The first thing I wanted to look at was the average purchase cost of a die.  This was simple - I took the average of each character's versions' purchase costs, and took the average of that.  Including Mjolnir and Vibranium Shield, we wind up with an average cost of about 4.83; without them, 4.81 - in short, if we had a team of 'average' cost cards, we'd expect it to be mostly 5s, with a couple of 4s tossed in.  I don't see a lot of squads running even vaguely that high, usually having maybe one 6 or 7, a couple of 5s, some 4s, and a couple of 2s.

Why this is the case is clear when we take a look at a graph of the non-action card costs.

There are too many 6-cost cards!  We've got way too many of those compared to 3s, which they should be 'balancing' - even if we're assuming a more bell-shaped distribution (in which case the 2s and 7s are fine: 12 of each), it's totally out of whack, and skewing everything upwards.  If you remember what it takes to actually field a 6-cost character - at best, two characters or actions and two sidekicks, fielding nothing that turn, and likely more like eight dice if you want to bolster your defenses - it seems very out of place to have so many of what are seem to me like capstone characters.

It almost seems like they did in fact want us to have two or three in our squad, and plan on getting them out. However, given how much that I feel that would slow down the game, it doesn't make any sense in the context of 15-minute tournament rounds.  That's a pretty short span to go through what would probably wind up including an extra five or six turns of jockeying for a time when you can spare enough dice from your defense to get that magic six energy.  Speed Dice Masters, I suppose.

Because I was curious, I also took a look at average purchase cost as a function of energy type; there's actually not too much variation there, with Shield coming in a little low at 4.76, Bolt and Mask at almost average at 4.79 and 4.81 respectively, and Fist fairly high at 4.98.  Fist came out high because outside of Widow, it has nothing to counteract the high cost of its Big Smashy Guys like Hulk and Thing.  By the by - the energy types are roughly even in count, with Shield/Fist having 9 and Bolt/Mask having 10.

The average TFC of the Avengers vs. X-Men set is 4.08.  Given that, the 'average' character would be expected to have roughly a 1-1-2 cost structure.  But what's the actual distribution look like?

Well, the 1-1-2 crowd is the second-largest group...but the largest, by a 50% margin, is the 1-2-3 crowd.  This makes even less sense given all the 6-cost characters; how the heck are we supposed to field all these mega-expensive characters and still scrape up a bazillion energy to buy more of them?

Considering you need to use at least two dice to put a 3-cost character out, it feels more and more like we're expected to be rolling eight or more dice frequently to pay for all this stuff, which to me would imply a firm base of lower cost characters for us to build on, both in purchase and fielding cost.  This makes sense, and we do have some base there, but the number of options pale in comparison to the choices we have at the high end of the spectrum; we end up going for the same few cards or dice for that meat and potatoes we need during the early-to-mid game, and all the decks get all samey.

In terms of average total fielding cost as a function of energy type, Fist makes up for its poor showing in purchase cost by being significantly lower than average (and the other types), with a 3.78.  Shields are extra expensive to put out at 4.38 on average, with Bolts being slightly cheap at an even 4, and Masks a little expensive at 4.2.  Fist has several very cheap characters (Widow, Deadpool, and Spider-Man) helping keep its bottom line down, while Shield has no TFC 1 characters, and only 2 2s, with the rest being 4 or more, resulting in a higher average.

The last thing I looked at was stat distributions.  Average stat values are refreshingly straightforward* in relation to fielding cost.

Stats increase with fielding cost, to no one's surprise, with about 1.5 attack gained per point of fielding cost, and about 2 defense per point.  Accordingly, defense usually trends higher than offense, and I'd noticed this before putting together the spreadsheet.  The dice seem to be a little more generous with extra defense compared to extra offense, with more high-defense characters like Deadpool, Mr. Fantastic, and Loki than high-skewed offense characters like Hawkeye or Punisher.

Looking at average stat values against TFC, though...

...we see a few things.  First off, the 3 TFC guys are pretty wonky - they include Mystique, who throws off the curve because her (terrible) listed stats aren't usually what she's going to be using.  More notably - the TFC 5 characters aren't really an improvement over the TFC 4 characters statwise, and while TFC 6 characters gain a good point in each stat over those, the average TFC 6 statline is barely equal to the sum of that of two TFC 2 characters.

Considering the relative lack of trample effects in the game presently, I'd argue that this again suggests you're better off using those smaller characters - they're safe to block big guys (and give you churn doing so), give you more opportunities to get through, and can deal roughly the same amount of damage for the same cost.  You do run into some throughput issues - you can only draw so many dice per turn, so you can get more potential damage in a single turn out of big dice than you will small.  That's offset by the smaller characters generally being easier to force to churn; additionally, how often can you manage to draw two or three of those big guys and pay for them in the same turn?  I wouldn't say they don't have their place, but the stats just don't seem to back up how often their frequency suggests we should use them.

The Conclusion Is: Too Damn High

So what we've learned - had confirmed, really - is that there are disproportionally many higher-cost characters, and relatively few really low-cost ones.  If you think about it, the field is even worse that you'd think for the 2-cost characters; half of them are on two characters (Black Widow and Beast), one of them is that stinker Johnny Blaze, the Storm and Human Torch options are significantly inferior to some of the other choices for that die, and Nick Fury is pretty situational.  That's really not a lot to choose from, especially in contrast to the diverse choice of TFC 6 brutes that end up as 8/8 we have.

What can we do about this?  Errata to change the set this drastically seems unlikely, and while there are a few new cards coming out as OP prizes, due to their limited availability, I wouldn't expect them to be agents of change in this vector, either (plus, most of them seem to be for the beefier characters, anyway).  It's possible that the new basic actions could breathe some life into the big guy roster, but the two we know either don't particularly help (Rally) or actively benefit a weenie-style squad (Teamwork).  So, overall, our hopes will probably need to be pinned on Uncanny X-Men.

Join me next time, when I'll take a look at the one of the most important kind of cards: those that help us draw more dice!

*: I'd also made a version of this chart that includes the level of the character, but as you can guess a three-axis comparison is sort of hard to visualize in a two-dimensional medium.  It's here if someone wants to look at it, and shows largely the same information as the chart that doesn't split out by level; the only real point of note is that there's a drop in stats for 2-cost characters going from level 2 to 3.  This is because the number of level 2 characters with 2 fielding cost have their stats inflated by all the TFC 6 characters progressing to their (usually 8/8) level 3 face, and those all drop out for level 3.