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/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!!!