Case Study: Words Read in Outlaws of Thunder Junction Retail Draft
Goal: make more of a fair comparison between the words read in a retail set draft and a cube draft.
Note these two differences between typical cubes and typical retail sets:
1) Retail draft sets have a smaller list of mechanics, with most of the mechanics repeated many times. The drafters can read the reminder text a couple of times, and after a while they can start skipping that text on subsequent cards.
2) Retail drafts have duplicates of lots of commons and some uncommons, so the drafter can avoid at least a portion of the reading when they see a card for the second time, third time, and beyond.
Both of these create something of a
reading discount.
How much of a discount? Well...
Assumptions:
1) The reader spends only 50% as long reading a card when they see it for a second time, and then the third time it only takes 37.5%, then 25%, and it keeps diminishing.
2) The reader only reads reminder text for mechanics 2-3 times before skipping that reading on future cards.
3) The ten common dual lands are being treated like the same card for discounting purposes. I think a typical person will just look at the mana symbols or colors after the first few looks at these.
Now we need to know how often drafters are pulling cards they've already seen before. In OTJ retail draft, about 45% of the common cards will be cards that the drafter has already seen at least once. On top of that, about 38% of the uncommons will be duplicates. Occasionally there are even more duplicates in the other slots (Rare, Mythic, Breaking News, Big Score, Special Guests), but those don't contribute much to the averages, so I am neglecting these.
All of this means that a reader is only reading about 75% of the words on the commons and about 86% of the words on the uncommons, so we have our first reading discounts.
(I played with the assumptions, and even trying out a wide range of guesses about how much text would be read, the commons run in the range of about 60-85% of the raw text being read.)
Reminder Text
So far, I'm only talking about the rules text excluding reminder text, but let's now focus on reminders.
Applying Assumption #2, let's look at the Plot mechanic.
Plot has 30 words of reminder text, and an OTJ drafter would see this text on about 25 cards per draft. That's about 750 words to read, but I'm assuming that the reader would quit reading that text after the third time - only 90 words out of those 750 are actually read. This creates a discount of 660 words.
Plot accounts for the biggest chunk of reminder text in the set by far, because it has so many words and is on so many cards, including a bunch of commons. We also have Saddle, Crime, Outlaws, and Spree. Those combine for another 500 words discount or so, plus there are a handful of other mechanics (ward, indestructible, treasure, scry, surveil) that provide a discount of another ~275 words.
Overall Averages
Now we can look at the overall totals.
| Category / Slot | Avg Words (no reminders) | Avg Words (including reminders) |
| OTJ: Common | 19.3 | 29.5 |
| OTJ: Uncommon | 27.4 | 38.8 |
| OTJ: Rare | 35.0 | 43.3 |
| OTJ: Mythic | 42.0 | 45.2 |
| OTJ: Land Slot | 13.3 | 13.3 |
| OTP: Breaking News (bonus sheet) | 21.2 | 24.9 |
| BIG: Big Score (part of The List) | 34.3 | 37.0 |
| SPG: Special Guests (part of The List) | 24.1 | 24.1 |
| Overall Weighted Average (no discounts) | 24.4 | 32.4 |
To calculate the adjusted average, I applied the duplicate discount to the average without reminders, then added in the reminder text less the amount that I've assumed players won't read.
Discounts:
OTJ Commons: Average drops from 19.3 to 14.6 words per card, a discount of about 5 words per card.
About 26% of the commons appear only once, and 36% are cards that appear twice. Another 24% of cards seen in the draft are seen three times, and 10% are seen four times. The remaining 4% of commons are coming in sets of 5 or more duplicates.
OTJ Uncommons: Average words drop from 27.4 to 23.5 words per card for a discount of about 4 words per card.
35% of uncommons are in sets of two, and 11% are in sets of three. A couple more percent of uncommons appear more than three times in a draft.
I wasn't sure how to quickly calculate all of that, so I just created a little simulation and ran it 10,000 times for each rarity.
Reminder text: 1440 words saved on the 199 OTJ cards seen in each draft for a discount of about 7.2 words per card across the entire OTJ portion of the draft.
Overall Discounted Average: 22.4 words per card (includes discounted reminder text)
This is a pretty big change from looking at the raw average of 32.4 words per card. This number is actually less than the rules text without reminder text.
Let's go a little further. The average adult reads about 200-300 words per minute, according to a 5 second Google search
(long enough or me to read 20 words). Each drafter brings 3 packs of 14 cards and will see 252 cards.
This amounts to about 5700 words of reading, which takes the average person about
23 minutes to read at 250 words/min. That reading time figure is super sketchy and confounded by talking about a population of MtG players reading their cards, and symbols counting as words. I think it's still an interesting number to look at.
Cube Comparisons
Now I have a baseline number for the words I read if I draft a new retail set. Outlaws is, I believe, the wordiest retail draft yet printed. Having drafted it a bit, I find it to be manageable, so I consider the benchmarks it provides (24.4 words per card, 5700 total words) to be useful.
My current cube project is a
3-5 player, medium complexity, non-blue cube. I want it to be more on the level of a retail expansion than a complex cube for repeated drafting by an experienced play group. Finding a number for comparison has been my purpose for this little case study.
I included a lot of madness (10) and flashback (10) in my cube, so I get a bulk discount on those mechanics' reminder text. The OG dual land reminder text also shrinks from 5 words nearly to zero. The raw numbers in my cube are 15.6 and 21.3 words per card, and the discounted number is about 18.6 words. In terms of total words per draft, I come in around 3500 total words, or 14 minutes of reading. This is partly because I'm using smaller packs with only 4-5 players. These figures tell me that I still have room to add wordy cards if the cube calls for them.
Other Factors
Clearly, the actual reading amount depends on a lot of factors. If the drafter already knows some of the cards, that's another discount. If there are a lot of mechanics with reminder text and the drafter already knows, that's another discount as well. If the cards are just weird, then they'll take longer to read, even with the same amount of actual words.
Also, I assumed that all of the rarity slots had an equal chance to be drafted, but in reality the rarer cards will tend to get pick up a little earlier on average due to their higher power level. If I tried to estimate the effect of the rare slots getting snapped up, that would reduce the word count by a little bit more.
Annoyingly, the oracle text now differs from the actual cards because of "enters" instead of "enters the battlefield" on about 20% of the cards, so the actually printed word amounts are about 0.40 words more per card overall.
Takeaways for Cube Design
Breaking singleton makes your drafters read less cards.
Using the same mechanics on multiple cards also reduces their reading.
These things don't surprise anybody, but maybe it was interesting for you to see how much of an effect they had (30%) in one retail draft environment's word totals.
If somebody wants me to run the numbers on a certain cube or retail set, let me know. If somebody can point me to what they would consider to be more of a "normal" cube, it might be interesting to see how the reading discounts differ as a percentage of the total words.
- Search your library for a basic land card or a Desert card, put it onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle" (21 words) and read something like "+
