Hasbro in America have sent out to selected Americans another giant promo box of free goodies... this time for Magic the Gathering - the new set of cards that includes Transformers cards (as seen at the Pulse Con last month).

Even though we already saw the Transformers game cards (linked here in an earlier post), we get some extra information (or confirmation if this was already known), about just how to obtain the Transformers cards.

I had mistakenly thought that the Transformers cards were being released in packs by themselves for people to then buy lots of packs to get all of the set, but it is actually a lot more difficult and expensive than that.
The Transformers cards are only being found in random packs of a series called "Brothers War"... and not even one in each pack, but one in every 10 packs on average!
Doing the math, statistically you would then have to buy about 300 packs of cards just to collect the set of 30 Transformers cards (and that's only if none are rarities)... and the reviewer who got this promo box had 30 booster packs in it and ended up with just 4 Transformers cards. Say that they are $5 per pack, that's $150 just for 4 Transformers cards (or less if you are unlucky enough to only get packs that don't have Transformers cards in them).

That's a very expensive and frustrating concept, and makes no sense why Hasbro/WOTC would do that. It's not like there is a lot of overlap of Transformers fans with MTG fans. You probably have 95% of MTG fans who will see the Transformers cards as wasted cards in the packs, while 95% of fans interested in the Transformers cards would have no interest in the MTG cards... and not even bother to try collecting them.