Premium boosters are packaged boosters that come with a small handful of packs with set rarities within them. Every booster will contain exactly two normal non-foil cards and a single foil that can be either a stamp or a signed card. There is no patterned distribution to the cards. As such, you may get infinite copies of a single card and finite copies of another. All rarities are essentially the same, but the chance of getting anything you want is up to the god of luck.
I’ll be very blunt here. I dislike premium boosters. Now before the reader(s) decide to raise their pitchforks and torches in outrage or support, I want to explain my opinion here. Premium boosters have carried the formula as follows since their inception years ago. They’re no longer a new product but an expected product that is more than likely to continue to show up.
They carry exactly six packs, each with three cards in them in the ratios described in the opening preface. They have no real set distribution, meaning any card could be found within any rarity with duplication. I’ve personally never seen a pack open with three of the same exact cards, but that is not entirely out of the possibility of these packs given their complete utter randomness. The only bright side lies with the fact that premium booster card pools are usually small to compensate, not that it changes your gacha luck when pulling this product.
*Note: As of the writing of this, Shakugan no Shana’s premium booster had not yet been finalized with images showing preliminary product.*
There’s no argument that the foil are gorgeous. The premium boosters open a wide range of design possibilities with the highest rarity cards having specialized modifications unlike that of the average sign in a booster (see Kazumi on the left).
As in the case of the Doctor Strange foil to the left, the foiling pattern leaves a stamp but also a prismatic rainbow colour flowing through the text in an off-frame rare background. It is absolutely gorgeous. Even the lesser rarities (the card viewer on the official site does these cards no justice) are fairly nice in their foil background as well. One last thing to mention about the cards themselves is that they’re tougher and less likely to curl than their old extra booster counterparts. In addition, they do have some real seiyuu’s images featured for some of the alternative rares if you’d like that.
Now on to the nitty gritty bad stuff that I dislike about these sets. Firstly, the pricing is absurd. These boxes are selling on average for half the price of a normal booster and offer no standard ratios. You are also only getting eighteen cards a box, making it impossible for you to even attempt to build anything without getting at minimum three boosters and being extremely lucky. Remember, due to the random ratios, it is entirely possible to buy several boosters and never pull a single climax, even if the chance is low.
Secondly, sets that are completely only available in premium boosters are becoming the norm. As is the case for Jojo’s Stone Ocean/Stardust Crusader split, you have a full card pool available with the only way to get product outside of singles to be pulling massive amounts of boxes. This makes it quite stressful and terrible for any individual to try and purchase product to try and make decks. As for reprint sets, I give them a little bit of a slide since the cards already pre-exist in another form. The reprints solely exist as collector bombs and are not necessary for deck construction.
Still, if you are willing to play the gamble game, do go ahead. These boxes are quite fun compared to opening the average booster. Since the chances of getting a higher rarity are completely random and there’s seemingly no mapping known, there is a chance of very high value. However, these are as defined by its title, premium products. At the end of the day, it is a gacha after all, so do remember to take that into account.