How rarity works
One number decides a card’s tier, and you can check it on every card.
Attention, not importance
A card’s rarity reflects how much attention its place receives on Wikipedia — nothing more. It is not a measure of beauty, significance, or how much a place deserves to be visited. Mont Blanc is not “better” than a village in the Dordogne; more people simply read about it.
The chain, end to end
GeoNames record
→ geonameid
→ alternateNamesV2 row with isolanguage "wkdt"
→ Wikidata QID
→ Wikipedia sitelinks per language
→ pageviews summed over 365 days
→ popularity score
→ percentile across all eligible cards
→ rarity tierThe link from a place to its Wikipedia articles is deterministic: GeoNames publishes the Wikidata identifier directly, so no name or coordinate guessing is involved. A place with no article has a score of zero, which puts it in Common — and millions of perfectly real places sit there.
Tier bands
| Rarity | Percentile band | Catalogue share | Draw odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common | 0–60 | 60.00% | 60% |
| Uncommon | 60–85 | 25.00% | 25% |
| Rare | 85–97 | 12.00% | 10% |
| Epic | 97–99.5 | 2.50% | 4% |
| Legendary | 99.5–99.95 | 0.45% | 0.9% |
| Mythic | 99.95–100 | 0.05% | 0.1% |
Catalogue share and draw odds are deliberately different. A full catalogue holds thousands of Mythic places; the draw odds are what keep pulling one rare.
Why every language, not just English
English Wikipedia traffic systematically favours Anglophone subjects. Summing across editions gives a fairer picture of global interest — a place well known in Japan or Brazil should not read as obscure because it is less discussed in English. This build tracks 12 editions, and that list is configuration, not code.
Calibration in this build
A real rarity run ranks every eligible card against every other. This build ships 113 places, far too few to derive meaningful percentiles from: rank them against each other and an ordinary village comes out Legendary. So pageview totals are mapped onto the global distribution through a documented calibration curve, and the tier bands above are applied to the result. Rarity is still derived, never typed in by hand.
| Views / 365d | Percentile |
|---|---|
| 1 | 60 |
| 100 | 70 |
| 1,000 | 82 |
| 2,000 | 85 |
| 20,000 | 94 |
| 90,000 | 97 |
| 500,000 | 98.8 |
| 1,600,000 | 99.5 |
| 8,000,000 | 99.93 |
| 15,000,000 | 99.95 |
| 60,000,000 | 99.995 |
What we will not do
- No hand-assigned Legendaries. If a card is rare, a number made it rare.
- No population fallback. A large city with little global attention stays common.
- No dropping places for being obscure. Only genuine data noise is filtered out.
- No live API calls when you open a booster. Rarity is computed ahead of time.
Rarity can move. Recomputation is monthly by design, so a place the world starts noticing may climb a tier — your card follows the place, it is not frozen at the moment you pulled it.