As someone who for a time bought MTG cards, in the secondary market, there is real money to be made in apps with analyzing financial data.<p>The secondary market is like a stock market only without regulations, has high fluctuations and swings. Oh and the God of world, Hasbro can reprint most cards in new sets except for a few on the reserve list at wil. Overnight a card can rise or fall. There are many people trying to predict the next swing and trying to get in on the ground floor.<p>If you're good at analyzing data, can grasp the game quickly and understand why certain cards are more valuable than others, then there is a great opportunity to "sell shovels to gold diggers".<p>The main market is <a href="http://magic.tcgplayer.com/" rel="nofollow">http://magic.tcgplayer.com/</a> for the US. <a href="http://www.starcitygames.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.starcitygames.com/</a> is the one everyone watches. If they begin to buy up cards and force up prices or slash prices, the market notices. If you have a spare weekend, take a look. Might make a good side project.
Back when I played (15 yrs back?) Black Lotus was the consensus "top" card... I don't even see it on that list, so I'm guessing the game has changed a lot...
This has been done a lot in the card game Dominion (<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10867765/genetic-algorithm-for-a-card-game-dominion" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10867765/genetic-algorith...</a>). Dominion has orders of magnitudes less cards than Magic the Gathering.<p>I've always wondered how a machine would solve for these complex games... How do you build AI to play a combination and reaction reliant game?
It's interesting that the fetch lands are rated higher than the dual lands. With Deathrite / Brainstorm / Tarmogoyf etc are they actually better?
Wasteland is an interesting result. I've watched it come and go as the metagame changes, and I also can't help but wonder is it the most powerful <i>land</i>? Or truly the second most powerful <i>card</i>.
I guess given that they're looking at deck lists things that were insanely broken aren't going to be represented. Skullclamp is possibly the best card to ever exist and nowhere to be found. Jace at 19, I guess maybe it's not played across lots of formats? Though, given just how truly broken it is I'd expect pretty much any blue deck in any format to have 3 or 4 of them. Very cool stats though, I loved looking through it and going "oh man yea, that was an AWESOME card" :)
OT, but I couldn't help notice how similar name and icon are to LEVEL-5.<p><a href="http://level5ia.com/" rel="nofollow">http://level5ia.com/</a>