Magic Is Officially Bringing Back God Packs and Making Major Changes to Booster Packs
The rarest packs in the Multiverse are coming to Magic: The Gathering, and we have exclusive details
If you bought a Journey into Nyx booster pack after the set’s release in 2014, there was an extraordinarily slim chance you might open a Magic: The Gathering “God Pack.” Instead of the usual mix of cards, these 1-in-1000 packs contained 15 legendary gods from the Theros block. Now, 13 years later, God Packs are coming back to Magic, with a twist.
Polygon can exclusively reveal that, starting with Nauctis: The Sunken Realm in February, every pack of cards that’s part of the Magic Multiverse has a slight chance to be a God Pack containing 14 rares or mythic rares. Universes Beyond releases are expected to follow suit in 2028. (The odds of finding a God Pack vary depending on whether you're cracking a regular pack of cards or a Collector Booster.)
“We are always looking for ways to make the pack opening experience more fun,” Magic communications director Blake Rasmussen tells Polygon via email. “Bringing back God Packs as a regular feature has long been at the top of our list of wants.”
In many ways, the strength of a trading card game lives and dies based on how it feels to open up a pack full of a dozen or more random pieces of cardboard. Every Play Booster pack from Magic’s latest set, Reality Fracture, included “echoed pairs” of cards featuring a single character from the Multiverse and a variant created within Jace Beleren’s twisted Echoverse. It made for a unique pack-opening experience, and it’s a major reason why I called Reality Fracture one of the best Magic sets in recent memory. God Packs take things to a whole new level.
Rasmussen notes that since Reality Fracture marked the end of a multi-year storyline for the game, Nauctis is the beginning of an entirely new arc for Magic, making it the ideal time to reintroduce God Packs.
“We’re really excited about future creative executions of God Packs that we think will be as exciting or even more exciting than what players remember from Theros,” he says.
What’s inside Magic’s new God Packs?
Approximately one in every 1,000 regular Booster Packs will contain the following:
- One God Pack celebration card
- 10 non-foil rares or mythic rares
- Two non-foil Booster Fun rares or mythic rares
- Two traditional-foil Booster Fun rares or mythic rares
The celebration card will always be the first thing people see when they open a God Pack. Rasmussen says it is intended as both a reference card and a keepsake that players can display to commemorate the occasion.
Collector Boosters will have significantly better God Pack odds of approximately one in 300 packs. Those versions will contain:
- One God Pack celebration card
- One foil land
- Three foil default-frame rares or mythic rares
- Three non-foil Booster Fun rares or mythic rares
- Five foil Booster Fun rares or mythic rares
That final batch of five cards could theoretically contain multiple copies of a set’s premium headliner card — The One Ring from The Hobbit or an Infinity Stone from a Marvel set — although Wizards says the likelihood of that happening is extremely low. God Packs will be inserted completely at random, with no guarantee that one will appear in any particular booster display, case, pallet, or even geographic region. They can also appear inside any product type containing eligible Booster Packs or Collector Boosters.
Rasmussen explains that the longer production timelines required when Wizards works with outside partners — which is the case for all Universes Beyond sets — are the reason God Packs won’t be included for crossover sets until 2028.
“It’s very common for us to go ‘pencils down’ on a Universes Beyond set a while before the Magic Multiverse set that releases around the same time,” Rasmussen said. “This was true for Nauctis and our first yet-to-be announced Universes Beyond set of 2027.”
If you open a God Pack during a tournament, call a judge
What happens if you pull a God Pack during a Draft or Sealed event? Suddenly seeing an influx of 14 rares or mythic rares in a single pack rather than the usual assortment makes for an unfair advantage.
“If a player opens a God Pack, they should stop and call for a judge or tournament organizer,” reads the official advice Wizards of the Coast will distribute to game stores. “Checking in immediately helps prevent confusion, regardless of how you decide to proceed. You have discretion over whether the God Pack remains in the event.”
Wizards strongly recommends that event management do the following:
- Celebrate the moment! Call attention to the rare find and share the excitement with your community.
- Remove the God Pack from the event. Let the player who opened it keep it for their collection.
- Replace it at no charge. Give the player an unopened Booster Pack from the same set so they can continue playing.
At competitive events where Wizards of the Coast provides the product, such as Regional Championships and the Pro Tour, removing and replacing the God Pack will be required. If you're participating in a pre-release at your local game store, it may ultimately be up to whoever is running the event to decide.
Booster Packs are getting better pulls, but Collector Boosters are getting smaller
God Packs are only one part of a broader overhaul coming to Magic boosters in 2027. Magic initially pivoted to Play Boosters as a replacement for both Draft and Set Boosters starting with Murders at Karlov Manor in Feb. 2024. The intention was to maintain a “fun-to-open experience” for all packs.
Now, Magic is reverting back to “Booster Packs” as a catch-all term for packs used for sets and for Draft events. Despite the name change, Rasmussen confirms that they will continue to serve exactly the same function in Draft, Sealed, and other formats. Wizards simply wants the name to make clear that this is the game’s default booster product.
“When we first launched Play Boosters, we did so with a guaranteed foil, alternative versions, and more rares on average per pack,” Rasmussen says. “When those changes ended up in fans’ hands, we learned that the rares and alternative versions really resonated with players, while the guaranteed foil resonated with far fewer.”
We’ve all been there: flipping through the contents of a pack only for the foil at the end to be of a common card we’ve seen plenty of times before. In terms of raw market value, the difference can often be counted in cents rather than dollars. While it’s not all about monetary value, the foil you pull these days is often a card you don’t even want to play with at all.
Part of the shift to “Booster Packs” means that foil commons or uncommons will no longer appear — but a foil in every pack is no longer guaranteed, either. The foils that do appear in Booster Packs, however, will always be a rare or mythic rare. Rasmussen says that the chances of finding one of those will increase from approximately 7% to 10%. Traditional-foil Japan Showcase cards, previously limited to Collector Boosters, will also begin appearing in Booster Packs at a rate of approximately 1%. Those cards will still have a chance of dropping at a specialty foil treatment in Collector Boosters.
Collector Boosters, meanwhile, will lose two foil commons and one foil uncommon. Those three cards will not be replaced, meaning that Booster packs will contain fewer cards while remaining at the same price point. The official announcement from Wizards indicates that these cards were the least-exciting parts of opening Collector Boosters and that they were often passed over — especially in pack-opening videos that have become increasingly popular online.
“How does removing cards make opening Collector Boosters more exciting? We'll be honest here — it doesn't,” Wizards admitted in the blog post now available on DailyMTG. “But we do know that most people who open Collector Boosters mostly skip past these cards. Not everyone, but enough of a majority. You can see it in virtually any Collector Booster opening video, where the video practically skips over that section of the booster.”
The tradeoff here, Wizards claims, is that removing those cards reduces the overall printing complexity, freeing up production capacity for more exciting experiments.
“Removing three less desirable cards from Collector Boosters (combined with removing foil commons and uncommons from booster packs) reduces our overall printing complexity to a noticeable degree, which we can then use for cooler things like God Packs and Japan Showcase cards in Booster Packs,” Rasmussen says. “We thought the tradeoff of fewer things people mostly skipped over in favor of adding some really cool, exciting features was worth it.”
Wizards is betting that players will miss the cards being removed less than they’ll enjoy the slim possibility of opening up an extraordinary pack chock-full of the rarest cards from any given set.