As many of you may know, I have a strong interest in understanding the true rarity of some harder to find MUSCLE figures. We have the Class designations, which are great and took a lot of work, but I think most people understand that the Class designations don't paint a complete picture of MUSCLE rarity. So over the past few months I have spent way too much time attempting to understand MUSCLE rarity by compiling information from eBay auctions. So far, I have recorded 100 larger auctions and tallied each figure in each color to see if I could learn anything.
For each sculpt, I tallied the number of times it was seen. Below is a tally of the number of sculpts seen a given number of times over the 100 auctions I have tracked to date.
# of times seen : # of sculpt-color combos
0 times : 171 (106 Class A, the rest are a near even mix of B and C)
1 times: 156 (18 Class A, 67 Class B, 61 Class C)
2 times: 217 (13 Class A)
3 times: 192 (1 Class A)
4 times: 190 (1 Class A)
5 times: 124 (1 Class A)
6 times: 81
7 times: 52
8 times: 41
9 times: 26
10+ times: 35
What does all this mean?
There are 171 sculpt-color combinations I haven't seen over 100 auctions (around 4500 figures tracked). Of these, over 100 are Class A, but this also includes a lot of Class C figures. Is this sampling error, or are these Class C actually rarer than believed? How large does the sample size need to be to get an accurate picture?
While the dataset isn't large enough to answer most questions I would argue that the 3 Class A figures seen 3-5 times shouldn't be Class A - and all of these are considered "common" Class A figures. These figures are 156 P (5 times), 135 M (4 times), 116 R (3 times).
I would also argue that any Class B seen 5 or more times should be Class C. This includes 18 figures: 65P, 66P, 70P, 77O, 83B, 101B, 110 LB, 112LB, 119S, 143B, 142S, 146O, 149R, 158LB, 160LB, 154R, 172S, and 183LB.
The dataset isn't large enough in my opinion to say much more yet. Maybe when its twice this size, it might provide a little more information on those harder to find figures.
Ideas or opinions?