On a week dominated by Warhammer spoilers and Unfinity speculations coming next week, one MTG player created an extensive Reddit post demonstrating a potentially large product error that, as other Reddit commenters state, may have had a hand in making an unpopular MTG product worse for players to open. It’s no new news that Commander Legends: Baldur’s Gate was not very well-received by the community, and this potential error may be part of the reason why.
Missing Set Booster Slot
Pictured above are the contents from Wizards of the Coast’s site regarding what comes in a Baldur’s Gate Set Booster. Our particular Redditor’s issue is with the Wildcard slots shown in this breakdown. These, as they read, should have a chance of providing a Common, Uncommon, Rare, or Mythic Rare card in the slot. After watching some box openings, Redditor strongsauce stated that one of these wildcard slots only seemed to be producing Common and Uncommon rarity cards instead of the promised spread of cards in the product breakdown above. This led them down the rabbit hole of gathering a bunch of data from some streamed YouTube openings. Here’s what they posted:
The Data
This may be a bit tough to read at first, so I will share the legend provided in the Reddit Post:
- White cards are Commons
- Gray Cards are Uncommons
- Yellow Cards are Rares
- Orange Cards are Mythics
- The Land Slot is not Recorded, but some lands pop up in the foil slot
These recorded box openings demonstrate that one of the wildcard slots does not seem to be working as advertised. To make sure that our Redditor did not just happen to pick up on two error boxes, they watched more videos. Here is a quote of the process:
“However, as I started watching box openings, I noticed the entire first box didn’t actually have anything above Uncommon in the 1st Wildcard slot. The 2nd Wildcard slot got 4 Rares. Even though it is probably extremely unlikely, I thought maybe it was just a fluke.
Then I watched a second box opening, they didn’t get anything above uncommon again in the Wildcard slot. After watching 2 more boxes opened without seeing a rare or mythic… the best way to label that slot would be the, “1x Common/Uncommon (*75% chance of the card being showcase)”, slot”
“Both the text information and the image on WOTC’s product page specifically note that there are 2 Wildcard slots so this does not seem to be a simple mistake with the copy. Unless I’ve just watched the 4 unluckiest box openings ever. So just to be sure, since there have been issues with DMU Set Boosters having no rares in their packs, I searched for a couple other YouTube videos with Set Booster openings to verify by watching about half the video, and they indeed have the same pattern of not having 2 Wildcard slots. (The videos I originally watched were from BadBoyGaming, watched the Professor‘s video and one from Titan Gaming after)”
Loss in Expected Value?
The bigger issue here is if this is the consistent thing going on and not just an error amongst a certain wave of this product, the customer may be losing some expected value on the box. According to our Redditor, this error will result in about a $10 loss in expected value per box of Baldur’s Gate Set Boosters. Our Redditor arrived at this number using TCGplayer sales, but since the explanation is quite complicated, we recommend you read it yourself.
Comment Approval, but is this just a Faulty Sample Size?
There are a lot of outraged comments in this particular post that believe these claims to be valid. There is a chance that this is just simply an incorrect sample size and an error is plaguing part of the affected product. That said, this Redditor has a lot of evidence to suggest that this is much more widespread than we may realize.
An additional note is that Wizards of the Coast has not stated the chances of opening a Rare and Mythic rare in both Wildcard slots. There is a chance that the Common/Uncommon Wildcard slot has a very low opening rate for Rare or Mythic cards, and that is all we’re seeing. Should this pattern be more than just that, the implications of this MTG error could have a massive impact on the MTG community.
