Live Play Data

Ambition's Cost

· Sorcery · March of the Machine Commander (MOC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

271

Decks Running

155

Median Cast Turn

7.0

Drawn → Played

62%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=42

12%

52%

T6-9

19%

T10+

Median 7.0 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 16

On curve 17% (3 / 42 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 33%

The "good card" funnel

274 brought · 147 players

Brought to game

274

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -12.8pp

Players who cast this card win 24% of the time (n=39) , vs 23% when it never left the library (n=165).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 27% (n=25).

Read this as correlation, not as the card's contribution. Casting a card means you lived long enough to cast it, so this gap widens with mana value across every card we track.

Observed gap +1.9pp; 95% confidence interval -12.8pp to +16.6pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

74 instances

1.4%

Library

1.4%

Battlefield

62.2%

Graveyard

8.1%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Kardur, Doomscourge 24 decks
2 Edgar Markov 18 decks
3 Breena, the Demagogue 8 decks
4 Lathril, Blade of the Elves 7 decks
5 Meren of Clan Nel Toth 7 decks
6 Witherbloom, the Balancer 5 decks
7 Zenos yae Galvus // Shinryu, Transcendent Rival 5 decks
8 Dina, Soul Steeper 4 decks
9 Kaalia of the Vast 4 decks
10 Dihada, Binder of Wills 3 decks

Card text

Ambition's Cost

Sorcery

You draw three cards and you lose 3 life.

March of the Machine Commander (MOC) · Uncommon · Illustrated by Zezhou Chen

Frequently Asked

Why isn't there more data on this card?

Playgroup Live collects per-card gameplay data from real Commander games. Play counts appear once a card reaches 100 tracked games, and the full charts need a sample of at least 25 observed games that is not dominated by a single pilot. Until this card clears those bars you're seeing only the basic counts. Stats refresh nightly.

How is Playgroup Live card data collected?

Players using Playgroup Live import their decklists before a game and log card actions as they play. Each cast, zone change, and resolution is recorded as a real game event. Stats on this site are computed from those events, not from decklist scrapes or theorycrafting. Playgroup has recorded 690,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.