Using Historical Data To Rank The Top Magic: The Gathering Cards
leve.rs
leve.rs
The secondary market is like a stock market only without regulations, has high fluctuations and swings. Oh and the God of world, Hasbro can reprint most cards in new sets except for a few on the reserve list at wil. Overnight a card can rise or fall. There are many people trying to predict the next swing and trying to get in on the ground floor.
If you're good at analyzing data, can grasp the game quickly and understand why certain cards are more valuable than others, then there is a great opportunity to "sell shovels to gold diggers".
The main market is http://magic.tcgplayer.com/ for the US. http://www.starcitygames.com/ is the one everyone watches. If they begin to buy up cards and force up prices or slash prices, the market notices. If you have a spare weekend, take a look. Might make a good side project.
It's an auto-include. A no-brainer. Everybody wants one. Every deck benefits from having it, and that's why it defeats the spirit of the game and should be left out of future editions.
So, you could say that it's because it's so powerful that it's an auto-include, but then that leads to a discussion about cards that are powerful on their own and what cards are enablers.
I've always wondered how a machine would solve for these complex games... How do you build AI to play a combination and reaction reliant game?
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mdfisher/DominionAI.html
There was some pretty good discussion on our dominion strategy forum by the author at http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=7036.0
You could, for example, run a two-color deck with 4 dual lands and 12 fetchlands. You retrieve the dual lands first (if you don't care about Wastelands) and then you get basic lands.
Does that mean that fetch lands are 3 times as popular ? Yeah, kinda, but if you had a choice between using only dual lands or only fetch lands, maybe the decision would favor dual lands in many contexts.
You can get dual lands, effect lands like wasteland, and regular lands instead of being stuck with any given one of the listed.
You also get the benefit of lowering the odds of drawing a land since you've cleared another one out of your deck.
Finally you get a chance to shuffle (which might matter in some decks).
Deathrite and Tarmogoyfs are considerations too, but they're not played nearly to the extent that Brainstorm is.
Deck-thinning is another oft-cited use, but in practice, the extra land out of your deck is unlikely to give you a statistical edge unless you're shuffling and drawing a lot that turn. It's far better to save your fetches to shuffle away Brainstormed cards.
If it's just about "most used", then it's probably because Wastelands fits almost everywhere and it's good disruption.
This is because any deck playing the card typically only plays one copy, because it is bad to play in multiples.
For example, brain geyser was an easy finisher in a deck built around generating stupid amounts of mana, and it also had secondary utility. But there are many cards that can do the same job almost as well.
You'll notice the trend if you peruse lists of restricted cards. It's always the catalyst that is restricted.
Would Vendilion Clique rank higher on the list if it weren't legendary? Probably. It's not that it's a less powerful card than others higher up the list, it's that you get diminishing returns for playing more than one.
The card text on Ad Nauseum prohibits playing more than a few copies in order to make it powerful. If the card worked a different way, such as if you paid 1 life for 1 card, you would certainly be playing four of them. Would it rank higher than the catalysts? No. But that's not the point.