Codifying Commons

by Crazy Ivan

Got a PM on the forum today about a particular sack.  I get these pretty often where people will name a Myachi and ask me "Is this one rare?"

Well, of course, "rare" is not a specific state so it can be kind of hard to answer that question.  In a sense, all Myachis are rare because we make them in remarkably small numbers, but obviously that's not what I was being asked.

Basically, what people want to know when they ask me something like this is, "would this Myachi be considered rare or common for the purposes of trading?" Even this question is hard to answer with any specificity.  Again, there's never been a clear demarcation between rare and common.  Sure, a Yellow Cat is rare and a Tidal Wave Blue is common.  We can all agree on that, but exactly how far back do you have to go before common turns to rare?

I've personally been guilty of muddying the waters on this one with terms like "semi-common" and "uber-rare", so I figured it was high time we got to deciding exactly what we mean when we say a Myachi is "rare" or "semi-rare".

The starting point is the graph below, though I'm certainly open to suggestions.  It wouldn't seem right to ramrod a definition through without any open discussion.  This is generally what I think of when I say "semi-common", but that doesn't mean it's what everyone thinks of.

So in the chart below, the first row has the various terms we would use.  The second row tells you the range of series that covers and the final row tells you which series, as of this moment, would fall into each category:

The idea here, of course, is that each time a new series comes out, things get bumped up.  So when the 5.1 series comes out, the 4.5s will become Semi-Common, the 4.3s Semi-Rare, the 4.0s rare, the 3.0s Ultra Rare and so on.

Obviously, this system is not perfect.  3.0 and 3.1 came out together, so if one of those is rare, so is the other.  It also doesn't take into account the fact that series get bigger as they go, so several series from now, tens of thousands of sacks would suddenly be in the Uber-Rare category.

It also doesn't help us out much when it comes to classifying promotional or special events sacks.  These suckers probably start out as semi-rares and just move up from there.  A separate system would probably be needed to truly capture the relative rarity of promo sacks, but it could also be a simple extension of this system; for example, another column that has how many years ago each promo was made.

Like I said, I want this to be the beginning of this discussion rather than the end, so feel free to voice your opinions in the comments section below.