Is there a real-world indicator of rarity? I know price is half of that equation, but other factors go in. Is there another way to measure it? Does Wizards have numbers for us? Is there a way to "separate" the demand part of supply and demand?

I'm not sure if this helps?



So it's sort of a numbers game, but likely more of a "feel" sort of soft math and not a real formulaic calculation.

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking here. do you want to know if there's a way to look at a card and know its rarity? if so, yes: the set symbol will be one of four colors. black means common, silver means uncommon, gold means rare, and a sort of reddish bronze means mythic rare.

if you're asking about the differences between those rarities, they largely represent how many you get in a pack. it's been a while since I purchased Magic cards, but last I recall a pack had 10 commons, 3 uncommons, and then usually a rare but, 1 out of 8 times, a mythic instead. (it's a bit more complicated than that but it's a rough estimate.) anyway comparing that to Dominaria, there's 105 commons, 82 uncommons, 56 rares, and 17 mythics, which means that, with slightly lazy calculations, it takes 10 packs to find a given common, 27 to find an uncommon, 64 to find a rare, and 136 to find a mythic.

if you're asking something else, could you clarify?

I assume the question is about how a card's mechanics affect rarity. If that's the question then the answer's something like:

• Commons and uncommons are the simplest cards and the least impactful, but can usually go in a wide variety of decks. The majority of any limited deck will be common, so no individual card can have too much of an impact on a given match. They typically
  Lightning Bolt and Grizzly bears are good examples of commons. They can be very strong or very weak, but they're dead simple and and a game rarely revolves around playing a single bolt.
• Uncommons have all the common characteristics but less so. They can be a little more complicated and a little more impactful.
• Rares can be as niche and complicated as the designers want the card to be. One With Nothing and Possibility Storm had to be at least rare because they were to hard to make use of to show up too regularly.
  Rares can also be very impactful. Very strong (not so much good for their cost, but outright powerful) creatures, spells that remove multiple threats at once and potentially game-ending effects tend to be rare.
• Mythic rares are as rare as they are to drive sales. They are generally much more impactful and plain old better than cards of other rarities. Since mythics show up so infrequently, they can be very impactful without messing up limited games too much. Since they're mostly for constructed play, they can be as niche as they want too, but regular rares already seem able to be as niche as they want too. The biggest mark of a mythic rare is that is attention-grabbing and desirable.
• Basic land has its own level of rarity. Every pack has a basic land. This rule has been broken in some sets where other lands took up the basic land slot.

I was pretty sure the question was about knowing how many copies of a given card exist in the world.

I thought the question was about the difficulties in downsizing bloated government bureaucracies.






Or maybe about synthesizing Newtonian and Einsteinian physics.

Is there a real-world indicator of what this question is about?

This thread is a real world indicator of what happens when you don't unpack a sentence before you type it.

Okay, so rarity means just like how many things there are of something. Price going into it is a function of rarity, not the other way around. I can't get into a conversation about how the secondary market works right now, this is too wacky. I'm working on my capsitiliation though so [card=werebear]bear[/card[ with me.