Secret Lair: Half the boosters in my [ONE] Draft Booster Box each contained 4-5 Rares and 0 Uncommons
The box came from the Secret Lair "Festival in a Box: Minneapolis 2023". Roughly half of the boosters contained 4 rares and 0 uncommons. Two of the boosters had 5 rares because the foil was also rare. Would have made for a fun draft/sealed experience, but it was also fun to just crack packs.
Does this happen often?
Posted Apr 28, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC
02
I wouldn't say it happens often, but it does happen. This is what I would call a "hopper error" where the hoppers that feed cards into packs were loaded incorrectly. Such things have been happening basically since the beginning of MTG.
This can manifest in many different ways; here one of the uncommon hoppers had rares loaded into it. Probably this is the US printer, as it uses two uncommon sheets where each pack gets 3 cards from one sheet or the other. So, half of packs were affected because only the hopper from one of these uncommon sheets had rares in it. (This also should mean that half of the uncommons don't appear in your box at all.)
Besides wrong rarity, sometimes hopper errors can be cards of the right rarity but the wrong sheet (which might be hard to notice unless you know a lot about collation), or cards from a different set, or just cards in the wrong orientation.
that makes sense. thanks for the explanation.