Since most sales of Shadowfist are at the box level, why do we bother with the booster packs anymore. Wouldn't it be more cost effective to buy a megabooster/box with 24 random rares, 72 uncommons, and 144 common cards? This should cut down on packaging, artwork, and overall cost of the product.
In fact, given the current sorting scheme being used with cards having basicly the same commonality within a box (dependent on where in the alphabet your box falls), the randomness comes completely from which box you draw and which part of the alphabet is missing. Either the point of the randomness is to make it hard to track down certain cards and thus require more purchases to get a complete set or there is no point other than repeating history. If the later is the case, we should just change to buying complete card sets. Then you can trade with others to get more or less of the cards you want rather than rely on luck.
If you are running a draft event, just open your megabooster and randomly build pods to simulate 10 card boosters. The cards would just have to be divided into the three commonalities within the megabooster so they could be shuffled without looking at them.
I think we are too stuck in the this is the way it has always been done, and this is the way Magic does it. We really need to review the sales model for this game to thrive.
