What a booster pack is actually worth
A slot-by-slot breakdown of where the money in a pack sits — and why almost none of it is in the cards you usually open.
A pack is fourteen cards in fixed slots. Each slot has an expected value you can actually calculate. Doing so reveals something uncomfortable: almost none of a pack’s worth lives in the cards you reliably open.
The two numbers that matter
Pack EV is what a pack averages out to over a very large number of packs. The slot total is what you get when nothing special happens — which is most of the time. The distance between those two numbers is the entire lottery.
In sets that print Showcase cards, the gap is enormous: the majority of a pack’s stated value comes from inserts appearing at rates measured in packs-per-box or even boxes-per-hit. In sets without Showcase printings, EV and the typical open sit much closer together, which makes those packs far more honest.
The rare slot does the real work
Setting inserts aside, the two rare-or-better slots carry the large majority of a pack’s dependable value. The seven commons and three uncommons together usually add up to about the price of a sandwich — worth having, not worth counting on.
What would change these numbers
- Foil pricing. Every rare and epic in a pack is foil; our prices do not separate foil from non-foil, which biases the figures down.
- The Showcase rate. Riot does not publish it. We assume roughly one in ten packs. Because Showcase dominates EV, that assumption moves the total more than anything else here.
- Time. EV falls as a set’s singles fall, which they generally do after release.