How a wiki page becomes a card

No one at FanBoosters sits down and designs a thousand cards by hand. The cards are forged from the wikis their fandoms already wrote. Here is what happens between a wiki page and the card in your binder, and the promises the process keeps.

1. Finding the pages worth a card

A wiki has tens of thousands of pages: characters, but also episodes, chapters, soundtracks and trivia. Only some deserve a card. For each universe we describe where its card-worthy pages live (characters, bosses, creatures, weapons) and how its infoboxes are laid out. Popularity comes from the wiki itself: how many of its pages link to a page. When popularity alone misses the icons of a fandom, the list is curated by hand. Curation is part of the product: a set is never padded, so a small cast gives a small set.

We capture each wiki slowly and politely, through its public interface, and keep a versioned snapshot so the wiki is not asked the same thing twice.

2. Rarity follows fame

What makes a card desirable is that everybody in the fandom knows who it is. So rarity is mostly fame, blended with power when the wiki gives figures for it (a bounty, a damage value, a health bar). Bosses always top their set. Each set is then shared out along the same curve:

• Mythic: the top 4% of a set
• Legendary: the next 8%
• Epic: the next 14%
• Rare: the next 22%
• Uncommon: the next 24%
• Common: the remaining 28%

That is why the main character of your favourite series is probably not a Common, and why pulling them feels right.

3. Stats from the story

Every card has an ATK and a DEF. Each rarity has a budget (a Common shares 90 points between the two, a Mythic 220), and the split follows the same figures as rarity, ranked within the universe. A glass-cannon sorcerer and a tank of a knight of the same rarity end up with the same total, spent differently. Those numbers matter: they are what your cards fight with in duels.

4. Numbers, factions and secret rares

Regular cards are numbered by faction, then by name, so a crew or a guild sits together in your binder, the way a real set is printed. Mythics come after the last regular card: in a set of 50, a Mythic reads 52/50, like the secret rares of paper TCGs.

5. Words and pictures

A card's subtitle, description and facts (species, affiliation, weapon, home) are read from the page and its infobox. The art is framed around the character's face, found by small detectors that run in the browser. The art is shown straight from the wiki, the way any fan site embeds an image: we do not copy it to our own servers.

Why wikis?

Because they are the best record of what fans love. A card game built on them rewards people who know their universe, and sends them back to the pages that taught them. If you have never read the wiki of a series you love, open a booster from its universe, pick your best pull and follow its link. That is the whole idea.