How Many Cards?

We were recently asked on Twitter how many cards one would have in one's deck if one were to combine one copy of every card officially released for Munchkin to date. This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

For one thing, what constitutes "one copy of every card"? Do the various versions of Class, Race, etc. cards count independently, since they have different art, or does Warrior count once even though there are 17 Warrior cards across various sets (so far . . .)? Also, we've occasionally republished exactly the same card in multiple sets -- does Holiday Surprise count all the holiday boosters twice? And do we include Munchkin Quest cards in the count, or not?

Here are the rules we decided on:

1. Every card in a core set or expansion counts, even if it has the same name and effects as another card (so every Warrior card counts toward the total). Even the blanks published as part of official expansions count.
2. Cards that are actually duplicates don't count. So we didn't include Blender at all, even though some of the art is different, because Cheat With Both Hands has replaced it. And we didn't include the 64 previously published cards in Holiday Surprise, just the 4 new ones.
3. Promo cards count, even retired promo cards, unless they've been republished later on -- so we only counted Pegasus Steed once, because it's also in the 2010 Warehouse 23 booster. Exception: we did NOT count blank promo cards. One must draw the line somewhere, and a blank card is a fine place to draw lines.
4. We did not include any cards from yet-to-be-released sets, although we were sorely tempted.
5. We may have made mistakes. It happens.

With all that, our off-the-cuff answer is: 4,190 cards in the Munchkin line, plus 323 cards for Munchkin Quest, for a grand total of 4,513 cards. We could certainly refine that answer (by excluding all blanks, by only counting a given card once, even if multiple versions occur in various decks, and so on), but that would require us to spend even more time on this than we already have. Please feel free to discuss our methodology and our inevitable errors in the Munchkin forum!

(Teaser: by the time the 2013 schedule is complete, we will be very close to 5,000 cards, and may even surpass it. Yeah, there's a lot you don't know about yet . . .)