Where randomness enters the pack
Trading cards are printed on large sheets, cut, sorted, and collated into packs by machines configured to hit the publisher's target ratios for each rarity slot. The process is not a coin flip per card in the poetic sense, but the practical result for you as a buyer is the same. You cannot know or influence what is in a sealed pack, so each one behaves like a random draw against the set's rates.
The contents were fixed at the factory. Nothing that happens after sealing changes them. Not the store you bought from, not the order you open the box in, not the way you peel the wrapper, and definitely not a parody blessing from this website, which we mention because it is legally and morally our whole thing.
Printed odds versus estimated rates
Some games tell you the odds. Certain publishers print approximate ratios on packaging or publish rarity breakdowns for specific products, which gives you an official baseline. Other games, including some of the biggest, publish no pull rates at all. For those, everything you read online is an estimate reconstructed by the community from thousands of recorded pack openings.
Estimates are useful but they are not gospel, and we would know, we run a fake church. A good estimate comes with a sample size and some honesty about uncertainty. A bad estimate is one screenshot of one box. On TCG Prayer, rate data is labeled with its source, its sample size, and a confidence level, because an estimate without those is just vibes with decimals.
Independence, or why your packs have no memory
Physical packs have no pity timer. If a hit appears in roughly 1 in 100 packs, that is true for your first pack and equally true for your fiftieth consecutive miss. Previous packs do not make the next one more likely to hit. Feeling due for a pull is the gambler's fallacy, and it has funded more regrettable box purchases than any other idea in the hobby.
The one honest caveat is product structure. Some products do guarantee certain slots, like a box promising at least one card of a given rarity, and those guarantees are printed by the publisher. Within any slot that is random, though, independence rules, and no streak of bad packs earns you anything except lighter pockets.
Sample size, or why your last box proves nothing
If a card appears in 1 in 100 packs, a 36 pack box will often contain zero copies, sometimes one, and occasionally two. All of those outcomes are normal. Concluding that a set is dead or juiced from one box is like judging a coin after four flips. Rates only become visible across hundreds or thousands of packs, which is why community tallies matter and anecdotes do not.
This cuts both ways. The person who pulled two chase cards in one box did not find a blessed print run, and you did not buy from a cursed case. You both took small samples from the same big distribution. The distribution does not know who you are, which is honestly one of its better qualities.