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Relative Rarity
I'd like to know about the relative rarity of various cards and how Wizards prints the cards to get those rarities.
How many cards are printed on a sheet?
Are commons, uncommons, rares and mythics printed on different sheets or are they combined? How are they combined?
How many commons are printed for each mythic rare? Is it an even number of sets of commons per mythic? Per rare?
Is there a simple ration between the commonalities?
How many cards are printed on a sheet?
Are commons, uncommons, rares and mythics printed on different sheets or are they combined? How are they combined?
How many commons are printed for each mythic rare? Is it an even number of sets of commons per mythic? Per rare?
Is there a simple ration between the commonalities?
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Comments
If you really want to learn all the details about it, you should definitely listen to those two podcasts:
1) Drive to Work #641: Booster Packs (LINK)
2) Drive to work #492: Printing (LINK)
Also, this post will give you the exact math behind the ratio of printed cards (I couldn't track the exact source unfortunately but it seems precise enough): LINK. The details of collation are mostly kept a secret by WOTC though.
For the short version of actually confirmed information about draft boosters:
• Most sets are printed on 11x11 cards sheets (there are exceptions)
• All rarities have their own sheets, except rares and mythic rares which share the same sheet (2 copies of 53 rares + 1 copy of 15 mythics = 11x11 = 121 cards, with ~1/8 mythics).
• Each rarity (maybe not rares and mythics) have multiple different sheets where each card appears a different number of times in a different order, to randomize the boosters.
• There are also separate sheets for special rarities like basic lands, timeshifted cards, double-faced cards, tokens, etc. For instance, in M19, Nicol Bolas was the only double-faced card in the set so he had a sheet printed just for him.
• To get the right number of cards of each rarity in the boosters, they simply put the cards from each type of sheet in separate hoppers. Then, a computer drops 10 cards from the common hopper in the booster, 3 cards from the uncommon hopper, 1 card from the rare/mythic hopper, 1 card from the basic land hopper and 1 card from the token/ad hopper. In recent sets, the algorithm has allowed for more refined booster composition though (for instance, the planeswalker sheet in War of the Spark corrected the other slots so you don't get 4 uncommons or two rares like it was the case with Innistrad's double-faced cards for instance).
• The rarity of every single card is close to any other card of the same rarity but not exactly, the math is not perfect. Also, each sheet is basically printed at a ratio similar to which you would find them in a booster pack (1 rare/mythic for 3 uncommons for 10 commons).
I'm not an expert in this, I hope this still helped and answered some of your questions