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The bad news: I'm relatively certain that the draw for this grab bag was not random and/or the pool of potential outcomes is not what was originally stated. Why? Because someone left a list in my box showing the exact sets that were shipped.
Now to be clear, it is certainly *possible* for something like this to be generated randomly from the probabilities in the listing. But there are compelling reasons to doubt, and I will lay out a few of them here.
First, lack of accuracy to the stated list. The 100-unit limit for this drop implied that each 'percent' on the list corresponded to a single booster box. And yet three M2014 boxes shipped (2% chance). Second, too much uniformity. This tends to be a problem anytime a human being tries to "act random," and it looks to have happened here. For example, notice how sets with a 7% chance shipped exactly 3 units. It is again possible but quite unlikely to for that to have happened randomly. Third, not enough variety. In a way MD was unlucky that this paper ended up in my box, as I have a decent statistics background. I ran a series of simulations to determine how many different sets we would expect to see in a group of 30 randomly selected boxes (the number shipped in this case) given the probabilities in the listing. The answer is 18; the chances of selecting 12 (or less) total different sets (which supposedly happened here) is around 0.1%, or 1 in 1000.
And finally, the fact that this ordered, hand-written list even exists. Any process for 'randomly' choosing something in 2018 is going to involve a computer or phone. Why wouldn't the end result of said process remain on said computer or phone (or if absolutely needed, be printed out)? And honestly even if, for some reason, legit results were copied down onto this paper, the list should not have been alphabetically re-ordered as they were in this case, as that affects who gets which box.
In conclusion, this drop is a great idea but it is unlikely that MD actually followed the rules it set out for itself. Let me know what you think!
I hope more people post what they received so we can check it against this list. Again though there’s nothing to stop those people from lying and there’s no real way to hold MD’s feet to the fire for the possibly dishonest behavior. Other than some sort of boycott.
I like MD and have purchased quite a bit from the site, but just felt in this case they deserved a call out.
I disagree about the list, however. It exists because someone ran their script (or however they chose), wrote down which boxes to get, and went back into the storeroom to grab them. I doubt they made an app for it, and a computer would be too bulky to keep referring to. My sample table was sorted by expected value, because that's what I was most interested in, but alphabetical makes the most sense if your goal is to grab the boxes as efficiently as possible.
They COULD have brought them back and assigned them to the buyers who selected them, but I think that's a little unlikely given how the rest of these drops have gone. I still think they're a bad deal, and even worse without a little transparency about their methods.