Mole Day Retrospective

Written by DrChillbrain

I think Mole Day existing makes a lot more sense with the context that it was 2020 and I was going insane.

Not the holiday itself, of course, that’s been around for decades. The Mole Day CD I own is called “Celebrate the Mollennium” because it contains every Mole Day Song from 1991 to the year 2000. It exists for the sake of high school chemistry teachers, who I guess were getting jealous of math having Pi Day and wanted their own holiday that’s about a number but sounds like it’s about something else. (Incidentally, that’s why it’s celebrated on 10/23 instead of 6/02, June 2nd wouldn’t be during the school year, and it was created by Americans). From those humble beginnings, Mole Day did not grow at all and still only chemistry teachers care about it. Except for me, because I thought it was funny and I had nothing better to do.

In early 2020, I got the privilege of being on the Custom Magic staff (Which, if you were on the server at the time, you probably found out about in one way or another). I immediately wanted to start putting this new free time to good use, and started devising a great big community-created Cube event. I wanted to have something to theme it around, and hey, I was in AP Chemistry, and I thought the Mole Day music was just incredibly funny. So hey, that’s as good of a theme as any, let’s make Mole Day a great big holiday. I still can’t believe nobody else on the staff like, questioned this at all. They just let me get away with it. I spent weeks working on a promotional video for the event and I even advertised a giant mashup album I was making at the end of it (I really can’t believe they let me get away with that part).

The first Mole Day was, politely, a mess. But it was a damn fun mess. I encouraged people to post their cards in the channel for feedback before submitting them, but I quickly learned that if you make your rules suggestions, nobody is going to care about them. So the cube ended up massive, with over 600 cards and full of stuff that was weird, parasitic, broken, played horribly, or was even completely unexplained.

But play it we did, and Agentbla was crowned the champion of the Mole Day cube in its inaugural draft, and would’ve won a Mole Day branded bucket hat if not for complications with international shipping. We apparently even did an async tournament for it afterwards? I had 0 recollection of that until I read back in the channel. Sounds like utter chaos.

Later events refined this formula, as Mole Day became a yearly tradition. I never had as much free time as I did in 2020 (take a wild goddamn guess why) so while I intended to I never made another Mole Day Direct or other tie-in projects for later years. But the laster cubes were certainly improvements, with the format we landed on in 2022 with a skeleton and card voting being an excellent way to ensure the cube functioned well and was full of high quality designs. 2023 took a new spin on Mole Day by making a standard booster set with rarities, which was a really fun different challenge. One of my favorite aspects of these later Mole Day projects were the returning characters: The likes of Camelopardis, Lucky, Voyager, Kraboi, and The Master became staples of the Mole Day multiverse, and I loved seeing how they evolved through all of their different cards. There were some really fun archetypes over the years too, some of my favorites were Selesnya Blood flavored around medical science, and Elementals Matter with tons of elemental creatures themed around elements of the periodic table.

With that said, as the years went on, the writing was on the wall. There was lower and lower interest in Mole Day each year, as more and more people felt “out of the joke” and disincentivized to participate. Not to mention, Moxtober overlapping with Mole Day’s time frame made many users choose that event over participating in Mole Day, since you didn’t really need much of an explanation of why you should care about Moxtober. While I tried to remedy this in 2023 by requiring fewer card slots, we still just barely made it over the finish line in time for the 23rd. Not to mention I’d been fading out of this hobby on the whole. I still contribute to some designs for community projects or occasionally chip away at personal sets, and I interact with plenty of friends I made through this server, but on the whole I’m not as on fire about Custom Magic as I was in 2020. It was at this point I decided that 2024 would be the last Mole Day event. And, rather than new cards, the cube would be entirely community-voted reprints from past sets, 2 copies each of 180 cards.

What I did not anticipate was just how many people were excited to participate in the final Mole Day. Before I’d announced my plans, I saw a huge amount of people excitedly talking in the channel about how we were going to “send off” our beloved characters, what classic archetypes should return, and otherwise just wanting to get at least one card in for this swan song for the project. I ended up having to hastily course correct: I really didn’t think people would care that much about designing new cards again, but luckily it was easy to retrofit my existing plans into 180 reprints and 180 new cards. I’m happy to say that this final event was a great success, and I hope all of you enjoyed it as well.

Now, I promised some data analysis for this cube in this article, so let’s not waste any more time and get to those juicy, juicy graphs. First, the stat I was more interested in going in: Which set would get the most cards in, and which set would get the least?

After breaking out to a runaway head start just in the first couple days of polls, 2022 ended the event with almost half of all reprints in the cube, a pretty astounding stat. There’s a couple factors at play here. For one, this was the most recent project where every card was at the power level this cube was aiming for. Both in terms of individual designs and in planning and structure for each event, I like to think we improved with time, and this seems to be validation of that. However, these numbers are also juiced by both of 2022’s land cycles being voted in, which let it add 20 cards by winning only 2 polls. We can see the effects of this if we break this data down by color category.

You can see here that a massive chunk of 2022’s total cards come from those 20 lands. However, if all of those lands were removed, it would still be the number 1 set, and by a fair margin! There’s a couple other fun quirks of this data too, like 2022 getting 0 blue cards voted in and 2023 only getting 1 black card.

Speaking of the polls, how did those go? What was the most decisive victory, and what came down to the closest margin? Well, 

we did have some ties that needed broken (7 to be exact), so let’s exclude those when counting these totals.

With that considered, the most decisive victories belong to two cards, both of which gathered 75% of their votes: Hydrogen Dragon and Creation Myth!

It’s pretty entertaining that we wound up with a tie for this position, considering both of these polls had different numbers of respondents, but they worked out in just the right way. Hydrogen Dragon I think was just a case of weak competition, filling in the skeleton with high mana value cards for this project was definitely a little more challenging, since most 5 drops folks designed, especially in the older projects, were very low impact or just a bit uninspiring. And in 2023, the only card I had for this slot was a pretty unremarkable common. But that’s not to say Hydrogen Dragon didn’t earn its keep, it’s an awesome card in its own right. Creation Myth on the other hand did have some pretty cool cards it was up against, although they were all either a bit weak, a bit under supported, or both. With that said, I think it won this many votes just by virtue of how goddamn cool it is. And who am I to argue with that.

As for the card that won by the narrowest margins (again, excluding ties), we come to Slow Path to Moleville!

I’ve got one more stat to share, this time on the new cards rather than reprints. Mole Day would not have been possible if people didn’t decide to play along with all this goofiness, but who played along the most? Let’s see all the designers whose cards made it into the set, and how many cards of theirs did.

Even if you only submitted one card, or even if you only submitted cards to previous events, thank you so much for contributing to this project. It might’ve been goofy and ultimately pointless, but I started this event with the idea that you don’t need a good reason to celebrate something and make something together, all you need is a spark and the willingness to get something off the ground. If there’s something you’re wanting to start, whether that be organizing an event, working on a project, or even just calling up some old friends to hang out: The most important step you can take is saying “Hey, I’m gonna start this, who wants to come along.” No matter how stupid it sounds, there’s a real good chance people are gonna say “Why not, I’m in.” And if you said that to Mole Day, you have my sincerest thanks.