Strange card distribution in SW pre-release boosters (?)

In my four pre-release Sabbat War boosters, three of them yeilded two vampires each, while the fourth contained FIVE vamps in 11 cards. Anybody else notice this or similar interesting distribution phenomena? Also, the Vampires seemed to be scattered throughout any given pack, so there may be some interesting new variations on rarity in Sabbat War. "Men choose as their prophets those who tell them that their hopes are true." - Lord Dunsany Chick...@aol.com 3930 Cody Road Sherman Oaks, CA 91403 USA day 818-718-1221 eve 818-784-8476

chick...@aol.com (ChickLewis) wrote: > In my four pre-release Sabbat War boosters, three of them yeilded > two vampires each, while the fourth contained FIVE vamps in 11 > cards. Anybody else notice this or similar interesting distribution > phenomena? At the pre-release I ran today, I saw some packs with two, three or four vamps. I didn't notice any with five. This is in direct contradiction with what LSJ stated earlier on the subject. This leads me to believe there was a screw-up with the company that packaged the cards. Regards, Noal McDonald Prince of Metro Detroit, MI -- "I was probably pretty young, when I realised that I had come from what you might call a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches." --Faulkner, "The Mansion" Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.

So, Noal, would you be willing to repost the official information from LSJ ? I missed it. [ quoted text not captured ]

chick...@aol.com (ChickLewis) wrote: > So, Noal, would you be willing to repost the official information > from LSJ ? I missed it. The plan was that each booster would have thre vamps (no more, no less), except that exactly 1% of the boosters would be "odd" and have only two vamps. Apparently, the printing/collating/distribution didn't end up matching that, though. As near as I can figure, the sheets have been randomized a little more than was planned. Not sure at this time what happened. If you open 100 packs, you should still get 299 vampires on average, but they won't be as evenly distributed through the packs as we had planned. If the distribution is completely randomized, but contained to a sheet (i.e., one sheet is "packaged" before another sheet is started), then the packs would look like this: 0 vamps: 2% 1 vamp: 11% 2 vamps: 24% 3 vamps: 39% 4 vamps: 21% 5 vamps: 9% 6 vamps: 2.4% more: 0.43% (numbers do not sum to 100% due to rounding) This will probably pose no problem for sealed deck play, but will likely make booster draft and table draft drafting a bit (or a lot) more difficult. Mixed draft (since it mixes more packs in before drafting) will suffer less than the other two draft formats. -- LSJ (vte...@white-wolf.com) VTES Net.Rep for White Wolf, Inc. Links to revised rulebook, rulings, errata, and tournament rules: http://www.white-wolf.com/vtes/ [ quoted text not captured ]

On Sun, 29 Oct 2000, LSJ wrote: > This will probably pose no problem for sealed deck play, but > will likely make booster draft and table draft drafting a > bit (or a lot) more difficult. Mixed draft (since it mixes > more packs in before drafting) will suffer less than the > other two draft formats. Additional rule: "Where opening packs has lead to insufficient vampires available for drafting, the <whoever> may open more packs in order to provide additional vampires." ? The more pressing problem, of course, is trying to deal with buying enough stock if, theoretically, you could get a box with 0 vampires in every booster. -- James Coupe | PGP Key 0x5D623D5D "And all the while I'm thinking things that I can never share with him. I'm a bundle of confusion, yet it has a strange appeal. Did it all begin with him and the way he makes me feel?"

I understand the message about how the vampires seem to be distributed in the boosters, but it brings up other questions. Are we to understand that the old traditional (?) "Rare/ Uncommon/ Vampire/ Common" card rarity plan is not used in Sabbat War? If one can find six vampires in an 11 card pack, this indicates that this must be so. The question would be, how many different rarity categories are there in SW, and how are those rarities distributed in any booster? Please forgive me if these topics have been discussed to death on this newsgroup in the past, I have only recently re-subscribed. [ quoted text not captured ]

James Coupe <jr...@cam.ac.uk> wrote: > Additional rule: > > "Where opening packs has lead to insufficient vampires available > for drafting, the <whoever> may open more packs in order to > provide additional vampires." You're going to run into problems quick there. I've bought five boxes of boosters to supply 18 players with ten packs in a sealed draft. If I sell out the event there will be no more boosters to open. Even if there were extra packs, how should I handle it? Charge them for additional packs? (Wanna see an angry gamer?) Give them away for free? (Wanna see an angry retailer/sponsor?) With regards to tournaments, Sabbat War is quickly turning into one huge cluster fuck. The cards are great and all, but someone better get a handle on things pretty damned quick. Noal -- "I was probably pretty young, when I realised that I had come from what you might call a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches." --Faulkner, "The Mansion" [ quoted text not captured ]

On Mon, 30 Oct 2000, Noal McDonald wrote: > James Coupe <jr...@cam.ac.uk> wrote: > > Additional rule: > > > > "Where opening packs has lead to insufficient vampires available > > for drafting, the <whoever> may open more packs in order to > > provide additional vampires." > > You're going to run into problems quick there. > > I've bought five boxes of boosters to supply 18 players with ten packs > in a sealed draft. If I sell out the event there will be no more > boosters to open. Erm, I thought I mentioned that in my next paragraph? [ quoted text not captured ]