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A Quite Shocking Correlation in Minion Cards
In a break from bawling my eyes out for the sad pace of card releases, let’s examine the effects of shirts/chestplates/weird bandoleer things on minions in the current standard cycle. I will update this for when all KotFT cards are released next century, and see if Blizz has continued with these trends. These results may be shocking so those with weak hearts should excuse themselves.
There is a statistically significant relationship between whether a minion is wearing a shirt and its mana cost. Not slightly significant of a small change, but a very high significance value representing an average cost reduction of clothed minions by 0.66 mana. This is a clear sign of discrimination in the Hearthstone universe, telling young minions that just because they have a shirt on, they are on average worth 0.66 mana less, even though they make up 48.5% of minions.
Mean/Std. Dev./Max/Min/Number
Shirt- 3.79 / 1.82 / 10 / 1 / 263
No Shirt- 4.45 / 2.85 / 25 / 0 / 279
We also see this minion discrimination in the rarity of clothed minions. Minions with shirts are given away for free at a higher rate and less commonly are assigned Epic and Legendary rarity.
Free- 53.33% Common- 48.19% Rare- 52.71% Epic- 43.28% Legendary- 44.09%
Other findings
• Minions wearing shirts have on average a slightly higher attack : health ratio, 0.863 : 0.826. Some may call that "insignificant" or "a tiny amount" and they're aren't wrong
• Minions wearing shirts have a minutely higher value of stats per mana cost (2.244 : 2.232). This is can be attributed to the average mana cost being lower for clothed minions and lower mana cost minions having proportionally higher stat lines for their mana cost. As well as just being meaningless because it's a difference of 0.012.
• Unclothed minions have more wide-ranging mana costs, with having the only 0 mana cost minion (Wisp) and the giants. Also, the largest minions are disproportionately shirtless, with only 1 of the 15 minions costing 10+ mana, and 3 of the 31 minions costing 9+ mana wearing shirts
Brode, how can you stand for this discrimination when young minions thought they could trust in the impartial judgement of a small indie company?
Shirterino Kripperino does not stand for this and neither should Brode or any of you good Redditors #EqualMana4EqualMinionz
Iksar
I appreciate the research that went into this post. We'll try to do a better job striving for equal opportunity for our shirt and shirtless minions. It's also possible we will not. In any case, I laughed :).