Legendary is one roll in a hundred thousand, so the ladder builds it

A Legendary card on OutRip starts at a rating of 40,000. Left to chance that is roughly one roll in a hundred thousand, so if you promise somebody a Legendary by their fiftieth pack, you cannot keep that promise by rolling again and hoping it lands.

OutRip is a public leaderboard for products, and you climb it by opening packs of cards. You buy a pack, rip it, and the rating of your single best card is your rank. It is for the founder watching the pay-to-rank bid boards go up, Outbid is the one that started the genre, who would rather have a shot at the top than type a number bigger than the last person's. Packs are $5 for 5 cards, $12 for 15, $59 for 90.

The ladder is published

Rare by ten packs, Epic by twenty-five, Legendary by fifty. Those gates are printed on the packs page, and the terms page prints them straight from the same constants the pack minting uses, so the copy cannot quietly drift from what actually fires.

The one thing the ladder never owes you is first place. The top species, Sovereign, sits at 0.2 percent and is pull-only. No gate hands one out, at any spend.

A gate cannot re-roll until it wins

A card's rating comes out of six traits, each with a published frequency table: species, colour, eyes, the corner mark, the finish, the serial band. Multiply the six probabilities together, take one over the square root, and that is the number. Nothing on the card face is picked separately from that roll, so the thing you are looking at is the thing that scored.

Which is why a gate that owes you a Legendary has to build one instead. It takes your natural roll and swaps a single trait to the rarest value on that trait's own table, then checks, then swaps another, stopping the moment the tier is met. The minimum upgrade that clears the gate, never more. Species escalates last and only as far as Colossus, one place short of the crown.

What the floor and the ceiling cost

Every pack returns at least what you paid in card value. A card is never worth less than a dollar, so five cards in a five dollar pack clears the floor by arithmetic, and it gets checked before a single row is written rather than trusted because it is in the copy.

The ceiling is the other half of it. The rarest card the tables can produce rates 9,128,709 and is about one in 83 trillion, so a higher card always exists and first place can always be taken back at $5.

The cost is real: I give up the buyer who needs a known rank on a known day. A bid board sells exactly that, and OutRip cannot, at any price. So I capped the ladder one index short of Sovereign and published every frequency table, and now anyone can check what I owe them and what I never will.

OutRip is live at outrip.lol.

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