Post
by mintcollector » Fri Mar 05, 2004 3:10 am
Based on CrystalKeep's numbers I found a point of interest. We know that there are 116 R1's printed on a 121 card sheet leaving 5 land rares. Crystal Keep reports 1100 R1's of each type existing, implying that 1100 Alpha R1 sheets were printed. This means there are 133100 "rares" (an actual 127600 rares and 5500 lands in rare slots). 95 U1's on a 121 card sheet leaves 26 land uncommons. CK reports there are 4500 U1's of each type, or 544500 "uncommons" (427500 actual uncommons and 117000 lands in uncommon slots). 74 C1's on a 121 card sheet leaves 47 land commons. CK reports there are 16000 C1's of each type, or 1936000 "commons" (118400 actual commons and 752000 lands in common slots). Adding up all the lands together (5500+117000+752000) gives us 874500 lands total. CK reports 85500 lands of each type, so 2 land artworks of 5 basic lands types, gives us 855000 lands. This means there is a 19500 land count discrepancy to account for. Since there are only 5 land rares on a rare sheet, the difference here is negligible, so let's look at uncommon and common print sheet counts. Since CK did rounding to the nearest 500, the worst case actual count for uncommon sheets can be 4251, which leaves 249 sheets at best. There are 26 uncommon lands, so this could account for 6474 of the 19500 land discrepancy, leaving 13026 lands still unaccounted for. If we assume that these are moctly commons, once again having a max of 249 common sheets due to the 500 rounding, we get 11703 lands for this. This leaves 1326 lands still unaccounted for. At 5 lands on a rare sheet there is no way we can account for the missing lands to be from rounding of rare sheets. We can assume that up to 249 rounding can have occured from the 85500 lands being reported per type, or a 2490 count overall. Here is the probable missing 1326 lands unaccounted for. Since the numbers are pretty close, we can assume that there was 200+ rounding on uncommon and common sheets, pretty close to the 249 though, so I went with 240 off on each count. So more realistic print run numbers are 1100 rares of each type, 4260 uncommons of each type, 15760 commons of each type. Re-tallying the land up using these new numbers (1100 x 5, 4260 x 26, 15760 x 47) we get 856980 lands, which is still 1480 lands over what is reported, but a far cry more accurate Refiguring the overall print run numbers (1100 x 121, 4300 x 121, 15800 x 121) we get 2565200 cards total, which still is close to the reported 2.6mil cards reported overall. The numbers make sense and the math seems solid so I think these are closer to what is actually out there for Alpha.
Now to the booster to starter ratio question. It is often difficult to reconstruct algebraic equations based on severely rounded data, so I took a different route to showing some stats. We know that there are 2 rares, 13 uncommons, and 45 commons in a Alpha starter. There are 1 rare, 3 uncommons, and 11 commons in an Alpha booster. We also know estimated print runs of each type.. The base to start from is the rare count. Let's assume that all 133100 rares are in boosters. This means there would be 399300 uncommons (3 x 133100) and 1464100 commons (11 x 133100) in those boosters. Now lets look at what the numbers would be if all rares were in starters. There are 2 rares in a starter, so this would mean 66550 starters. There would be 865150 uncommons (13 x 66550) and 2994750 commons (45 x 66550) in those starters. using CK's numbers and not my new ones calculated in the previous example, we get 554500 uncommons (4500 x 121) and 1936000 commons (16000 x 121). So:
All boosters===CK's reported numbers===All starters
R: 133100===133100===133100
U: 399300===544500===865150
C: 1464100===1936000===2994750
So if you think of the above example as kind of a slide bar where CK's numbers fall somewhere in between both extremes, you will see that the numbers lean towards more boosters than starters. Let's now figure how far these numbers deviate into each range. CK's uncommon number of 544500, is 36.36% above the All booster uncommon number (544500/399300). CK's common number of 1936000, is 32.23% above the all booster common number. This means that the real number lies in between 32.23% and 36.36%. Let's assume 33.33% for simplicity's sake. Since we see that the numbers show more boosters than starters and have assumed an easy to calculate 33.33% deviation off of all booster, we can see a ratio of 66.67% boosters to 33.33% starters, or in easy to understand layman's terms, 2 boosters for every starter. With 2 rares in each starter and 1 in each booster, this means half the rares went to boosters and half to starters, with there being an estimated 66550 Alpha boosters and 33225 Alpha starters. This proves Crystal Keep's estimates of 50/50 for boosters to starters is incorrect simply by using the site's own data. I'll need to work on Beta later, but I found these 2 points I made pretty interesting and wanted to share.