The April 2015 Play Plan

I have opened dozens and dozens of booster packs online, mostly from Mirage, Tempest and Urza block, but have not played with most of these cards. I also have a ton of Vintage Masters and Modern Masters cards, cards waiting to be redeemed for several recent complete sets, and many other cards, including awesome staples like Snapcaster Mage that I seldom, if ever play. This is a shame, and the core of my April 2015 Play Plan is to put to use as many of the cards I have as possible, beginning with the ones I find most interesting and/or playable, and, time permitting, moving down the list to cards that were not even designed to be good in Constructed, the so-called 'Limited Chaff.'

Here are the steps to form the plan (as I develop it, each step will get its own set of posts):

1. Catalog what I have.
2. Set up a sequence by which I will pick a small number of cards and make a deck with them.
3. Track cards that I have already played using a coverage metric.

This is a big fun task, as I now have 5,624 distinct cards by name, and a total of 17,483 cards.

1.

2. Modern needs to be the first format, followed by Legacy, followed by Vintage, and only because of how many people play these formats in Just for Fun goes in that order from most to least. There are many themes, or archetypes, and I will play to those archetypes (tribal, milling, and so on).

3. The cards I have played with a lot are off the list for now. Some are staples that need to go in almost every deck of a type. How could you not play Ponder or Path to Exile if you can, right? They will be in the decks, but only because I need a reasonably working deck that does not lose every single game-that's no fun.

Here are the counts of the heavy play cards. I came across a total of 609, or 10.8 percent of all of the cards I have by name.

When I look at the rarities, excluding four promos and the three Moxen, here are the counts by set. The counts are about equal for common, uncommon, and rare.

April 14 update: OK, I lasted two weeks, time to buy some cardz!