Due to the mechanics of inserting foils into early sets, it was possible - though very unusual - to open a pack with more than one foil card plus an ordinary rare. This meant that collecting full foil sets was significantly more unpredictable, and also could result in some interesting booster packs: for instance, this could result in a booster with two rares (one of them foil, replacing one of the common or uncommon cards), or a booster with no rares (if the regular rare card was replaced with a foil common or uncommon). In addition, each booster pack had about a 1/6 chance of having one of the cards randomly replaced with a full-foil card of a random rarity. This assumes you never got any duplicate rares, and if you wanted a complete playset (4 of each card, which is the maximum you can have in a particular deck), your Common/Uncommon set would quickly approach quintuple-digits–and that's just for one set! This meant that, if you were to collect a complete collection of 121 rares from a base set entirely from booster backs, you would have about 363 uncommon cards, and 847 common cards. There were the same number of each rarity in each set base sets like Fellowship had 121 of each, while expansions had 40.

Each booster pack contained 11 cards, made up of 7 Common (C), 3 Uncommon (U), and 1 Rare (R) card. This was only true for these two sets, however.īooster packs, on the other hand, were the primary way of getting cards (as it is with most TCG's), and the primary waterline by which rarity was judged. The other cards included varied, but were always the same for a particular box, except for 3 random Rare (R) cards to mix things up.įor Shadows and Black Rider, all non-rare cards included in the Starter Packs were given a rarity of S, in an attempt to normalize rarity labels (since Common and Uncommon cards included in a Starter Pack were of course much, much more common than other C/U cards only released through boosters). That companion was marked with a special rarity, Premium (P) and always included two copies per box (in The Fellowship of the Ring, those two Premiums were Gandalf, The Grey Wizard, and Aragorn, King in Exile). Starter packs, 2 per set, were specifically designed for new players and came with a specially-designed deck centered around a particular companion.

Cards had two primary means of distribution for most of the game's run: booster packs and starter boxes. First, a word on how most cards were distributed (as this was the primary means of manipulating a card's rarity).

Lord of the rings legends