Double-faced MtG cards in Innistrad

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caquaa
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Post by caquaa » Tue Oct 04, 2011 7:54 pm

mystical_tutor wrote: Reference the contents of a box I documented the following:

20 duel sided cards
erm, I thought there was one in every pack?

anselan
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The uncommons jigsaw

Post by anselan » Wed Oct 05, 2011 6:11 am

Fellow Librariticians,

10 of the last 14 sets have had 60 uncommons. (The other 4 were small expansions and just had 40.) I would like to know what the pattern is for 60. It's unlikely to be as pretty as what they do for 101 commons, which appears in all the last 7 Core and September major expansion sets.

I remember looking at some boosters for CHK many years ago, and it seemed that the uncommons were divided into two suits A & B. The three uncommons in a set were AAB or ABB, and the two from the same set were always linked.

My hyphothesis is that the same approach is used. But CHK had 88 uncommons, so not many duplicates. For ISD, I would make the further hypothesis that all copies of the same card are contained on the same sheet. (This is maybe reasonable by comparison with the commons, where a Good/Bad strategy applies in order to ensure that boosters are relatively balanced, although it's more complicated there.)

I can't believe they actually have two different uncommon sheets these days (although they might have done in the old days of Tournament packs). So they will have probably two queues, into which the cards are channeled. (They have four queues for the commons, but surely the uncommons don't warrant that. On the other hand, if they had just one queue, there would be too much correlation in the uncommons.

The first thing to do would be to triage the cards into suits. If the AAB/ABB pattern is corresponded to, then I would guess that the split is 66/55. The frequency of AAB/ABB would be 7/4 to ensure that the cards are distributed evenly from the two suits. Each suit will be I guess a multiple of 11, because after a sheet has been printed, it will be easiest for a machine to segregate in this way. With 108 uncommon objects in the box, I will probably be missing a few of the different cards. I should certainly be able to validate the A/B hypothesis, but I may not be able to assign all the cards correctly to one suit or the other.

In terms of solving the jigsaw, one the cards have been classified into A & B suits then one wants to sort the order out. If the cards are say A1.A2.B in a pack, then this only gives you the information that A2 follows A1. I.e. a pack only gives one piece of the jigsaw. Logically you would need an minimum of 119 boosters in order to figure out the sequence of 121 cards in the two suits. A box only gives 36. This is why I need more data. 5x36 = 180 would seem reasonable.

The other thing which I have never done is look at inter-booster patterns. We know that notoriously there are inter-booster patterns in the rares. So it's likely that such patterns exist for the commons too. This could nearly triple the number of jigsaw pieces that one can get from a single box. And with just two boxes one could maybe solve the whole jigsaw.

It might also then be worth solving the commons problem for comparison, to indicate if there are any disruptions in the booster order which have occured after the boosters have been assembled. I am pretty sure that there is no real shuffling that takes place at a booster level, because it's much more mechanically convenient to do the randomization earlier at the card level. But there may be some dislocation nonetheless.

There is also the Mystery of the Missing Card. 60*2=121-1, and somehow I find it hard to believe that one uncommon is 50% more frequent than the others. I think this would be known. But in the absence of evidence, that seems to me the most plausible discovery.

So when I get my box (hopefully today) I will get stuck into the analysis, and hopefully this will encourage someone else opening a box to supply detailed uncommon data. I don't think a large number of boxes will be required. But 1 is not enough.

Final thought: has anyone got an uncut sheet of uncommons? That would be very interesting to see.

All the best,
Andrew

anselan
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"card" or "card" or "card"?

Post by anselan » Wed Oct 05, 2011 6:47 am

caquaa wrote:
mystical_tutor wrote: Reference the contents of a box I documented the following:

20 duel sided cards
erm, I thought there was one in every pack?
He's talking about (a) distinct logical cards rather than (b) physical objects. We should have proper terminology to distinguish between these concepts, and also (c) the separate occurrences of a logical card on a sheet. Anyone want to suggest a nomenclature?

Actually, he seems to have got quite lucky there. Forgetting about foils, one would expect to pick up Garruk in a box 36/121. But presumably there are only a couple of queues for the double-faced cards, and within a box there will be quite long runs. It is lucky to have hit runs which pick up each of the rares, since presumably by design these are spread around the loop. I know each rare occurs twice, but if they were spread evenly I would expect to only pick up about 60% of them.

Note 38 distinct rare/mythics too, suggesting there are long runs here as well (obviously this includes a couple of foils as well).

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mystical_tutor
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Re: "card" or "card" or "card"

Post by mystical_tutor » Wed Oct 05, 2011 4:06 pm

anselan wrote:
caquaa wrote:
mystical_tutor wrote: Reference the contents of a box I documented the following:

20 duel sided cards
erm, I thought there was one in every pack?
He's talking about (a) distinct logical cards rather than (b) physical objects.
There was one in each pack. What I was trying to say was that I got one of each of the two-sided cards. BUT, THAT IS NOT TRUE. I screwed up and checked the wrong boxes in my data base for 4 cards. Thus, only 16 different two-faced cards. When I went to put them in the binder this morning the truth came out. Sorry for the flub. My data base is only as good as the data entry….

Also I came to realize that for my binder I will need two of each of them instead of just one.
anselan wrote:Actually, he seems to have got quite lucky there.
I sure did. By the time I pulled my last Mythic I was dumbfounded—never got a box like that before.
anselan wrote:Note 38 distinct rare/mythics too, suggesting there are long runs here as well (obviously this includes a couple of foils as well).
The pack that Garruk was in also had a rare and I got one rare foil in a pack with a rare.

Gary

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mystical_tutor
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Post by mystical_tutor » Wed Oct 05, 2011 4:09 pm

caquaa wrote:
mystical_tutor wrote: erm, I thought there was one in every pack?
See above about the two-sided cards I screwed up on.

Also, note the land. I actually got 10 lands but 9 were different.

Gary
Last edited by mystical_tutor on Wed Oct 05, 2011 8:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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mystical_tutor
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Post by mystical_tutor » Wed Oct 05, 2011 8:24 pm

a quick note;

Something that threw me off in my original counting was that the Gatherer lists 75 Uncommons. The extra one is Blazing Torch which was UC in Zen but is common in Inn. For some reason the search brings up the Zen rarity though it correctly notes it as a common in Inn.

Gary

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mystical_tutor
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Re: The uncommons jigsaw

Post by mystical_tutor » Sat Oct 08, 2011 4:07 am

anselan wrote:Fellow Librariticians,

<big snip>

Andrew
Here is a spreadsheet documenting the exact uncommon content and locatin of almost 2 boxes (was 9 boosters into the first box before thinking about listing the cards by location). Numbers across the top of the sheet are booster # starting with the top left card in the box as #1 and the top middle card as #13.

t=top, m=middle, b=bottom as you would see them in a library (t is next to the rare card, b is next to a common).

http://www.mediafire.com/?tii3bgcp2h36amg

Hope that helps.

Gary

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