Has anyone else noticed how many Lorwyn card names sound like Shakespearean insults?

Like thou art but a scusback scrounger. I bite my thumb at the hexing squelcher.

He is a surly fairy of perverick hitting around in the manner of a gangly stompling.

Anyway, uh, hey, welcome back to the channel. Uh, so I have a question for you. How often have you been super excited to get some new cards from a new set? You bought them. You waited eagerly for those cards to arrive. You put them into a deck. And then when you finally saw them in action, maybe a couple days or weeks later, you realize that, you know what? These cards actually maybe aren't as good as I thought they were. And maybe you take one or two or even all of them out of that deck. Like remember all of the buzz about Final Word Fantasm? Or when Bootlegger Stash was 30 bucks? Yeah, that was a true question I asked before. I already know that your answer is that you've done this more than once. We have all done this more than once.

We have all gotten a card that looked good when you read it, but it didn't necessarily live

up to the hype once you played it.

And that makes us all kind of wonder, how can we stop ourselves from falling for that again?

In fact, is there any data about this that we can use to try and figure that process out?

Do we have any insight to which sets of cards do have the staying power to last beyond just the hype cycle? And if so, what cards are they? And why? Well, you gravel gill scoundrels, I have got some data to share with you. And no joke, this might be one of the coolest graphs that we've ever gotten to show you on this channel. What we're seeing here is a graph of the average number of original cards from each set

that made their way into decks every week for the past two years.

So for example, if decks on average contained one card from Dusk Mourn or two cards from Tarkier Dragon Storm,

from murders at Carl's Jr. Manor to Lorwyn Eclipsed, we see every single set jump up

upon its initial release, immediately getting a high rate of how many cards from that set are

making their ways into decks across the format, but then, over the following months, they settle

down as people find out which of those cards are working the best for them after all. Some sets

definitely achieve higher spikes than others, although some also fall a lot farther than others. As I also mentioned last week, this type of video is also going out into a podcast feed because it's just really cool information that we want to get out to a whole bunch of folks, and it will be, of course, describing these visuals to the folks who are only accustomed to listening through an audio medium. But for those folks, I definitely recommend checking out the video versions of these on YouTube so that you can see all these cool visuals because the graphs are really dang awesome. And of course, I recommend liking, subscribing, maybe even visiting Patreon if you want even more cool behind the scenes data as well. But hey, let's dive in now. Let's start with the biggest spikes. The sets that achieved the highest penetration into decks, not a good enough reason to use the word penetration there, the sets that saw the highest average number

of cards make it into the 99 when the sets released were Avatar the Last Airbender and Final

Fantasy. Both of them peaked at over three cards from those sets making it into deck lists

every week. And remember, those are original cards that we're talking about, not reprints. I'll get to

that in a different video. Both of those sets benefited from broad appeal in their mechanical implementation.

Cool equipment in Final Fantasy, for instance, or the crystals generating a whole lot of interest

for a lot of monocolor decks. And Avatar also had some cards that were basically multi-classing,

...