The odds of someone drafting and pulling the same opening chaos draft hand are in the hundreds of trillions...and only growing.
Chaos drafts are many things. For newer or younger players, its a chance to see many new cards, expansions, disused mechanics and other things they never saw before. For older and more seasoned players, it can be a trip down memory lane or the opportunity to open a pack of The Dark for the first time in decades. It's one of the most popular booster draft forms out there, is DCI approved for paper Magic, and utilizes so much Magic history and strategies that the top pros often play it to stay sharp - you never know when they'll bring back banding after all.
However, as chaos drafts allow virtually any pack to be put in from Alpha onwards (Small card packs like Fallen Empires can double up, although unusual pack amounts like Chronicles usually aren't allowed due to their awkward card quanitity) it also hold the distinction of having one of the highest odds for different playable combos out there -- even if you go the mostly Mystery Booster route.
Games vastly vary in opening odds of play. For Texas Hold 'Em poker, there are 1,326 different starting hand combinations. In NFL history, there has only been just over 1,070 uniquely scored games. And, getting the numbers really crazy, the multitude of different combinations of the first 10 chess moves is at 170 octillion. The number of moves in chess actually has a name - the Shannon Number. And Magic, well, for chaos drafts, it blows this number out of the water.
But this is where chaos drafts come into play. As of The Hobbit, there are 33,599 unique Magic cards, not counting alternate art, reskins, or other collectors versions. Fandom puts just all the different variants of the first hand before any action is taken at the hundreds of trillions of different variants. The first play turn and draw for one player already compounds this by tens of thousands.
Even in a standard draft, there is a finite numbers of cards as it is from an expansion. The same goes for commander - you have 100 cards, there are only so many different opening hand combinations. Chaos draft doesn't have a ban list and can throw traditional strategy out the window. And with the randomness of drafting, how many lands someone goes with, and what is in each booster, no two chaos drafts will be alike ever. Oh, that throws another wrench into this too - lands. That messes up the total number of combinations. And if you include art or collectors edition variants, there are endless possibilities.
The number of different Magic chaos draft opening hands is somewhere in the hundreds of trillions. But if we go with the previous chess analogy and what all the different hand combinations can look like after the first ten moves, with different factors like several cards being played at once or cards adding or removing cards from the hands, the odds are virtually incalculable.
Thus chaos drafts hold the distinction of being a game where no game will ever be even remotely the same twice. And with each expansion, those number off different opening combinations gets even longer.
