Singles vs sealed: crack or buy?

What a booster pack is actually worth, worked out from Riot’s published pack composition and current card prices.

Every collector eventually asks the same question: is it better to open packs, or just buy the cards you want? There is an actual answer, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. Here is how to work it out, and what our data says today.

How a pack is built

Riot publishes the composition. Each booster contains fourteen cards, split into fixed slots:

Slot	Cards	What fills it
Common	7	The bulk of the pack.
Uncommon	3	A step up, still easy to find.
Rare or better	2	Always foil. Epic upgrades one of these in roughly 1 pack in 4.
Foil	1	Usually common or uncommon, occasionally better.
Token / Rune	1	No secondary-market value.

On top of the slots sit the inserts, at much longer odds: alt-art champions around two per box, overnumbered roughly one per three boxes, and signatures about one in ten overnumbered — call it one per thirty boxes.

The method

If a slot is filled at random from a pool of cards, that slot is worth the average price of the pool. So the expected value of a pack is just the slots added up, plus each insert priced at its own rate:

EV = 7 × avg(Common)
   + 3 × avg(Uncommon)
   + 2 × rare slot        (mostly Rare, part Epic)
   + 1 × foil slot
   + insert rates × their average prices

The one thing that must be right: insert printings are held out of the slot pools. A signature card is not something the rare slot can produce, so folding it into the rare average would massively overstate what a pack is worth.

What that gives, per set

What do you pay per pack?

Set it to your real cost — retail, box price ÷ 24, whatever you actually pay.

Set	Pack EV	Box EV (24)	vs your $4.00	Chase share	Verdict
Vendetta	$36.38	$873.12	9.10×	4.4%	EV above cost
Proving Grounds	$18.82	$451.68	4.71×	0%	EV above cost
Unleashed	$18.65	$447.60	4.66×	7.2%	EV above cost
Origins	$12.85	$308.40	3.21×	66.5%	EV above cost
Spiritforged	$8.80	$211.20	2.20×	81.6%	EV above cost

Why the answer is usually “buy singles”

Look at the chase share column. In the older sets, the large majority of a pack’s expected value sits in insert cards you will almost never open. The EV is real in a statistical sense, but it is concentrated in outcomes that happen once every few boxes.

Open a single pack and the overwhelmingly likely result is seven commons worth pennies, three uncommons worth slightly more, and two rares. That is the median outcome, and it is far below the average outcome. Averages get dragged up by a tail you probably will not hit.

EV is not what you should expect to open. It is what you would average over hundreds of packs. If you want a specific card, buying that card costs what it costs, with no variance at all.

Packs make sense when you want the experience of opening them, when you are drafting or playing sealed, or when you are buying a sealed box to hold rather than open. They are a poor way to acquire a particular card.

What this calculation does not know

Foil premiums. Every rare and epic in a pack is foil, but our prices do not separate foil from non-foil. That biases the figures downward.
The Showcase rate. Riot does not publish it. We assume roughly one pack in ten, from community box openings. Since Showcase dominates EV in the older sets, that single assumption moves the headline number a lot.
Condition and fees. EV assumes you could sell every card at its market price. In practice there are fees, shipping, and the simple fact that nobody wants your bulk commons.

Treat these numbers as a demonstration of the method rather than a valuation — and remember the site is currently running on modelled prices, so plug in real ones before making a real decision.

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