The Confrérie Opens Its Counter
The petition of the citizen jpvalery carried at 15:18 on the 9th of September, with 100 Seals affixed by 25 citizens and Ⱡ2,060,673,388 behind it. The Confrérie Artistique pour la Reproduction et la Distribution has been seated, and its counter is open.
The Confrérie prints. It does not appraise. Every Blister says on its face what it holds and what it guarantees, and what The Ice puts inside any particular one is not the Confrérie's affair.
TL;DR
- Cards exist. All 720 rostered players have one, and most have several at different tiers. So do thirty-three individual games.
- You buy them sealed, in Blisters, with Looneys and nothing else. Ⱡ500 for the standard packet of six.
- Thirteen Blisters are printed. Three stand on the counter at a time: the standard one always, and two others that change hands every few hours.
- Five rarity tiers and four finishes. The odds for every Blister are published at How it works and always were.
- Your binder holds one hundred cards. You may keep forty sealed Blisters beside it. Neither number is a suggestion.
- A card you do not want recycles for Looneys. This is permanent.
- Cards trade on Le Marché Gelé, against anything else a citizen owns.
- The mint starts today at number one. Nothing was struck before today.
What A Card Is
Two kinds, and they are not the same kind of object.
A player card is a person, in a season, as they were that season. The name, the position, the star rating and the six attributes are stamped onto the run at the moment of striking, and they do not move afterwards. The player goes on to have a better year or a worse one. The card does not follow them. This is the whole point of the thing: a card is not a live readout of a player, it is a record of one. What is printed on it stopped being true the moment it was printed, and that is exactly what makes it worth keeping.
A game card is a single night, preserved. The Ice does not remember games. Fans do, and unevenly. Thirty-three contests currently stand as print runs.
Every card carries a print number, unique within its run, assigned in the order it was struck. The Confrérie has struck nothing before today. The first card out of the first Blister opened will be number one, and there will only ever be one of those.
One thousand six hundred and eighty-six print runs stand open: 1,653 player runs, struck from 720 rostered players, and 33 games. A run closes when the Confrérie stops striking from it. Cards already struck from a closed run do not stop existing; they stop being obtainable, which is a different and more interesting condition.
What Is In A Blister
Six cards, in the standard packet: four ordinary player cards, one player card guaranteed Rare or better, and one game card.
That is the standard packet. It is not every packet—see the thirteen below, some of which are shaped differently. What is constant is that a Blister tells you its own shape before you buy it. The Confrérie considers a sealed packet whose contents are undescribed to be a different and worse product.
Blisters are bought with Looneys and nothing else. There is no other currency at this counter and there is not going to be one.
Rarity And Finish
Five tiers, ascending: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary.
Tier is not assigned by the Confrérie's affection. It is a percentile cut across the whole rostered league, blending how good a player is with how many people follow their team, so that the best players on the most-supported teams are the hardest to pull. A per-team floor and cap sit on top of that, because a team nobody supports should still have a card worth chasing, and three well-supported teams should not hold every Legendary in the league.
A player's standing does not buy them a tier. It buys them a ceiling, and the Confrérie prints them at that ceiling and at every tier beneath it. Ingrid Solheim of McMurdo reaches Legendary, so five runs of her stand open—Legendary, Epic, Rare, Uncommon and Common, the same woman five times. Élodie Gagnon of Montréal reaches Epic, so there are four of her and no Legendary at all. Of the 720, 56 reach a Legendary ceiling; 81 stop at Epic, 144 at Rare, 178 at Uncommon, and 261 never rise above Common.
This is why a name is not a result. A Common Solheim exists, and it is Common—not because she is ordinary, but because that is the print. The tier is the thing, the card says which print it is on its face, and a collector who reads only the name will misjudge their own binder.
Of the 1,653 open player runs, counted by what is actually printed rather than by who reaches what: 720 Common, 459 Uncommon, 281 Rare, 137 Epic, and 56 Legendary.
Separately, a card carries a finish: Standard, Frost, Gold, or Foil, in ascending order of scarcity. A finish is not a tier. A Common in Foil and a Legendary in Standard are both entirely possible and neither is a mistake. Foil is the rarest thing the Confrérie prints.
Exact odds, per Blister, per slot, are at How it works. They are published as a matter of record and were published before the counter opened. The Confrérie will not be asked what the odds are; it has already answered.
