With 2 years passing, that's hard to know. Every so often they reset the game due to glitches. For the Halloween cards you shouldn't have to open a portal first. For the packs, you may or may not have to. We went 3 months between playing and had to open a portal before getting a new pack. We lost the key card and they happily replaced that but we still had to open a potal. It was good there was one SotMK card in our car that we grabbed because a previous time, they wouldn't give a starter card when we left them at home. Maybe that's just an AP thing?