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.
What that produces
A rarity run ranks every eligible card against every other card in its own collection, and stamps the result. Places are ranked against places and species against species, because a mammal should not slide down the percentile the day the Places catalogue grows. The bands above are then applied to that percentile, which is why the tiers come out at the sizes they do rather than at sizes anyone chose.
| Tier | Cards | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 333,870 | 60.02% |
| Uncommon | 138,950 | 24.98% |
| Rare | 66,732 | 12.00% |
| Epic | 13,902 | 2.50% |
| Legendary | 2,502 | 0.45% |
| Mythic | 280 | 0.05% |
Rarity is measured, never typed in — and a card you already hold keeps the rarity it was given. A monthly run writes a fresh candidate; it does not reach into anybody’s collection and change what is already there.
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 in the catalogue. The copy in your collection does not move with it: a card is stamped with the rarity of the edition it came from, and only a published release ever mints a new edition. Measuring is not publishing.