#but judging by past trends it's not impossible for it to be gentaro orz

[crehador]

since i was too impatient to wait a few hours for the official announcement to find out if ichiro is going to be the next free card, i logged the free/premium cards for the past 60 arb story events* and found some mildly interesting numbers along the way

(this data probably already exists somewhere but honestly it was faster to log it myself than to look for it lol)

fun (and useless) facts under the cut

dice hasn't been a free card in 17 events, and he's shown up 4 times as a premium card during that time

sasara is the only one who hasn't been free for longer (18 events) but he's only shown up once as a premium since he was last free

sasara is also the one who's gone the longest without an appearance at all (7 events)

in the past 60 events everyone has shown up between 9-12 times (ichiro, samatoki, ramuda, and sasara each have 9**; gentaro and dice are the only ones with 12***)

almost everyone has been free either 3 or 4 times in the past 60 events, except jakurai (only free 2 times) and jyushi (free 5 times)

the numbers are all pretty reasonably balanced, like it's three guys per event (i only logged the most recent 60 bc earlier events had different structures) with a total of eighteen guys in the franchise so approximately 10 appearances each in 60 events is fair

on average characters are free 1/3rd of the time though there are some notable outliers (jakurai has only been free 20% of the time in the past 60 events, while jyushi has been free 50% of the time in that same range)

anyway

we seem to really love dice

oh also hitoya and rei have both shown up 10 times in the past 60 events and 4 of those times were together i don't think anyone else has as much of an overlap frequency lmao (even hifudo only have 3 lol; eta: i was wrong jiro and gentaro also have an overlap of 4 but STILL that is a substantial amount of reitoya they are putting in the water here)

*technically 61 events since i included the upcoming one **since i'm including the upcoming event ichiro technically only had 8 appearances in the previous 60, with an appearance in 61 bumping him up to 9 (they are neglecting my boy?!) ***similarly gentaro only hits 12 with event 61 so technically in the previous 60 events only dice had 12 appearances