How Do We Perceive Streaks Of Luck In Games Like MTG?

by

Imagine opening a Magic: The Gathering booster pack and pulling a mythic rare card. How likely is that? It varies slightly depending on the specific card set, but let’s say it happens about once in every seven packs. While that’s good, it’s not incredibly rare – something happening one in seven times occurs fairly often.

Finding a second mythic rare card in a single booster pack can feel really surprising. Statistically, it’s about a 2% chance – roughly one in fifty – but when you’re searching for a specific card, it often feels much less likely. It makes you wonder why that is.

There’s been a lot of study into how probability works and how it matches what people expect when it comes to random outcomes. One key part of the answer is that if you haven’t opened any booster packs yet, there’s a two percent chance of getting two mythic rare cards in a row.

Usually, you don’t start tracking mythic cards until you actually get one. You only begin to notice the streak after opening a booster pack that contains a mythic. This shifts how we think about the problem. Instead of asking how long the streak has lasted, a more useful question is: if you just opened a pack with a mythic card, what’s the probability the next pack will also have one?

It seems that each booster pack you open has the same odds of containing a rare card, regardless of what you found in the previous pack – it’s still a one in seven chance. This can be surprising, especially since getting two rare cards back-to-back is much less likely (one in forty-nine). People often think they’re just lucky or that something’s wrong with the cards when they find multiple rares, but it’s simply how probability works.

Other Places This Can Occur

This feeling isn’t unique to Magic: The Gathering booster packs. Any game where you repeatedly pay for a chance to win, and occasionally get something rare, can create this same misleading impression. For example, if you were to play a Bitcoin lottery, you might notice small wins happening close together more often than you’d expect. This isn’t due to the lottery being rigged, or Bitcoin changing your luck. It’s simply because people only start paying attention to how often something happens after it’s already happened once.

It’s common to feel like luck should even out, but that’s not always how random events work. Imagine a friend repeatedly opening packs of cards or buying lottery tickets and consistently getting nothing. They might start to believe their chances of winning must increase with each loss, feeling like it’s unfair otherwise. However, with truly random systems – like trading card packs or lotteries – each attempt is independent. Previous results have absolutely no impact on the odds of success for the next try.

Okay, so yeah, pulling eleven packs in a row with no mythics feels super unlikely, and the math says it’s around an 18% chance if we assume a 1-in-7 chance for a mythic. But here’s the thing I always forget: each pack I open is totally independent. Those ten I just ripped open don’t change the odds for this one. It’s just one single pack, and my chances of getting a mythic are the same as they always are – about one in seven. It’s easy to get caught up thinking about the streak, but it doesn’t actually matter!

Tying It All Together

What’s the key takeaway here? Many people overestimate how often random events happen in streaks. This is because we only start paying attention and counting when we notice a pattern. To avoid this mistake, think about an entire session – like a whole gaming session or lottery ticket purchase – rather than starting to count only when something interesting happens. Start counting from the very beginning, like when you open your first booster pack or buy your first lottery ticket.

Even with careful thinking, coincidences still happen. Random events often produce streaks – runs of good or bad luck – more often than we’d guess. For example, you might open two packs of cards in a row and find rare cards in both, even though each pack has a low chance of containing one. This is similar to playing the lottery; winning or losing several times in a row is possible, even if it’s unlikely.

Read More

2025-12-09 16:38