Info About Poker Card Reader

If you’d like to fac­tor in the Uncom­mons, it’s easy to do so. There are 40 in World­wake, of which only two are truly rel­e­vant. Assum­ing all oth­ers are zero value, the mean value of Uncom­mons is $0.075, (1.5 + 1.5) / 40. Since we get three to a pack, we mul­ti­ply by 3 (just as we mul­ti­plied by .125 with the Mythic Rares), which brings us to $0.225 per pack. Here, it’s okay to round up to $0.23. Because the Uncom­mon dis­tri­b­u­tion has noth­ing to do with the Rare or Mythic dis­tri­b­u­tion, we sim­ply add $0.23 to $2.90 to get $3.13, and there’s our EV!

Actu­ally, call­ing that num­ber EV is a bit mis­lead­ing. That’s your mean value, weighted, per pack, and it doesn’t take into account foils or the bulk price of com­mons and uncom­mons (which is roughly $4 per thou­sand, so it doesn’t really change your EV). Your EV can only be derived once you have a cost per pack. CoolStuffInc.com can ship you a box of World­wake for about $90 after all asso­ci­ated costs, which amounts to $2.50 per pack. Thus, your true “EV” on a box of WWK from Cool­StuffInc is a cool +$0.63 a pack! Killer!

Com­par­ing World­wake to pre­vi­ous sets, I’m a bit dis­ap­pointed. The EV of Zendikar was ridicu­lous because of fetch lands and M10 was high because of a lot of expen­sive cards. Both had mean pack val­ues approach­ing the $4 mark, which was almost unheard of pre–M10. World­wake prob­a­bly has some room to grow, since the Pro Tour is right around the cor­ner. New tech will almost assuredly emerge, and with it, val­ues will cer­tainly change. Because so much value is con­cen­trated in two Mythic rares, the vari­ance of the set is much higher than aver­age. In fact, if you remove Jace and Abyssal Per­se­cu­tor and zero them out, your mean pack value drops to $2.00 even. With a rate of about 4–5 Mythics per box, you can eas­ily miss both Jace and Per­se­cu­tor in a sin­gle box, and there’s no guar­an­tee you’ll get either as you con­tinue open­ing boxes. With­out know­ing much about the print runs, it seems safe to say that if you’re open­ing World­wake to fill out sets and a trade binder, open at least 3 boxes.

Hav­ing sold mul­ti­ple cases to local play­ers myself, I can say that the best way to open World­wake is to find some­one with whom you can split a 6-box booster case and agree in advance to split the cards, not the boxes. I saw a pair of guys split a case. One opened all the Jaces, one opened all the Per­se­cu­tors. There was much ani­mos­ity. Thus, I sug­gest that you split a case with a trusted friend and basi­cally Rochester Draft the rares to keep. Not com­mon, but a good way to min­i­mize vari­ance and keep every­one happy.

That’s it for now! Hope­fully the pre­re­lease and release week­ends didn’t burn you out too badly, since we have a brand new Stan­dard for­mat to play this week at FNM! I’ve been grind­ing out new decks, but noth­ing has yet con­vinced me to stop play­ing Jund. I will say this, how­ever: Grixis can see an awful lot of cards by using Pon­der, Hal­i­mar Depths and Trea­sure Hunt. What you do with that infor­ma­tion is up to you, but I may just tune up my list and play it at my store’s Stan­dard tour­na­ment this evening.

Talk to you next week, Magic fans!