Card Frequency

Every card within your deck possesses an individual draw rate. If you click on a card and hover your mouse pointer over the "i" icon (in the top right corner of the card description), you'll learn the frequency category to which the card belongs.

For a list of cards of each supported frequency, see Category:Card Frequency.

Frequency

A Card's Frequency may be one of the following, in ascending order. The numeric values are relative draw frequency, using Standard Frequency's value of 100 for reference.

• Rarererest (1)
• Rare (10)
• Unusual (20)
• Very Infrequent (50)
• Infrequent (80)
• Standard (100)
• Frequent (200)
• Abundant (500)
• Ubiquitous (1000)

Wiki note: Due to the unintuitive way the opportunity deck is implemented, the relative frequencies listed above are not exactly correct: cards with frequency below standard are rarer than expected, and cards with frequency above standard are more common than expected.

The strength of this effect depends on the total number of cards in the deck: stronger for small decks and almost negligible for large decks.

(For example, if a deck contained exactly one Standard card and one Frequent card, the Frequent card would actually be 3 times more likely to be drawn, not 2 times as expected)

Urgency

Aside from Frequency, the Urgency mechanic also affects which cards you will draw. Cards with High Urgency are always drawn first before any other cards, irrespective of relative Frequency. Only when cards with higher Urgency are exhausted (because the player is in a location without any, or they are locked by Qualities, or they are held in hand) will Standard Urgency cards be drawn.

The first example of a High-Urgency card that most players will encounter is A Gift from the Capering Relicker. This card will always be the next card drawn after a player hits 4 levels of Someone Is Coming. A more interesting example is the Menace cards while Zailing: these cards are added to the deck at Troubled Waters 7, but also require other Zailing Menaces, varying the access a player has to regular Zailing cards.

Unlike Frequency, the Urgency of a card is hidden from players and can only be viewed by technical tricks. A High-Urgency will only display its Frequency to players, which can cause confusion. For example, A Gift from the Capering Relicker only shows to players that it is Standard Frequency, while its drawing behavior is quite different from a regular Standard Frequency card.

Frequency and Urgency Together

Technically, Urgency and Frequency are independent mechanics. All cards have both an Urgency and a Frequency. If a player tries to draw one card and has two eligible High-Urgency cards, the odds of each card will be affected by their Frequency. In practice, the Frequency and Urgency mechanics have not yet been deployed together in existing game content and the Wiki annotates High Urgency cards as if is a replacement for Frequency. This may change in the future.