Old rumours

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GlobalBoosterHunter
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Old rumours

Post by GlobalBoosterHunter » Thu Jun 21, 2012 7:41 am

Back when I actually used to open boosters there was a rumour going around (I think it was before the internet so it was probably only going around by word of mouth and probably only in the South East of England) that if you opened up the Pygmy Allosaurus booster on the bottom (or was it one up from the bottom) layer of a booster box of Ice Ages you would always find the best rare in the box.

Being a small area that did not get through many boxes of Magic cards I did not have much opportunity to give it a really good scientific testing but, of the three I found, I pulled a
  • Jester's Cap, at the time the pick of the set!
    Jester's Mask, it had the word Jester in it but too many lines to work out what it did
    Lhurgoyf, apparently these were good but as it wasn't another jester's Cap I was not happy.
Most of the shops emptied the boosters out onto the counter stuck a price tag on them and chucked them back in the box so it wasn't always easy to find an undisturbed layer.

There was no box mapping going on but there were always rumours of 'Cherry Picking' as it was known then. No idea how the rumour started or how it was propagated but it was interesting enough at the time.

And I got a couple of good cards out of it (though granted one of them was from a box I bought myself and would have had anyway)

Anyone else ever hear of this rumour?

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Archivist
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Post by Archivist » Sat Jun 23, 2012 10:18 am

Heard those same things in every store, every new set. Sometimes, it was even the store owners doing it to push some extra boosters ;) Every once in a while, someone would get a good rare and attribute it to the "patterns" and keep the urban legends going.

There have been some attempts with early sets to figure out print run patterns, but those usually happened only over the internet, where you could compile a very large pool of results and sometimes be able to see pictures of entire card sheets. Not much ever came of them, and later packaging methods became much more sophisticated.
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mystical_tutor
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Post by mystical_tutor » Sat Jun 23, 2012 3:52 pm

Some place on here there is a link to a video of someone showing just how to find the best of the crop.

No idea as to the validity of the video (anything can be staged) but it was interesting.

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kidicarus2000
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Post by kidicarus2000 » Sat Jun 23, 2012 7:07 pm

In the course of business, I crack a ton of cases of each set. While there hasn't been anything like the old rumors floating around anymore, there are still some print runs determinable in newer sets. The only problem is that these print runs aren't the "bottom-middle of the box" run, so they don't help if you are only cracking one pack in a box.

The print runs I'm talking about are 2-3 packs in a row runs, where if you open the top one you will know with 80-90% certainty what the pack below it is (but you couldn't tell until you opened the first one where this run would be in a box). The best example I can remember for sure was in Time Spiral. If you opened a Sacred Mesa in your pack, you were all but guaranteed an Akroma in the pack underneath. We were going to make a video like the one Gary mentioned above, but never ended up filming it. We did pull about 20 packs that should have Akromas in them, and I think 16 or 17 did.

The last few sets haven't had any glaring print runs like that, at least not that I can remember. I tend to only pay attention to the money cards in a set though, so it's possible that I don't recall some runs like that in more recent sets. AVR did have a small print run that was noticeable, but it was only accurate about half the time so I hesitate to really call it a run. Also, the AVR run had an error of +/- 2 packs, so the card you were looking for could be anywhere in the 5 pack string. They were all Mythics we were looking for though, so I guess there is still enough correlation to call it a run.

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fvzappa
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Post by fvzappa » Sun Jun 24, 2012 6:37 am

The one rumour I've been hearing is that MtG has this "box" and it's one of everything they've ever made, which includes most of the rare stuff.

I find this to be false, mind you. But I hear it a lot.

GlobalBoosterHunter
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Post by GlobalBoosterHunter » Sun Jun 24, 2012 12:38 pm

fvzappa wrote:The one rumour I've been hearing is that MtG has this "box" and it's one of everything they've ever made, which includes most of the rare stuff.

I find this to be false, mind you. But I hear it a lot.
Surely MtG could go back and reprint whatever they wanted, they could probably afford to do limited print-runs or even one-offs. Good job I am not running the company, everyone would be paid in reprinted Power 9.

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