Pack Rat in Return to Ravnica Draft: Rules, Math, Hidden Picks

Pack Rat is a two-mana black rare from Return to Ravnica, a set Scryfall dates to October 5, 2012. On its own it is a 1/1. With mana and cards to spare it becomes a growing pack of creatures that each get bigger every time another one arrives. This article sets out exactly what the card says, the official rulings that govern it, how fast it can grow under stated assumptions, and how booster draft information actually works for the drafter who takes it and for everyone else at the table.

What Pack Rat says, word for word

The current Oracle text of Pack Rat, a {1}{B} Creature — Rat with power and toughness of */*, reads:

• Pack Rat's power and toughness are each equal to the number of Rats you control.
• {2}{B}, Discard a card: Create a token that's a copy of this creature.

Two abilities, and every part of them matters:

• The size ability counts Rats, not Pack Rats. It counts every creature you control with the creature type Rat, including Pack Rat itself. With one Rat it is 1/1; with four Rats, each Pack Rat is 4/4.
• The cost is three mana and a card. {2}{B} plus discarding a card from your hand. Discarding is a cost, so it is paid when you activate, and the activation is impossible with an empty hand.
• There is no tap symbol in the cost. That single detail drives most of what makes the card hard to play against, as the rules section below shows.

The rulings that matter

Wizards of the Coast's official rulings for Pack Rat, as listed on Scryfall with the date 2024-01-12, settle the questions that come up at the table:

• Any Rat counts. The first ability "counts any creature you control with the creature type Rat, not just Pack Rats." In Return to Ravnica itself, Scryfall lists exactly two Rats: Pack Rat and the common Drainpipe Vermin, a {B} 1/1 Rat. A Drainpipe Vermin on your side makes every Pack Rat one bigger.
• The ability works in every zone. The ruling says it "works in all zones, not only the battlefield." That matches Comprehensive Rule 604.3, which says characteristic-defining abilities "function in all zones."
• Tokens copy the abilities. "The token will copy Pack Rat's two abilities." Each token is itself a Pack Rat, so each token can make more tokens, and its power and toughness track the current number of Rats you control, "not the number of Rats you controlled when the token entered the battlefield."
• Tokens do not copy counters or pump effects. "The token won't copy counters on Pack Rat, nor will it copy other effects that have changed Pack Rat's power, toughness, types, color, or so on." This follows Comprehensive Rule 707.2: "Other effects (including type-changing and text-changing effects), status, counters, and stickers are not copied."
• Killing the source in response does not stop the token. "If Pack Rat leaves the battlefield before its activated ability resolves, the token will still enter the battlefield as a copy of Pack Rat, using Pack Rat's copiable values from when it was last on the battlefield."

Two further points come straight from the Comprehensive Rules (effective September 25, 2026):

• Instant speed. Rule 117.1b: "A player may activate an activated ability any time they have priority." Pack Rat's ability has no timing restriction, so it can be activated during an opponent's turn, in response to removal, or in the end step.
• Summoning sickness does not stop the ability. Rule 302.6 restricts only abilities "with the tap symbol or the untap symbol in its activation cost," plus attacking. A token made this turn can activate its own copy ability immediately, and a Rat that is tapped from attacking can still activate. What a new token cannot do is attack on a turn unless it has been under your control continuously since that turn began.

How fast the pack grows: the math

Size is simple arithmetic. With N Rats, each Rat is N/N, so the total power on your side is N × N. One Rat is 1 power; three Rats are 9; six Rats are 36. Each activation adds one Rat and also adds 1/1 to every Rat already there, which is why growth accelerates.

How many Rats you get depends on mana and cards. We modeled it in a short script (compute.cjs, exact arithmetic, no simulation) under these stated assumptions:

1. You play a land every turn, and every land can produce {B}.
2. Pack Rat is cast on turn 2. Nothing else is ever cast; every 3 open mana becomes one activation.
3. Activations happen at instant speed in the opponent's end step with the mana left open on your own turn, so each new token has been under your control since your next turn began and can attack then.
4. The opening hand is seven cards (rule 103.5). The player on the play skips the first draw (rule 103.8a); otherwise one card is drawn per turn. Every land played comes from that hand, and each activation discards one card from it.
5. No other Rats, no removal, no extra card draw.

That table is the on-the-play case. On the draw, the extra card buys one more activation: the model reaches 7 Rats after turn 7, and those 7/7s attack for 49 on turn 8. If the lands stop at four, the model makes one Rat per turn cycle (three of the four mana) and reaches 6 Rats after turn 7, with 25 attacking power on turn 7 and 36 on turn 8.

