The second box I opened was Magic: Origins. This is the last basic set to date and it showed. Especially after having opened a box of Shadows over Innistrad this box was a little disappointing. Not in the least because you could really sense the drop in card quality due to missing flipcards. And I didn't even know about that distribution at that point. It just felt like there were fewer rares, fewer good cards.
And it shows.
So the box contains 36 boosters, each has 15 cards and a marketing card. Each booster has one land card that may be a foil of any kind, one rare, three uncommons, and 10 commons. 1 in 8 boosters has the rare replaced with a mythical rare. No flipcards in this set so that number isn't skewed that much. The land card can still be a rare foil though. But they weren't.
According to
mtgcollectionbuilder.com I've entered 544 cards (even though there should be 36*15=540 cards so I made a small mistake somewhere, no matter). According to whatever source it quotes for prices my collection for this box is worth $45. That's little over half of the price of the box.
Note that prices quoted here are according to
mtgcollectionbuilder.com on the "low" price setting. I don't know what the difference actually means but let's be conservative here.
The box gave me 224/288 cards of the Origins set, 77%. Obviously the remaining missing cards are mostly in the rare/myth area because that's how it works.
The most expensive cards are "Jace, Vryn's Prodigy" ($17.16) and "Kytheon, Hero of Akros" ($2.40). The other cards are all sub $1. That's a little disappointing when comparing that to what
the innistrad box yielded.
Interesting to note here is that the Origins set was released in 2015 and Shadows over Innistrad in 2016. But even then, the cards are simply less appealing I guess. The set is just a little bland, with about 3 cards above $5 value.
Back to stats. My box contained 5 mythical rares, beating the odds once again (1:8 means only 36/8=4.5 boosters should contain a myth). Obviously in this set that means the other boosters contained rares, 29 of them. 2 rares are dupes. Is it me or do land cards have a higher chance to dupe, even in the rare spectrum?
The biggest dupe count was 5. It feels like this box had a significantly higher amount of dupes, but the collection site doesn't show these stats.
From the land-card slot in the booster, only two gave me a cheklist card. That at least feels like a much better ratio.
My box contained 8 foils, 2 of them lands. Of course.
The marketing cards were also a bit crap. Where they were all tokens of some kind in Shadows over Innistrad, it seems they found it more important to actually ship marketing cards with marketing printed on both sides. Why would you do that. Those cares are instant discards, never to be seen again. At least the token cards served a purpose and your marketing still shows. Extra disappointment on an already meager box. Of course there were 36 marketing cards. 18 (!) were useless double sided marketing cards, including some that have the same print on both sides... The others were; 2x goblins, 1x demon, 8x thopter, 2x elf warrior, 1x knight, 1x Liliana's emblem, 1x zombie, 1x Ashaya, 1x soldier (the starwars one).
All in all.. I think this box wasn't worth it to me. The cards were a bit bland. The boosters a bit disappointing after being spoiled by the flipcard boosters of innistrad. The double-sided marketing cards also felt a bit like a useless addition.