Before 2019, opening a Magic booster meant chasing rarity and little else. Project Booster Fun changed that math permanently, giving collectors a whole new axis of chase value layered directly on top of the game's existing rarity system.
Introduced in a July 2019 design article, Project Booster Fun set out to make Collector Boosters more exciting by adding alternate frame treatments, showcase styles, and borderless art on top of a set's normal rarity distribution. It succeeded well beyond its original scope.
This guide covers how Booster Fun reshaped what collectors actually chase inside a pack, how it interacts with rarity rather than replacing it, and why some collectors now prioritize frame treatment over raw rarity when evaluating a pull.
Understanding this shift is genuinely useful for anyone buying Collector Boosters specifically, since the product's real appeal today is built around exactly this frame-treatment layer.
Prior to 2019, a card's visual appeal outside foil status was largely fixed; every printing of a given card in a set used the same standard frame, meaning rarity and foil status were essentially the only two variables driving chase value inside a pack.
That left relatively little room for collectors who cared more about visual variety than raw competitive power, since a card's frame never changed no matter how many times you opened it.
Project Booster Fun introduced showcase frames, unique stylized borders built around each set's specific theme, alongside borderless and extended-art treatments that gave artwork dramatically more visual space than the standard frame allowed.
These treatments debuted across several 2019 and 2020 sets and quickly became a defining feature of how Wizards structured Collector Boosters going forward, expanding into dozens of distinct styles across subsequent releases.
Crucially, Booster Fun treatments did not replace or bypass rarity; they are still applied to cards that carry a normal rarity classification, most commonly rares and mythic rares. A showcase card's underlying rarity is exactly the same as its standard-frame counterpart.
This layering is what makes Collector Boosters feel so much more exciting to open than before, since a single rare-or-mythic pull now carries additional variance in frame treatment on top of the rarity variance that already existed.
Popular showcase and borderless printings of in-demand cards routinely sell for significantly more than the same card's standard frame version, sometimes exceeding the price gap between that card's rare and mythic printings entirely. Visual scarcity has become its own genuine driver of collector demand.
This shift has meaningfully changed how serious collectors evaluate a pull, with frame treatment now factored in alongside rarity and foil status as a core part of a card's overall desirability.
Collector Boosters guarantee multiple premium slots specifically built around Booster Fun treatments, with certain slots guaranteed to contain a non-foil borderless or extended-art rare or mythic rare. This structural guarantee is a direct product of Booster Fun's design philosophy.
Buyers now frequently choose Collector Boosters over standard boosters specifically for the higher odds of pulling a desirable alternate frame, even when the underlying card's rarity distribution is functionally similar between the two product types.
Booster Fun has become close to a permanent fixture of modern Magic set design, with nearly every release since its 2019 introduction including at least some form of showcase or borderless treatment. What started as an experiment is now a standard expectation.
This has real implications for how collectors approach older, pre-2019 sets as well, since those releases simply do not offer the frame-treatment variety that has become standard in every set since.
The strongest showcase treatments tend to be the ones most tightly tied to a set's specific narrative or setting, giving a showcase pull real thematic weight beyond just being a rarer frame. A horror-set showcase style built around gothic woodcut art, for example, reinforces the set's story in a way a generic alternate frame would not.
This thematic tie-in is part of why certain showcase treatments from especially beloved sets have held stronger long-term collector demand than showcase styles from less memorable releases, even when both were similarly rare to pull.
Wizards introduced Project Booster Fun in a July 2019 design article.
No, showcase and borderless treatments are layered on top of a card's existing rarity, not a substitute for it.
Borderless and extended-art treatments are most commonly found in Collector Boosters.
No, Project Booster Fun debuted in 2019, so earlier sets do not include these alternate frame treatments.
Once you land the showcase or borderless pull you were chasing, protect it right away with a set of EVORETRO Card Sleeves.
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