How does scarcity work?

Quality, Rarity and Scarcity on Serra.

Scarcity has two dimensions on Serra. There is the Rarity dimension and the Quality dimension. Multiplying both values gives you the overall Scarcity Score of a card.

What is Rarity and how does it work?

Rarity only applies to Transcendent Set cards and refers to how rare in number a card may be. This could take the form of special Serran characters or technology. However, the level of rarity does not necessarily relate to how powerful the card might be in gameplay.

What are my chances of getting a Legendary card in my Transcendent crate?

To work out the chances of getting your hands on some of the scarcest cards in the Transcendent Set we need to combine the distribution rate for both Quality and Rarity.

We calculate the expected distribution like this:

Common: 0.70x(5/6) = 58,33% Rare: 0.24x(5/6)+1.00x(1/6) = 36.67 % Epic: 0.05x(5/6) = 4.17% Legendary: 0.01x(5/6) = 0.83%

Therefore, when all crates are opened we expect there to be 58.33% Common, 36.67% Rare, 4.17% Epic, and 0.83% Legendary cards. We expect these percentages to fluctuate while there aren’t many cards in existence, but over time, the distribution should closely reflect these percentages. You can read about what happened when we opened four million crates on the test net here. {link} Remember though, everyone still has five chances of 1% to get a Legendary card in their crates.

There is no set number allocated to each card so different cards of the same Rarity will vary in total supply. For example, there may be more Bagni cards than Harbinger of the Source cards even though they are both Legendary in Rarity.

What is Quality and how does it work?

Quality applies to all cards and refers to the frame and associated cosmetics of cards.

Transcendent Sets will have the following draw chance on opening your crate:

• Painted Metal 84%,

• Bronze 10%,

• Silver 5%,

• Gold 1%.

You are guaranteed to receive at least one Rare card in each Transcendent Set crate.

Base Sets will have the following draw chance on opening your crate:

• Bronze 75%,

• Silver 24%,

• Gold 1%.

All the cards are guaranteed to be at least Bronze in each Base crate.

Quality x Rarity = Scarcity

To work out the chances of getting your hands on some of the scarcest cards in the Transcendent Set we need to combine the distribution rate for both Quality and Rarity.

As you can see above, we expect the distribution of Common Painted Metal cards to make up 49% of all cards. We get from Rarity x Quality = Scarcity, or 58.33% x 84% = 49%.

We can translate those percentage values into numeric values to get a better picture of how many cards of each Scarcity will exist.

These tables show us broadly how many cards to expect in total, however, there are 34 different cards in the Transcendent Set.

So, how do we know how scarce one particular card is? With the Scarcity Score.