GIMM X MTG

Many of us have discovered this semester that quite a few GIMM students, as well as some of our professors, like to indulge in a bit of Magic The Gathering, myself included. As I came to realize this earlier this semester, I decided that I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive into these students.

  • How many students play?
  • How did they learn about MTG?
  • What colors do GIMM students tend to enjoy?
  • What formats?

To find the answers to these questions, I did the simplest thing; Ask. I made two surveys about MTG: One for GIMM students, and one to post on Reddit. By collecting these two pools of data, we shall be able to compare the MTG trends of students to those online, and make an analysis of GIMM personalities, based on those trends.

CardStack

Favorite Color

These graphs show the percentage of players who voted for which of the five colors in MTG are their favorite to play. It’s immediately obvious to see that GIMM has an incredible bias towards playing blue, with a whopping 54% of the total votes. Compared to the online statistics, blue is a bit more average, with Black and Green being nearly tied for most popular (25.6% vs. 24.8%). Of the five colors in MTG, blue is considered the one with the most “control” over cardplay. It’s all about counter-spells and card draw, and keeping the card advantage over your opponents. Black is also a color based in control, but rather than boosting your own advantage, Black emphasizes reducing your opponents advantage, via destroying and sacrificing creatures, forcing others to discard cards from their hands, and by draining their life directly.

Next, looking at the combinations of colors, online the most popular color combo appears to again be Black and Green, aka “Golgari”. The second highest, “Dimir”, is Blue Black. From the data I gathered from GIMM students, the three most popular color combinations were Blue Red (Izzet), Blue Black (Dimir), and Blue Green (Simic). As consistent with the previous data, Blue is incredibly popular, and online, Black appears to be the most used as well.

Favorite Two-Color Combinations

Least Favorite Colors

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Overall, I’d argue that the majority of MTG players like one thing in particular; Power. We want a sense of control that we must be deeply lacking in the other parts of our lives. The overwhelming popularity of Blue and Black in these two circles show that on average, MTG players like playing decks that are mean. They want to be in control of the round, and they take pleasure in seeing the downfall of their opponents, even more so than they do in winning the round itself. Not only are those two colors the most played between these groups of players, but they are also the two least favorite colors to play against, Blue especially. There’s nothing a counterspell-spamming player hates more…than an opponent’s counterspell. In Magic the Gathering, Blue is the color of hypocrisy, and we should all be ashamed of ourselves.