You are right!
Upon the start of Open Beta, to get things going and create somewhat of a market flow, there will be a vendor named Server (or whatever) selling cards for X amount of weeks, until enough people gather the BFP and cards they want so the marketplace can continue on it's own.
About the statistical data - for now, we're tracking some of stuff that Killian mentioned, but I highly doubt we'll be able to graph those out or anything graphical like that. Concrete values in form of numbers would be possible and probably made public per request.