Hi everyone, its been a little while!
Today I decided to do something different and have a look into statistics that might tell us something about the nature of peasant cubes. For a detailed explanation of where I got the data from and how I processed it, I will comment a full explanation at the end of this article, but for now, lets just jump into our deep analysis!

Top Cards

The first and most obvious fact I obtained is that there are cards that appear again and again across cubes, staples of the format. However, I was surprised by just how dominant some of these cards were.

Topping the peasant cube charts, chart a course sits comfortably at the top in terms of popularity, played in 90% of all the top 20 cubes. This was kind of a surprise to me, as the card is fairly unassuming and, while strong, not the strongest card out there. But perhaps this tells us something about the nature of a successful peasant card - it doesn't need to be flashy, just consistent and flexible.

Alongside chart a course, the other top cards, sitting at 85% popularity, included:

At this point, I decided to investigate a pattern that seemed possible. Were simple cards more popular than more complex ones? These first few top cards had all been very straightforward, after all.

So I crunched the numbers, using a subset of the top 1000 cards used in the top peasant cubes. When testing the relationship between oracle text complexity, proxied by length of text, and popularity, there was a strong, statistically significant relationship, with more complicated cards generally being less popular than simpler cards. This was intriguing, and backed up a gut feeling I, and perhaps others players may hold, that simpler cards are generally more elegant and enjoyable, and are thus more popular to include in cubes. It's something key to note, especially in a time where new mechanics and cards are increasingly wordy.

Finally, one last thing I wanted to investigate was characteristics of the top cubes. Were there any simple statistics that could explain why some cubes were more popular than others?

First, I investigated similarity between cubes, on a card based level. I tested how similar cubes were to each other, and the results were quite interesting. The most "similar" cube was Squirelly's Peasant Travel Cube, while the most "unique" cube was Zacthecrafter's Standard Peasant Cube - which makes sense, as it must use a different, restrictive pool. I tested whether there was a pattern for this stat, but there wasn't a clear relationship between the popularity of a cube and the "similarity" of the cube. Perhaps this suggests that being an influential and convergent cube is equally effective as a more niche, unique cube.

Secondly, I investigated the evenness of cubes, based on how much each card was played in the mainboard. The most "even" cube was Eldamir's Two Player Peasant Cube, followed by my own Pets Peasant Cube and then MatEffect's infamous and influential The Peasant Cube. This stat did show a significant relationship, with the most popular cubes in the top 20 more commonly also showing higher evenness scores.

And that wraps up this review. I hope you found it an interesting read!

Do get in touch if you want more comprehensive data from my investigation, or more detail on my methods.