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Ambition's Cost

· Sorcery · March of the Machine Commander (MOC)

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Times Brought

612

Decks Running

337

In Decks

—

Decklist Inclusion

—

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Showing 1v1 (duel) data only. 1v1 is a different format from multiplayer Commander, so these numbers are not comparable.

Card text

Ambition's Cost

Sorcery

You draw three cards and lose 3 life.

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

Final zone distribution

111 instances

0.9%

Library

1.8%

Battlefield

64.9%

Graveyard

4.5%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

The "good card" funnel

612 brought · 311 players

Brought to game

612

Ever drawn

103

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -6.8pp

Players who cast this card win 21% of the time (n=49) , vs 20% when it never left the library (n=343).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 17% (n=27).

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 +0.6pp; 95% confidence interval -6.8pp to +8.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=68

13%

10%

16%

40%

T6-9

19%

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 15

On curve 25% (7 / 68 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 18%

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 750,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.