The statistics of Friendship is Card Games · 1:43am Dec 19th, 2017
So as that intro post from the other day completely helpfully explained, FanOfMostEverything's Friendship is Card Games blog recently passed the 5000-card mark. Yep, you read that right. Five thousand. That is a huge amount of delicious cardboard, and a milestone that I think totally deserves celebrating.
So, here is my Christmas gift to FoME: a statistical analysis of the entire run of Friendship is Card Games to date. There will be numbers. There will be charts. There will be old arcade game references.
It is the nineties... and there is time for stats.
Wait did you actually say 5,000 cards?
Yes. 5,017 to be exact. Now this depends on how you define a "card", which, because of Magic's delightful complexities, isn't actually straightforward. So firstly: tokens aren't cards (although if FiCG was printed, there would be 86 different printable tokens that it could generate, one of which is a Vampire Rabbit, yes please). Emblems aren't cards either. But lands, planes, schemes, conspiracies, and all that stuff are totally cards.
I've considered each side of a double-faced card (transforming cards) to be two separate cards, since, y'know, they are really. There are 50 of these in FICG, which means that if you don't agree with that classification then lalalala I can't hear you. Split cards (cards which have two designs on the same face) however I've considered to be one card.
A small handful of cards have been "reprinted"; that is, featured in more than one FiCG blog post. These are Adventurer's Pith Helmet, Ahuizotl, Dread Despot, Attention Horse, Caballeron's Thugs, Commemorative Window, Daredevil's Scooter, Daring Do, Ruin Raider, Doctor Caballeron, Downtown Manehattan, Harsh Judge, Overtaxing Workload, Pony of Pop, Stare Mastery, Talent Show, and Training Montage. I didn't include the reprints in the card count.
Everyone confused now? Let's move on.
What does 5,000 cards look like?
If you took 5,000 cards and laid them end-to-end, the resulting distance would be just about the height of the Empire State Building.
Yes but nobody would actually stack cards that way.
Okay fine. If you want to stack cards in the normal boring way, then by coincidence, a stack of 1000 Magic cards is pretty much exactly 12 inches. So, FiCG is 5 feet tall, almost as big as a human person. But that doesn't look as impressive.
What are my color options?
FiCG gives you the full rainbow.
As always, Blue is Magic's favorite child, covering almost a quarter of all color options. Now, I should note that this pie is a bit misleading, since this includes multicolored cards as well (ie. any card with blue mana in its cost is blue). Green and black, meanwhile, are left out in the sticks to ponder their life choices.
Let's try to beat some sense into this pie. First of all, we'll look at monocolored cards only. Most cards are monocolored, which is probably obvious if you know anything about Magic, which I don't. The following chart shows the proportions of colorednessness among cards:
So let's look at the proportions of all monocolored cards (cards with exactly one color).
Blue dominates even more here, with almost double the number of black cards. I mean, I say that as if it's a bad thing, but, y'know, that's still hundreds of black cards. I'm not complaining. I mean, just because black and green are my colors doesn't mean I'm taking it personally or anything. Balancing the color pie and satisfying everyone while retaining natural flavor is difficult.
Note to self: include subliminal black/green cues in all future messages to FoME.
Speaking of two-color combinations, what do those look like? Here's how the bicolored cards break down:
Here the Azorius maintain an iron grip over the world-city. Black gets some fairer representation here at least, while green infests the squalid end like some kind of ravenous fungus. Look, it's hard to make pie charts sound dramatic, okay?
Now they said that doing three-color combinations on a pie chart would be madness. "hawthornbunny", they said, "this will be a visual travesty, devoid of aesthetic pleasure or statistical meaning. We beg you, do not do this. In the name of Bad Horse and all that is holy, do not do this."
But I didn't listen.
"They've gone to plaid!"
At this point, the Order of the Harmonic Mean broke through my window, tied me to a chair, and explained in clear and precise detail what they would do with their obsidian-hewn set squares if I continued along this path. After some deliberation, I decided that bar charts were the way forward.
Four-color cards are the rarest in Magic, and so they are here, with only two in the whole set: One is a Discord planeswalker, and the other is the insane sorcery Time Compression:
The six five-color cards include some of the most powerful rainbow magic seen in show, including the Rainbow Power and of course the legendary Sonic Rainboom. Which, due to the way Magic works, is not Legendary.
What Legendaries are there?
Quite a few, although that's likely only because of the sheer amount of canonical lore there is to draw upon. Overall, FoME actually tends to be quite restrained in his deployment of Legendary cards; more often, he captures the archetype of a character rather than the character itself. For example, you can probably guess who Roctor of Geology is meant to be.
(Although seriously. Maud Pie card when. I mean she's practically one of the Mane Six now right?).
Actually since we haven't done it yet, now's a good time to look at card types overall.
Remember that supertypes can overlap, so an Artifact Creature counts as both an Artifact and a Creature for example. As ever, Creatures are the bread and butter of the game, and you can see that approximately 1 in 20 cards are Legendary. There's also the unique Trope supertype, used for With Catlike Tread.
I don't know how this distribution compares with real Magic. Probably close?
Wait wait wait I saw Planeswalkers in there
Yes you did. Ungula (the plane in which FiCG takes place) is home to just three planeswalkers: Ditzy Doo, Pinkie Pie, and Discord. If anyone else has the Spark, we don't know it yet. (My money's on Flurry Heart).
Between them they comprise only nine cards, so I might as well just show them. Click to zoom.
For the record, Discord managed to break both my proxy renderer (by having a massive ultimate in Actually Serious), and also my card parser (by being a double-sided card with no Loyalty number). I have to special-case him. Bloody chaos spirits.
That's chaosist.
Goodnight everybody!
Part 3 coming soon.
Fun fact: I'd planned on doing something like this way back at the end of Season 5 but quickly lost track of all the data I wanted to gather. Seeing it all assembled here is... Astonishing, really. And kind of humbling. Thank you very much. Needless to say, this is getting one heck of a shoutout when all's said and done.
Also, I can't tell if With Catlike Tread was a mistake, or if I should make more trope cards.
Also also, in my defense, the land of friendship, harmony, and natural forces on manual override does not lend itself well to black or green cards. Especially not when so many episodes involve the Princess of Checklists.
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It's okay. I understand completely
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There's a trope for that!
Did you count the ones he made for Unhinged's Explode Twice?
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Nope! FiCG comprises only the weekly card blog plus anything else that FoME declares to be part of the set via the FiCG index page.