The Thirteen Blisters
| Blister | Price | Holds | Guarantees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Le Blister | Ⱡ500 | 5 players, 1 game | Rare or better |
| Le Blister Épique | Ⱡ1,000 | 5 players, 1 game | Epic or better |
| Le Blister Doré | Ⱡ1,000 | 5 players, 1 game | Rare or better, and one card Gold or better |
| Ten team Blisters | Ⱡ750 | 6 players, no game | Rare or better, all from one team |
The team Blisters are printed for Montréal, Winnipeg, Tokyo, Anchorage, McMurdo, Helsinki, Stockholm, Prague, Nairobi, and Guadalajara. They contain six players from that team and no game card at all.
The Confrérie notes plainly that the league has forty-eight teams and ten of them have a Blister. The other thirty-eight are not a judgement on those teams. They are a printing schedule, and it continues.
A team Blister costs less than an Épique despite holding more player cards, because the game card is the most valuable slot in an ordinary packet, and its rates never roll Common. Fewer cards is not always less, and more cards is not always more. Each Blister is priced against what is actually in it.
The Rotation
Three Blisters stand on the counter at any moment.
Le Blister is always one of them. It does not rotate, it does not run out, and it is always Ⱡ500.
The other two positions turn over. Each rotating Blister stands for six hours, and the two positions are staggered by three, so something new appears on the counter every three hours and nothing that arrives is gone before you have had a chance at it. The counter shows what is standing and how long it has left.
A Blister that has left the counter is not withdrawn from the world. Any sealed packet you are holding still opens, at the odds it was sold under, however long you sit on it and whatever the Confrérie has printed since. The rates a packet was sold under travel with the packet. This is not a courtesy; it is the only honest way to sell a sealed thing.
The full register of all thirteen, including what is on the counter now and where each sits in the turn, is at The Blisters.
Recycling
A card you do not want may be returned to the Confrérie for Looneys.
What it returns depends on its own rarity and its own finish, and on nothing else. Not which Blister produced it, not what you paid, not what anyone thinks it is worth. A Legendary returns the same whether it came out of a Ⱡ500 packet or a Ⱡ1,000 one. The ladder runs from a few Looneys for a Common to a substantial sum for a Legendary, multiplied by the finish, so that a Foil is worth ten times a Standard of the same tier. The figures are at How it works.
One warning, stated once and plainly. Recycling is permanent. The card is gone. It does not come back, it cannot be bought back, and the Confrérie will not restore it because you have changed your mind.
The Binder
You have one binder. It holds one hundred cards. You may hold forty sealed Blisters beside it, which take no binder space.
You may open twenty Blisters a day.
One hundred is not a large number, and it is not meant to be. The petition asked for finite storage, and finite storage is what makes a collection a set of decisions rather than a pile. At some point you will hold a hundred cards and pull a hundred and first, and you will have to decide what it is worth to you. That moment is the feature.
Recycled cards do not occupy the binder. Only what you are actually keeping counts.
Trading
Cards are property. They go to Le Marché Gelé like anything else a citizen owns, against shares, against Looneys, against other cards, against whatever two citizens agree on.
O.F.F.R.E. holds both halves and does not judge a price. The Confrérie has even less to say about it: it prints cards and takes no position on what one is worth once it has left the counter. A card promised to an open offer is frozen where it sits and cannot be recycled out from underneath the citizen who accepted.
The Confrérie observes, without recommending anything, that the recycle ladder is a floor and not a valuation. It is what the Confrérie will always pay. It is rarely what a card is worth.
Where This Departs From The Petition
The petition was unusually complete and has been followed closely. It has been departed from in three places, and the Confrérie would rather say so than be found out.
The composition is not fixed. The petition specified six cards, five players and one game, in every Blister. The Confrérie has printed thirteen Blisters instead of one, and the team Blisters carry six players and no game card. The petition's shape survives as Le Blister, which is the standard packet and always on the counter. The Confrérie judged that a single fixed recipe could not express a guaranteed Epic or a single-team packet, and that fans would want both.
There is one binder, and it cannot be bought. The petition provided for binders purchased with Looneys, and for a fan who wants more to acquire more. One hundred slots ship, and no second binder is for sale at any price. The Confrérie would rather watch fans meet the wall once and hear what they say about it than sell a solution to a problem nobody has described yet.
Special editions are not printed. The petition provided for commissioned art at Le Council's discretion. None exists. The apparatus is built and nothing has been issued through it.
What Is Not Here Yet
Stated plainly, so that nobody reads a promise into a silence:
- Special editions. Provided for, not printed.
- Additional binders. One hundred slots is the whole of your storage.
- The remaining thirty-eight team Blisters. Ten teams are printed. The schedule continues.
- Further striking. The catalogue is what it is. When the Confrérie strikes again, whether new seasons, new runs, or runs closing, it will be announced and not done quietly.
The counter is open. The rates are published. What is inside any particular packet is between you and The Ice.