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Brain Freeze

· Instant · Vintage Masters (VMA)

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Times Brought

471

Decks Running

233

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

Brain Freeze

Instant

Target player mills three cards. Storm (When you cast this spell, copy it for each spell cast before it this turn. You may choose new targets for the copies.)

Vintage Masters (VMA) · Uncommon · Illustrated by Tim Hildebrandt

Final zone distribution

121 instances

4.1%

Library

13.2%

Battlefield

42.1%

Graveyard

14.0%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Vivi Ornitier 30 decks
2 Flubs, the Fool 15 decks
3 Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh 15 decks
4 Ral, Monsoon Mage // Ral, Leyline Prodigy 12 decks
5 Kraum, Ludevic's Opus 11 decks
6 Najeela, the Blade-Blossom 8 decks
7 Tymna the Weaver 8 decks
8 Bruvac the Grandiloquent 7 decks
9 Crystal, Inhuman Princess 7 decks
10 Krark, the Thumbless 7 decks

The "good card" funnel

471 brought · 225 players

Brought to game

471

Ever drawn

108

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ +7.5pp

Players who cast this card win 33% of the time (n=50) , vs 18% when it never left the library (n=256).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 23% (n=43).

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 +14.6pp; 95% confidence interval +7.5pp to +21.7pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=60

13%

15%

40%

T6-9

12%

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 13

On curve 7% (2 / 60 cast on T2) Cast same turn as drawn 51%

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 680,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.