Top Cards in Modern Constructed

I picked the top 300 or so Modern cards by adding a recent online sample to the two previous samples I had looked at. Now the cut-off is any card that was used 8 or more times. There are a total of 26,579 cards in this sample. If I select the top 328 cards-this cut excludes 50 or so cards-I have 97.4 percent left in the sample.

And if you want to fast forward to May 2015, here is a similar list from another relatively large sample. There are some big shifts in almost three years of Modern as a popular format.

Here are the top cards.

Modern is clearly not color-balanced. It also is over-represented by artifacts and dual lands. Black and Green are under-represented, and White and Red are over-represented.

And when we look at set representation by total number of cards, here is the ranking. I am glad I have an overflow of Innistrad commons, and that I bought a booster box of Scars of Mirrodin. Dark Ascension is in the middle of the range.

Magic 2012 is towards the bottom but this is not a good measure because I assigned earliest set to each card, and that means that Magic 2012 and Magic 2013 have a few new cards and many reprints from earlier core sets that ARE modern staples.

And poor Champions of Kamigawa block.... all three sets are at the bottom of this range. Avacyn Restored is also here-I can't wait for Tamiyo to roll off Standard to buy it at a much lower price. A booster box of Saviors of Kamigawa is not what you want to buy if you are looking for Modern staples!!!