Final Fantasy IX: Card Game Leveling

I'm now a little over 20 hours into my Final Fantasy IX game and I've spent probably 6 of those hours just playing the Tetra Master card game. One of the things I've never done in this game is acquire the 'perfect' card collector rank which involves owning one copy of all 100 cards, all of which at the A attack type, and all of which have a different combination of arrows. After playing 6 hours I have 6 X cards and 1 A card. Well, actually, I only have 5 X cards because I lost one of them and couldn't win it back.

Supposedly the odds of a card leveling from X to A is .56%. If I was playing with 5 X cards, and if they all have an independent chance of leveling after each match, I'd be looking at a 2.77% chance of getting an A after each battle. I need 99 more As, so I'd be looking at needing to play 3576 more games to turn 99 Xs into 99 As. Given needing to sort for the cards I want, actually play the game, and periodically save so I don't lose needed cards I'm probably looking at 5 minutes per game? So only another 300 hours...

But wait! I don't have 99 Xs to turn into As. I have 5. I need to turn 94 more base cards into Xs before I even reach that point! I'm a little less than 3 times as likely to have a cards upgrade to X than to A, so with really hand-wavy math I probably need 100 hours to have that happen...

But wait! I don't have a copy of all 100 cards yet! And I'd need to make sure they have the right arrows! And I'd need to not lose critical cards!

Yeah... This was an interesting thing to think about, but I'm throwing it out the window right now. Playing the card game isn't even very fun and I'm really sad that I lost that X in a story battle. Sorry Tetra Master, you are the weakest link. Good-bye.


Oh, on the plus side, I did run into a random dude in town who had this to say...