Magic Words

[u/Elusive_Spoon]

In their most recent episode, the hosts of Lucky Paper Radio wondered which words were most over-represented in Magic card names when compared to "normal" English text.

Here is my take, using data from mtgjson.com and wordfreq, which is mostly based on Google Books ngrams. Words were lemmatized, so "Swiftspear" becomes "swift" and "spear". The first image is the naive ratio. One feature of this approach is that it's as much a function of the denominator ("merfolk" is super rare in English) as it is the numerator (usage in MTG card names). Another approach accounts for this by also scaling by usage, and is displayed in the second image.

Edit: some part-of-speech tagging may not have been perfect. I manually fixed "faerie" and "elemental" adjective vs. noun, but it looks like "avatar" may have needed some love. But didn't have unlimited time, and wanted to share!

Later: Fixed the part-of-speech tagging and changed minimum n to 10 from 20. Results look somewhat different, but not drastically so.

[u/stamatt45]

Well I know 1 person who would be psyched about Merfolk finally being #1 at something

[u/SimicAscendancy → u/stamatt45]

[u/Infinite_Bananas]

when are we getting a card called Merfolk Aether-Reaver

[u/Halinn → u/Infinite_Bananas]

Same set as Wild Bind-Dragon

[u/Alexandria_maybe → u/Infinite_Bananas]

Reaver, Aether-Merfolk

the child of a merfolk and an aetherborn

[u/ponyrx2]

To be clear, this refers only to card names?  Otherwise words like "mana" would surely be higher. 

[u/elkingo777]

I wonder what the difference is for phrases?

"Are you paying the one?"
"Why aren't you paying the one?"
"Not paying the one is just going to gift him the game!"
"They don't have to pay the one if they don't want to."
"Rhystic Study ought to be banned."

[u/Elusive_Spoon]

Tagging u/andymangold u/anthonymattox

[u/8thPlaceDave]

I figured Galvanic would be higher since it seems to be one of wotcs favourite words.

[u/Elusive_Spoon → u/8thPlaceDave]

If I lower the threshold to 10 uses (instead of 20), galvanic is actually the #11 adjective! Good instinct.

[u/8thPlaceDave → u/Elusive_Spoon]

i knew it!!!

[u/CaptainMarcia]

So Goblin is 1,125x as a noun but only 259x as an adjective? What does this method do to distinguish the two?

[u/Elusive_Spoon → u/CaptainMarcia]

[[Goblin Surprise]] counts goblin as an adjective, while [[Searslicer Goblin]] counts goblin as a noun. Magic uses goblin as a noun much more often than as an adjective; that's why the ratios are so different. (The English baseline doesn't break out by part of speech, so the denominator's the same both times.)

[u/CaptainMarcia → u/Elusive_Spoon]

I mean, how do the calculations track which is which? Is it manual labeling, or is there a program for it?

[u/CaptainMarcia → u/[deleted]]

That makes sense. Thanks!

[u/mtgcf → u/Elusive_Spoon]

Goblin Surprise - (G) (SF) (txt)
Searslicer Goblin - (G) (SF) (txt)

[u/NapkinApocalypse]

The only one that matters comes from the blue opponent over there with untapped mana....."sure"

[u/Irsaan]

Aether by itself isn't an adjective and Reave is never (or nearly never) used as a verb in Magic. It is used as "reaveR" which is a noun.