Card Preview

Benevolent Hydra

· Creature — Hydra · Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC)

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

849

Decks Running

398

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

Benevolent Hydra

Creature — Hydra

This creature enters with X +1/+1 counters on it. If one or more +1/+1 counters would be put on another creature you control, that many plus one +1/+1 counters are put on it instead. {T}

, Remove a +1/+1 counter from this creature: Put a +1/+1 counter on another target creature you control.

1 / 1

Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC) · Rare · Illustrated by Vincent Christiaens

Final zone distribution

176 instances

2.8%

Library

43.2%

Battlefield

24.4%

Graveyard

3.4%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

The "good card" funnel

849 brought · 373 players

Brought to game

849

Ever drawn

166

Reached battlefield

110

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 69% of this card is still on the battlefield at game end. This reflects how often it survives removal, not just whether it's a permanent.

≥ -2.9pp

Players who cast this card win 30% of the time (n=106) , vs 28% when it never left the library (n=595).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 29% (n=49).

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 +2.2pp; 95% confidence interval -2.9pp to +7.3pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=110

16%

19%

48%

T6-9

10%

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 5 · P75 7 · max 14

Cast same turn as drawn 21%

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 780,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.