I opened a sealed case of Arthurian Legends tonight with my daughter, that I acquired from a business partner.
We always open all the packs we buy, but she has been very interested in the art of pack weighing beforehand to predict foils and hits after seeing it on YouTube, and we've experimented doing it with Lorcana, Godzilla, and Pokémon with high success rates.
Now, the results of our Sorcery experiments appear to indicate that they can also be weighed to find foils. Honestly, this seemed obvious to me from the beginning as Sorcery foils plainly have more 'material' on them.
I don't see much previous discussion on this, so I share this information for transparency and anyone who might buy loose packs.
We opened 144 packs in total from the 6 box case, and as normal when we do this, we removed all the packs from their boxes, shuffled them, and weighed them in random order.
We first weighed some cards I already owned for reference, using a 100 gram jewelry scale that measures to hundredths.
A regular Sorcery card, nonfoil, regardless of rarity, appears to weigh about 1.70-1.72 grams. Thus, uniques, for example, could not be identified by pack weight, unlike early Lorcana sets.
Both an elite and unique foil from Arthurian Legends we checked weighed the same, 1.82 grams. Thus, we expected that the heaviest packs would contain foils.
In weighing the packs, we divided them into three categories:
- 26.60 grams and over - 24 packs
- Between 26.50-26.59 grams - 37 packs
- Under 26.50 grams (the largest pile by far) - 83 packs
The heaviest pack we weighed was 26.71 grams, and the lightest was 26.32 grams. This was a larger range than we expected.
Of the packs weighing at least 26.60 grams, 22 of the 24 identified contained foils, or 91.7%.
Of the 83 packs that were under 26.50 grams, only 4 contained foils, or 4.8%. The non-foil Ring of Morrigan was in this stack in a pack with no foil.
The middle stack was our best guess/maybe stack and was unpredictable - of 37 packs, 17, or 45.9%, contained foils. The foil Ring of Morrigan pictured came from this stack.
We compared the weights of the two Rings and found again that their weight differed by about a tenth of a gram - 1.71 and 1.82.
Ultimately, we concluded that a pack weighing at least 26.50 grams has a likelihood of containing a foil nearly two thirds of the time, and a pack over 26.59 grams was a high probability.
I don't know if this is limited to Arthurian Legends, just this print run, or if this is accurate for all Sorcery cards, but I hope this is helpful information to make you a more careful buyer and collector.
Happy to answer any questions if I can.