The funny part is that I was looking at this just before WotC announced that OTJ was going full bukkake with 2 different bonus sheets plus even more Special Guests. At this point, with the release of OTJ, about *half* of the ~960 different Mythics on Arena are either literally or effectively uncollectible from store packs. That’s beyond insane.
(My counts are going to be a little off because Scryfall didn’t have perfectly up to date info when writing- it had OTJ, but didn’t know that Stoneforge Mystic is on Arena, etc., and I’m not checking everything by hand because the point I’m making isn’t at all dependent on near-perfect accuracy)
Once WotC announced Mythic packs a little over 2 years ago, you’d think that you’d just be able to spend 1300 gold and get a Mythic from whatever set you’re after. Or at least you’d be able to the vast majority of the time. And if you did think that, you were horribly, horribly mistaken.
First off, WotC sometimes just… didn’t implement Mythic packs. The first 8 regular sets (up to M20), Kaladesh Remastered, Amonkhet Remastered, all of the non-standalone Alchemy sets, and MoM: Aftermath don’t have Mythic packs available for purchase. Why? Who knows. It makes no sense. This puts 60 recent Mythics (MAT+Alchemy) and ~170 older Mythics behind a pay gate where the only way to buy them with in-game currency is to buy that set’s regular packs (far) beyond the point where you’re rare complete and they’re just giving 20 gems most of the time, making them effectively uncollectible without spending wildcards. (you can also wait a month to collect a new regular set, overbuy alchemy packs until alchemy-mythic-complete without running into base-set rare completion, then finish the base set, but that still sucks and only addresses 1/4th of the problem)
Second, there are another ~67 promo and/or commander Mythics associated with particular sets that simply aren’t openable in that set’s store boosters. They aren’t even pay-gated behind almost-worthless packs- they’re truly wildcard-only. Why? Again, it makes absolutely no sense. Not having them in *draft* boosters makes sense, but Arena store boosters are a unique digital thing that has never mirrored paper- they have a different number of cards, sometimes different frequencies or different available cards, and hell, sometimes the slots aren’t even filled with cards! Why not have them drop with the lowest priority (after everything else and down with the banned cards, etc.)? Another easy fix.
And third, we have the absolute grade-A bullshit that is Arena bonus sheets. Bonus sheets (before BIG, which may be a one-off) can mostly be ignored in paper because all of the cards they contain have already existed in normal printings, so it doesn’t often matter if they’re ultra-rare in this printing. A new-to-arena bonus sheet Mythic is effectively uncollectible. For example, it would take opening **540** SoI:Remastered store packs on average to open a **single copy** of Geist of Saint Traft from the Shadows of the Past bonus sheet. Absolute bullshit. There are about 100 of these, and all of them except the 14 from Strixhaven’s Mystical Archive are from the last year and a half. It has gotten completely out of control. Goodbye to hundreds of Mythic wildcards if you try to keep up.
And on top of that, a BIG mythic drops in paper Play boosters in 18.4% of packs (1 in 5.4), a bit more frequently than a normal OTJ Mythic (edit: because there are 30 of them compared to 20 OTJ Mythics, each individual card drops slightly less often- 1 in 140 packs for each OTJ Mythic, ~1 in 160 paper packs for each BIG Mythic), and that slot is in addition to the base-set rare slot. WotC actually tried to make the paper BIG cards reasonably available because they knew they needed to do that with a first printing. In Arena store packs, a BIG Mythic drops in 1 of every **35** non-wildcard packs instead of 1 in 5.4 (1 in 1050 packs for an individual card instead of 1 in 160), and it replaces the regular Mythic. Why? Because fuck you twice, that’s why.
Fourth, you have the other ~70 Mythics that were never available in store packs and are wildcard-only now- Special Guests, Anthology cards, Jumpstart exclusives. Some were reasonably collectible for a short time, others not so much, but they’re all impossible now.
This is all trivially fixable- if the plan were to ever fix anything instead of looking for new places to nerf Mythic drop rates by a factor of 7. Fully implement Mythic packs as should have been done 2 years ago. Put promo/commander cards down with banned cards at the end of packs. Have the rare(mythic) slot in a store pack give a bonus sheet/list/SPG rare(mythic) instead of gems when you’re rare(mythic) complete in the base set. That’s 90% of the uncollectible Mythic problem solved right there, and the other 10% isn’t that hard if you’re a little creative, and also doesn’t matter that much without the other massive Mythic wildcard drains running wild.
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