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collections_bookmark Part of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan
Ancestors' Aid card art
Live Play Data

Ancestors' Aid

{1} {R} · Instant · The Lost Caverns of Ixalan (LCI)
1%
Live Inclusion
Buy on TCGplayer
Times Brought
363
Decks Running
200
Median Cast Turn
7
Drawn → Played
67%
Format
Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=57
0%
T1
2%
T2
5%
T3
9%
T4
14%
T5
56%
T6-9
14%
T10+
Median 7 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 12
On curve 2% (1 / 57 cast on T2) Cast same turn as drawn 44%

The "good card" funnel

363 brought · 189 players
Brought to game
363
Ever drawn
85
Reached battlefield
57
Still on board at game end
11
≥ +4.4pp

Players who cast this card win 41% of the time (n=48) , vs 23% when it never left the library (n=232).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 15% (n=23).

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 +17.7pp; 95% confidence interval +4.4pp to +31.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

90 instances
2.2%
Library
12.2%
Battlefield
48.9%
Graveyard
4.4%
Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games
Card text
Ancestors' Aid card

Ancestors' Aid

{1} {R}
Instant
Target creature gets +2/+0 and gains first strike until end of turn. Create a Treasure token. (It's an artifact with "{T}, Sacrifice this token: Add one mana of any color.")
The Lost Caverns of Ixalan (LCI) · Common · Illustrated by Alessandra Pisano

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 760,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.