I’d like to share this document I made and hear thoughts / feedback from the forum:
The inspiration was An Elaborate Attempt at Print Run Estimates by @gottaketchumall. This was always a great mystery to me and I figured the info is worth compiling in one place. I chose to not include any assumptions about averages of the sets to remain as objective as possible. (Although maybe that would be interesting for the sake of discussion?) *Averages added.
Hope you enjoy! Please comment here, or reach out directly if you have any more information or just want to share your thoughts!
Disclaimer
This is a work in progress. This document and calculator do not account for Language Percentage and differences in set structure, Non-Main Sets*, Theme Decks*, Promos, Sheet Rarity or Energy Cards. The Information and results extrapolated should be used as a fun thought experiment and not a definitive answer to print run numbers.
This thread needs more engagement for the work put into it so I fed it into chatGPT to help summarize the high level points and make a graph as a conversational opener
There were def some formatting and over generalization issues with the first iteration of the doc as well! It was giving :Charlie Kelly meme:
I’ve since parsed out pull rates and crossed referenced Gen2-6 with more reliable sources. Added an Overview with Averages, & made this fun “print run calculator” !
If you’re clicking around and notice anything wrong please reach out!
@tediorso – the original document doesn’t work. Any chance you can re-upload it? I would love to see the data.
One thing I can see from the calculator–you’re missing one massive variable: the print run numbers are inclusive not only booster packs but also precon decks, which comprise a meaningful % of each set’s print run. This changes the numbers dramatically. Less significant is that the calculator also doesn’t take into account non-main run sets that the print run figures were inclusive of (e.g., POP Series, EX Trainer Decks) that would further reduce the print run per main set.
Also, a few small methodology issues:
For some sets, you forgot to exclude secret rares that couldn’t be pulled in packs (e.g., Absol in TMTA, Charmeleon in TRR). Those affect the numbers a lot for those sets.
There are some minor pull rate errors in some sets. An example: for EX Dragon, you list holo pull rate at 7 and EX pull rate at 6, which assumes that the secret rare only replaced regular holo rares. But from what I’ve seen, the secret rare can replace either a holo or an ex. Meaning that instead of 7 / 6, the pull rates should be 6.55 / 6.55.
The pull rates also don’t factor in certain set-specific quirks. For Ruby, for instance, each theme deck contained a random regular holo from the set. So the numbers you’re using understate the number of regular holos and overstate the number of exs.
There are a number of other small issues that I’m happy to elaborate on if you want.
BTW, none of this is meant as criticism; just constructive input. This is an incredible project and–by in large–you used accurate pull rates. Huge props for building this!
For SWSH era, ‘alt art’ is taken apart from ‘full art V’ and ‘full art trainer’ though they should all be printed on the same sheet.
Same goes for ‘alt art vmax’ and ‘rainbow rare’.
edit: If you really want to get into the weeds, not all cards in the same rarity have necessarily the same print run because of how many spots there are on the sheet vs how many unique cards have to be printed.
However mostly or all of them should only have 1 primary rate and 1 secondary rate unless evenly divisible. Of course unless we have the actual sheet, it’s almost impossible to tell which ones are which with such small sample sizes.
My approach was to generally overestimate! Which perhaps lead to an idea that theme decks and non-main sets be excluded. I’m not quite sure how to handle decks but I could add larger non-mains to the timeline to reduce the averages!
Your insight on ex era pull rates over all and the quirks / nuances have been extremely helpful and sited!
Good thing about box toppers is we can figure those out pretty easily with the info and formula already in use!
Point 2: noted! is this type of error prevalent throughout?
Three makes a lot of sense as to why they’d be the same pull rates! If the ratio for theme decks is basically ⅓ and pull is /6, could we average holo rares in Ruby to /4.5 overall?
From what I can tell, a lot of the authors conclusions about sheet rarity and pull rates align pretty well with other sources (especially for later sets). Understanding this better may help with what is missing like Alt Tag Teams, the categories you mentioned and others!
Can someone ELI5?
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You both remind me of a major question of this project: can a confident margin of error actually be achieved?
Anyway, thanks again! Will try and update this more. There’s certainly a lot that can be ironed out.
Would be interested in the input of others on this, but conservatively I’d guess that ~30% of the print run of each EX set was comprised of precon decks. Each theme deck has 60 cards while each pack has 9 cards.
My rationale: at 30%, that would mean that 1 theme deck was produced for every 15.6 packs. That feels like a reasonable, conservative lower bound estimate. Which would mean that the print run is (for the intentions of your tool) at least 30% lower than the figures cited.
I’ll make a more comprehensive post on this thread soon with some specific suggestions :).
Thank you for being receptive to feedback–and, again, for doing this project to begin with! It’s a wonderful idea with a ton of potential.
An alternative way would be to start with how many products are produced instead of what is the print run of a particular set.
As in, do we think TPCi decided ‘we’ll print 2b of Temporal Forces packs’ or was it ‘we’ll produce 1,000,000 booster boxes, 200,000 ETBs, 200,000 sleeved boosters etc.’
I tried messing around with that before as well. ETB inflation would increase the amount of dud cards (60 energies) but there are also promo cards and code cards in packs and products. And then of course decks in every era.
Yet another would be, how many of the top rarity are we intending on producing? Although this may be a bit illogical, they did alter pull rates in the SV era when they presumably felt the chase cards were too easy to pull.
1. Print Volume Trends
2. Pull Rate Evolution
3. Set Size Growth