hadĪctually received from them as the first Magic shipments were concerned. Occurred just months after I'd finished writing this post. Information on these things get unearthed, and one spectacular moment of new insights Update March 2021: Every now and then new This will be deep nerd and very number crunchy. I believe I have access to pretty much all the written sources D'Angelo had at his time, along with perhaps a handful more thanks to excellent books and some better information on the print sheets and printing process available. So this post is my truth on 93/94 era print runs. And we can't have people being wrong on the Internet.

After re-reading Scott's own (excellent) article on the set, it started to dawn on me how most every resource online that talks about print runs comes back to D'Angelo's estimates, and that so much random stuff we've found over the years cast new light and perhaps better accuracy on some of the 'accepted truths'. Writing this post was triggered by a comment from Scott Latham on my previous post on Unlimited. The only printed reference to Alpha rares in a Wizard's publication was in The Duelist #3, where they noted 1,400 cards.Ī later (1995) supplement to The Duelist called The Complete Card list would however imply that the number was closer to 1,070 rares. Wonder where the 1,100 estimate of each Alpha rare came from? That gained traction with D'Angelo. He had some very solid estimates, but as the Internet grew D'Angelos numbers somehow got repeated as the singular truth over the web and beyond. But he gathered the information he could find, bundled it together on a webpage, and added a disclaimer at the top noting that he had no inside info and that a lot of it was 'almost completely guesswork'. Some of these had questionable official numbers, and some had nothing but hints or nods. And wisdom he had.Īpart from his updates on card lists, rules and errata, he took a stab at estimating the print runs for Magic sets. In an era before or The Dojo, there was D'Angelo and his collection of wisdom from the internet and beyond. The D'Angelo Files and Crystal Keep were the go-to sources of Magic information in the early days of the web. It is hard to overstate the impact of Stephen D'Angelo and the Crystal Keep webpage. No inside information was used to build these numbers.' -Stephen D'Angelo, Rarity Information at Crystal Keep, circa January 1996

The Gathering is almost completely guesswork. Distribution between starters and boosters for I think I'm in the ballpark,īut don't bet money on it. 'Numbers for Revised, Fourth, Ice Age, Chronicles, Homelands and promo cardsĪre guesses based on almost no information.

What mtg card sets will be printed this year