The plugin marketplace currently offers three options for sorting plugins: number of downloads, number of stars, and alphabetical order. This isn’t ideal if you periodically check for new plugins (as I do). You can try looking at the plugins with the fewest downloads, but this might cause you to miss a new plugin that became popular very quickly – which is probably the last plugin you’d want to miss!
A better option would be the ability to sort plugins by date added to the marketplace. Date updated would be a nice option as well.