Booster Box Mapping
General forum
Posted on March 30, 2012, 1:20 p.m. by NobodyPicksBulbasaur
So I've seen a lot of mention about booster box mapping and the location of "money rares" within a box lately. I figured I'd make a thread for people to discuss it.
Is it really as prevalent as I'm being led to believe? Does anyone here have any first-hand experience dealing with booster mapping?
Rhadamanthus says... #3
Because the cards are printed, cut, sorted, and packaged by automated mechanical processes, the specific machine settings cause the distributions to be periodic instead of random. A large-volume retailer (Star City, etc.) or a sufficiently large crowdsourcing effort (MTGSalvation does this regularly) can pretty easily open enough boxes (60-100, depending) to document patterns and correlations in rare/mythic positions in a given booster box, and sometimes this analysis can even be extended to the case level. After the patterns and periodicity are discovered, opening just a few packs in a box will tell you what the rest of it looks like.
March 30, 2012 3:07 p.m.
KorApprentice says... #4
You could also weigh booster packs to find foils. I might start doing that, seems quite profitable.
March 30, 2012 3:08 p.m.
NobodyPicksBulbasaur says... #5
I understand how a foil card would weigh slightly more than a non-foil card. I don't see how this would be very significant, though.
How the heck do you measure such a small difference?
March 31, 2012 2:05 a.m.
KorApprentice says... #6
The foil card is an extra that comes in addition to the other 15. There is indeed a weight difference with just one card, you would know if you shipped cards often as I do through trading. A foil card should make the booster weigh enough to show up on a pocket scale.
March 31, 2012 2:34 a.m.
killers_inn says... #7
Go to http://box-mapper.rhcloud.com for free box mapping (current for GTC only)
March 3, 2013 5:14 p.m.
@KorApprentice: Foils in Magic boosters actually replace one of the commons. They do not add an additional card.
March 3, 2013 5:18 p.m.
killers_inn says... #9
Foils also follow the track. There's a foil after each 7 boosters in the right track.
metalmagic says... #2
In yugioh, yes. I magic, no. From what I've read NPH and MBS were hard to map. The money rares are inserted based on an algorithm apparently, and if it hasn't already been figured out, you have to open so many boxes of that set before you can even start seeing it. If it does get figured out for each new set, then that's good. If not, but singles. My favorite thing to do still is to take my little pocket scale into walmart to weigh the yugioh packs, get the heaviest ones (as the contain the rarest cards) and sell them for profit.
March 30, 2012 1:29 p.m.