Packs
Five cards, drawn from the whole set, no card twice in the same pack. The last card is always Rare or better. Every copy also rolls a print finish: Foil about 1 in 12, Gilded about 1 in 150 - independent of tier, so a Common can come out Gilded.
Discontinued cards are the exception to everything: one in roughly five thousand packs, and they can never come from the guaranteed slot. There are sixteen of them in the set.
Packs are drawn on the server, so a collection still means something once cards can be traded. Gold comes only from a sync.
Unopened - 0
Nothing opens itself. Hoard as many as you like and open them however you want.
Your binder
Set completion
Two numbers, deliberately. Coverage rewards finding new cards; points reward duplicates but on a log curve, so five hundred rats never beat one Kalphite Queen.
How rare is rare?
Nothing here is hand-placed. Every card's tier is worked out from the game data itself, so the ladder means the same thing in every expansion and nobody had to decide that a rune platebody feels rarer than a mithril one.
The seven tiers
Odds are per card slot. A pack is five slots, and the last one re-rolls until it is Rare or better - so the chance of seeing a tier in a given pack is higher than the number above, except for Discontinued, which is barred from that slot on purpose.
Print finishes stack on top of rarity
A finish is rolled separately from the tier, so a Common can come out Gilded and a Mythic can come out plain. That means a finished card is much rarer than the same card in plain print - twelve times for Foil, a hundred and fifty times for Gilded.
Points scale with that. Plain, Foil and Gilded are three separate holdings of the same card: getting the foil never costs you the plain copy, and the binder shows them side by side.
Where gold comes from
Gold is xp. Not xp you had before you linked - xp you earn from that moment on, read off the public hiscores when you press Sync.
The exponent is the whole point. It is below 1, so the curve flattens: your twentieth hour in a skill pays a little less than your first, and spreading across skills beats grinding one. It is applied to your total xp since linking rather than to each sync, so twenty small syncs pay exactly what one big one would. Syncing more often gains you nothing.
Where a tier comes from
Read straight off the equip requirement, and it is a ceiling as well as a floor: bronze, iron and steel are Common; black and mithril Uncommon; adamant Rare; rune Epic; dragon Legendary. No amount of scarcity moves a mithril spear above an adamant one.
Under 10 Common, to 29 Uncommon, to 69 Rare, to 129 Epic, to 249 Legendary, above that Mythic. A boss - something with a look nobody else has, its own examine line and one spawn in the world - sits one rung above its level.
A shopkeeper has no combat level to read, so the measure is spawn scarcity, a chathead, quest involvement and how often the scripts mention them. Characters stop at Rare; the top of the ladder belongs to monsters, dragon gear and discontinued drops.
Excalibur is a level-20 sword and nobody would file it next to a black scimitar. Something that exists in one or two places in the world, is never sold or dropped, and has its own model and examine line, starts at Epic.
A sack of flour is handed out by exactly one script, which makes it technically scarcer than a rune platebody. Nothing you cannot wear or wield goes above Rare on scarcity alone.
Party hats, a Santa hat, a pumpkin. They are ordinary item cards and they sit in the same pool as everything else - they are simply scarce in a way nothing else in the game is, because they were handed out once, in one year, and never again.
Post an offer
Put a card up and say what you are after. It goes into escrow the moment you post, and anyone can offer one of theirs in return - their card is held too. Nothing moves until you accept, and cancelling sends everything back.
Open offers
Sync
Nothing runs in the background and nothing is lost by staying away. Press this whenever you like - a week's xp pays exactly what seven daily syncs would have.
Get in, or get back in
The only thing that can move a RuneScape account's xp is whoever can log into it. So that is the proof, and it is the same three steps whether you are starting out or you have lost your key: we read your hiscores now, you earn a small amount of xp in a skill we pick, we read them again. No password, no email, nothing that can leak and nothing to lose.
Recovery in progress
You passed the challenge for -. That name already has a proved owner, so the new key is handed over after a hold rather than straight away - and whoever is signed in gets told about it and can stop it. That is what keeps someone else from doing this to you.
Sign in with a key
Your collection lives on the server, so signing in on another machine brings it with you. There is no password: you get a recovery key.
Your key
While you are signed in on any device you can read it back or issue a new one, which stops the old one working everywhere. If every device is gone, prove the name again above.
Recovery key
Write this down. Anyone with it can open your collection.
Accounts on this device
Switch between accounts you have signed into here. One at a time.