Live Play Data

Baleful Mastery

· Instant · Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander (OTC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

651

Decks Running

335

Median Cast Turn

7.0

Drawn → Played

70%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=108

12%

15%

52%

T6-9

18%

T10+

Median 7.0 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 18

On curve 16% (13 / 108 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 29%

The "good card" funnel

652 brought · 316 players

Brought to game

652

Ever drawn

154

Reached battlefield

108

Still on board at game end

≥ -0.6pp

Players who cast this card win 30% of the time (n=102) , vs 22% when it never left the library (n=416).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 24% (n=39).

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 +8.6pp; 95% confidence interval -0.6pp to +17.9pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

176 instances

1.7%

Library

64.2%

Graveyard

15.3%

Exile

18.8%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sheoldred, the Apocalypse 46 decks
2 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 40 decks
3 Nekusar, the Mindrazer 29 decks
4 Gonti, Canny Acquisitor 25 decks
5 Umbris, Fear Manifest 8 decks
6 Zenos yae Galvus // Shinryu, Transcendent Rival 7 decks
7 Ketramose, the New Dawn 6 decks
8 Marrow-Gnawer 5 decks
9 Tinybones, Bauble Burglar 5 decks
10 Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls 5 decks

Card text

Baleful Mastery

Instant

You may pay {1}

rather than pay this spell's mana cost. If the {1}

cost was paid, an opponent draws a card. Exile target creature or planeswalker.

Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander (OTC) · Rare · Illustrated by Chris Cold

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.