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Ancestors' Aid

· Instant · The Lost Caverns of Ixalan (LCI)

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Times Brought

206

Decks Running

115

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

Ancestors' Aid

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

Final zone distribution

43 instances

2.3%

Library

4.7%

Battlefield

44.2%

Graveyard

7.0%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Zada, Hedron Grinder 59 decks
2 Fire Lord Azula 13 decks
3 Krenko, Mob Boss 11 decks
4 Feather, the Redeemed 5 decks
5 Kediss, Emberclaw Familiar 2 decks
6 Loki, God of Lies 2 decks
7 Smaug the Magnificent 2 decks
8 The Scarlet Witch 2 decks
9 Thor Odinson 2 decks
10 Caparocti Sunborn 1 decks

The "good card" funnel

206 brought · 108 players

Brought to game

206

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -16.7pp

Players who cast this card win 24% of the time (n=17) , vs 27% when it never left the library (n=123).

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 -3.7pp; 95% confidence interval -16.7pp to +9.3pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=23

22%

17%

48%

T6-9

T10+

Median 6 P25 4 · P75 8 · max 10

On curve 9% (1 / 23 cast on T2) Cast same turn as drawn 32%

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.