Working out

The average Legendary creature is a 3.56 / 3.71 and costs 4.92 mana: the average non-Legendary creature is a 2.41 / 2.59 and costs 3.60 mana.

The average Legendary creature has 1.5 times as much rules text as the average non-Legendary creature, and has 7% more keywords.

The median non-Legendary creature was first printed in Dissension (May 2006), but the median Legendary creature was printed in Saviors of Kamigawa (June 2005).  Whilst the popularity of Commander has seen recent sets increase the amount of Legendary creatures, the hugely Legend-centric Legends set and Kamigawa block still bring the midpoint of Legends back by a year.  About 1/6th of all Legendary creatures were printed in Kamigawa block (99/569).  Discounting those printed since Kamigawa block, that’s 99/303 or about 1/3rd.

The cost of flying

This table shows the difference between the average CMC of a creature without flying, and with flying, for every power/toughness combination where at least one creature of each exists.  Black / positive numbers are where the flying creatures cost more on average; red / negative numbers where being a flier is on average cheaper.

Generally, fliers get 1.34 points of power and/or toughness per CMC, and non-fliers get 1.39.

Magic Origins quick facts

Some quick Origins hits for you:

 - There are now 14,817 distinct Magic cards (excluding Planes, Schemes, Conspiracies, silver-bordered, and similar)

 - Standard is now 1,702 cards (the largest it’s been in six years); Modern is 9,185; Legacy is 14,756; and Vintage allows 14,805 cards.

 - Goblin Piledriver is famously being added to Modern, but is joined by fellow reprints Cruel Revival, Revenant, and Sylvan Messenger

 - After a 20-year reign, Dance of the Dead is finally unseated as the card with the longest Oracle text ‘word’ count (depending a little bit on what you count as a word, anyhow).  Nissa, Vastwood Seer is slightly longer by my reckoning.  But at least Nissa has the decency to use two sides for her text.

 - The five most common keywords are flying (1,333), enchant (798), trample (307), haste (210), and tied in fifth are first strike and equip (both 196).

Someone sent a message about the card which was strictly worse than the most other cards. I lost the message accidentally, but here's my reply. This is a hard question because the strictly worse definition is vague. My best guess would be Scorching Spear. Spear is at the bottom of the longest strictly-better chain I know of (ignoring colour): Scorching Spear - Hornet Sting - Shock - Lightning Bolt

DRAGONS

Prior to Khans block, there were 117 Dragons in Magic.  Fate Reforged increased that by 11 (+9.4%), and then Dragons adds another 26 (+20.3% from FRF total.  The two sets together represent a 31.6% increase in the total Dragon count, or to put it another way, the FRF/DTK draft format contains fully 24.0% of all the Dragons ever printed.

Dragons is by percentage the Dragon-iest set ever (11.2% Dragons), and FRF the second (6.83%).  The rest of the top 5 non-special-sets are:

3. Planar Chaos (3.03%)

4. Scourge (the previous “Dragon set”), 2.80%

5. Mirage / Invasion (both 2.09%)

Commander 2011, Modern Masters, and Portal would all break this list if all sets containing new cards are included.

Dragons average 4.75 / 4.74 in size and 6.14 in converted mana cost.  

Creature keyword overlap

This chart shows the degree of overlap between the 10 most common creature keywords.  So for example, there are 36 creatures with both first strike and flying.

Magic Topline summary - DTK edition

Here’s a topline summary of Magic as at Dragons of Tarkir:

- There are 14,649 unique non-silver-bordered cards

- Standard is at 1,472 cards (10.05%)

- Modern is (somewhat weirdly) at exactly 9,000 cards (61.44%)

- The average creature has 2.49 power and 2.67 toughness

- The most common keywords are flying, enchant, trample, haste, first strike, defender (+1 from FRF), equip (-1), protection, morph, and flash in that order.  If you decide megamorph is just morph, that pushes it ahead of protection.

- There are 7,705 creature cards (52.6%)

- The most common creature types are Human, Wizard, Soldier, Warrior, Spirit, Elemental, Zombie, Beast, Shaman, and Cleric in that order - this is unchanged from FRF.  Goblin and Elf are 11th and 12th and close together (Goblins ahead by 7).

- The total of all Oracle text is approximately 325,000 words.

Standard size over time

This graph shows how many cards were legal in Standard over time.  The very early parts are a little guesswork, because as far as I can tell there are no online resources about exactly what sets were legal in Standard right when the format (then called Type 2) was created.

For many years, the format grew bigger as sets were added, then dropped down when the next large set rotated out a block of sets.  There are some occasional slight differences as sets and Core Sets varied in size, but pretty much it was all the same.  The sharp-eyed among you might be able to spot the tiny downward bumps representing some of the more infamous Standard bannings.

In July 2006, the bonus extra Standard-legal set Coldsnap arrived at the tail end of the Ravnica block, pushing Standard to its then largest-ever size (1,742 cards).

Although it removed all of Kamigawa block from Standard, Time Spiral was huge - with 121 bonus cards on the ‘timeshifted’ sheet as well - meaning that by the time Future Sight rolled around in May 2007, Standard broke its all-time size limit again, reaching 1,878 cards.

This record lasted a whole 2 months, when the slightly bumper size of Tenth Edition increased it by just one card, to 1,879 (10th was 23 cards bigger than Ninth Edition, but many of the cards were Standard legal already).

Coldsnap rotated as part of Time Spiral, so it stayed in Standard as Lorwyn pushed Ravnica block out.  Because of Lorwyn’s unique structure, the third set Shadowmoor was a large set instead of the usual small set (the first time two large sets had been in a single block) - this was enough to break the record again, up to 1,967 cards, in May 2008.

Of course finally, the Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block broke another rule: it was a 4-block set.  In July 2008, the entire Eventide set was dumped on top of what was already a record-breaking high, reaching the all-time record Standard of 2,146 cards.  For reference, that’s about 22% of all the Magic cards that existed at that time, or a little less than 1/4th the size of Modern.

Wizards took action, moving to the Magic 2010-style Core Sets and reworking Standard to never reach such crazy sizes again.  Standard’s smallest ever size of 973 cards came just 434 days after its largest.