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In a July article, Mark Rosewater mentioned a change to the Mythic Rare drop rate in packs;
Starting with Zendikar Rising, the mythic rares are changing their rate of drop. In the past, 1 in every 8 rares was a mythic rare. Starting with Zendikar Rising, that will be changing so that 1 in every 7.4 rares will be a mythic rare. This will also be true of Draft Boosters.
Some developers in the MTG Arena Discord later confirmed that this new rate would also apply to both types of Boosters in Magic Arena (but not retroactively to previous sets).
At the time this would have meant that it would actually be cheaper to complete a set since you would be getting Mythics more frequently. Now that the full Zendikar Rising spoiler is out it appears that this is not the case because they also added more Mythics to the set.
I crunched the numbers for the Zendikar, Amonket Rising and Ikoria to see how many packs it would take to get a playset of an entire set of each. In this table "using opened MWC" means that it assumes you are willing to spend any of the Mythic Wild cards you open in packs or the Wild Card wheel on completing the set.
| Set | Rares | Mythics | Mythic Drop Rate | Complete Playset (Using Opened MWC) | Complete Playset (Not Using MWC) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ikoria | 53 | 15 | 1:8 | 379 packs | 655 packs |
| Amonkhet Remastered | 74 | 31 | 1:8 | 784 packs | 1353 packs |
| Zendikar Rising | 64 | 20 | 1:7.4 | 475 packs | 786 packs |
Small Aside on Amonkhet:
I included Amonkhet in the table because I was curious how many packs it would take to complete the set from scratch since its a different size from the sets previously on Arena. As expected it requires about twice as many packs as a previous set (because there are twice as many Mythics... which are the bottleneck).
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So it looks like Zendikar will require 786 packs to complete the set through duplicate protection + pack opening... or 475 if you are willing to spend every Mythic Wild Card you open through both the WC Wheel and Packs. This is an increase of between 96 and 131 packs (again depending on whether you spend all the Wild Cards you open).
The change in the number of Mythics in the set from 15 to 20 means that the set ends up being more expensive to complete despite more frequent Mythics through the new drop rate.
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