The script's own limit is the lesson: under these assumptions the hand, not the mana, runs out first. On the play, the hand is empty after the turn-6 activations, having discarded five cards. Pack Rat converts cards into Rats one for one, so the card budget sets the ceiling and the mana sets the pace.

Real games differ from the model. Your opponent has removal and blockers, you will want to cast other spells, and not every land produces black mana. Treat the table as an upper bound for an uncontested board, not a forecast.

Playing around it and playing with it

The rulings support a few lines of reasoning:

• Removal timing. Because the ability works at instant speed and the token still arrives if the original leaves in response, a single removal spell aimed at a lone Pack Rat can be answered with an activation if its controller has three mana and a card. The Rat dies, but a new Pack Rat token takes its place. Removal on the first Rat is most reliable while its controller is tapped out or has no cards in hand.
• Every Rat shrinks when one dies. Power and toughness follow the current count (rule 611.3a: a static ability's effect "isn't 'locked in'"). Remove one Rat from a group of four and the other three each drop from 4/4 to 3/3 at once.
• Any card can pay. The cost is "Discard a card," with no restriction. Surplus lands late in a game are natural discards, and each one becomes a Rat.
• Open mana is information. A Pack Rat player who passes with three or more untapped lands and a card in hand can add a Rat at any point. Planning a combat step around that possibility is reasoning from the rules, not guesswork.

What the other drafters can actually see

Any "mind games" around a card like Pack Rat in draft are limited by one fact: picks are hidden. The Magic Tournament Rules effective February 27, 2026, section 7.7 (Booster Draft Procedures), say players choose one card and "pass the remaining cards face down," that the chosen card goes on a "single, front face-down drafted pile," and that:

"Players may not reveal the front face of their card selections or the contents of their current packs to other participants in the draft and must make a reasonable effort to keep that information from the sight of other players. Players are not permitted to reveal hidden information of any kind to other participants in the draft regarding their own picks or what they want others to pick."

The only stated exception is double-faced cards, "both faces of which may be revealed at any time during a draft." Section 5.6 adds that players and spectators "will refrain from providing any information about draft selections or strategies" between pod announcement and the end of the draft, and at Competitive and Professional Rules Enforcement Level are "expected to remain silent." Under section 7.7, the direction of passing alternates: the first pack goes left, the next goes right, and so on.

So the drafter who opens Pack Rat and takes it reveals nothing directly. The next player receives a pack that is one card short and is not shown which card was taken. What neighbors can read is the stream of cards you pass, and what you can read is the stream passed to you. If you take Pack Rat first and then keep taking black cards, the players you pass to will see fewer black cards in the packs you hand them; they cannot see why. That is the whole information channel: inference from what is passed, not knowledge of what was picked. Telling a neighbor about your picks to steer them is prohibited under these rules: section 7.7 bars revealing information "regarding their own picks or what they want others to pick."

What Wizards said about Pack Rat in Limited

When Pack Rat returned in Ravnica Remastered, Wizards explained how the card was handled. In "Designing Ravnica Remastered" (Carmen Klomparens, December 13, 2023), Klomparens wrote: "Pack Rat in particular is a level of unfun whose footprint we really wanted to de-emphasize in Draft, but we really thought the Booster Fun treatments would make people happy to have Pack Rat once the draft was over."

"Collecting Ravnica Remastered" (Zakeel Gordon, December 12, 2023) gives the product details: "The default frame Pack Rat is intentionally not included in Ravnica Remastered products." The retro frame version "exclusively appears in Collector Boosters," while "the borderless anime version of Pack Rat is available in both Draft Boosters and Collector Boosters." The same article lists Pack Rat among 21 retro frame cards kept to Collector Boosters "to curate the best Limited environment within Draft Boosters." So Pack Rat can still be opened in a Ravnica Remastered draft, but only in its borderless anime version.

Every printing and where it is legal

Scryfall lists seven printings of Pack Rat, all at rare:

As of October 2, 2026, Pack Rat is legal in Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Vintage and Commander, and not legal in Standard or Pauper. Our Wizards ban and restriction history has no entry for it.

Draft it yourself

Our Return to Ravnica draft simulator uses a 249-card RTR file that includes Pack Rat at rare and Drainpipe Vermin at common, so you can practice drafting around it, or against it. We have no 17Lands data for Return to Ravnica, so this article quotes no draft win rates. For the odds of drawing a specific card, such as a single Pack Rat in a 40-card deck, by a given turn, use the hypergeometric calculator.