Buried Ruin
74% of drawn Buried Ruins are cast before the game ends, landing on the battlefield at a median turn of 5.0 across 1725 tracked Commander games on Playgroup Live.
Buried Ruin is a colorless utility land that earns its slot by doubling as graveyard recursion for any artifact. Across 1725 tracked multiplayer Commander games on Playgroup Live, it sits in 950 of 17527 distinct decks, a 5% inclusion rate that reflects a narrow but consistent niche in artifact-heavy strategies.
The draw-to-play rate of 74% is one of the cleaner signals in the data. When Buried Ruin reaches a player's hand, the land almost always sees play before the game ends. Median first activation lands on turn 5.0, fitting naturally into the mid-game window when a key artifact has already been answered by an opponent. The 72% stickiness figure shows that once it resolves, the land survives through the end of most games it appears in.
The commander distribution is broad and well-spread. Artifact commanders like Urza, Lord High Artificer, Tony Stark, Kilo, Apogee Mind, and Inspirit, Flagship Vessel lead the list, but no single archetype monopolizes the data. With 741 unique players contributing observations and the single heaviest contributor accounting for just 24% of total instances, the dataset reflects real cross-table diversity rather than one dedicated brewer.
- 5% of tracked Commander decks include Buried Ruin
- 74% of drawn copies are cast before the game ends
- T5.0 median first-cast turn
- 72% battlefield stickiness once the land enters play
- 741 unique players in the dataset, a well-spread sample
- 950 decks across all tracked Commander games
First-cast turn
n=328The "good card" funnel
1853 brought · 741 playersOf 1853 Buried Ruins brought to games, 445 were drawn, 328 of those were cast, and 72% of cast copies stayed on the battlefield through the end of the game.
Players who cast this card win 26% of the time (n=312) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=1219).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 32% (n=105) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.
Observed gap +1.1pp; 95% confidence interval -3.9pp to +6.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
499 instancesMost Buried Ruins never leave the library, a structural feature of 100-card singleton decks rather than a statement on the card's power level. Of observed copies, a solid majority ended on the battlefield.
Commanders that played this card
in tracked games-
1
Kilo, Apogee Mind
41 decks
-
2
Inspirit, Flagship Vessel
35 decks
-
3
Dogmeat, Ever Loyal
23 decks
-
4
Krenko, Mob Boss
22 decks
- 5 Ultron, Artificial Malevolence 22 decks
-
6
Tony Stark // The Invincible Iron Man
18 decks
-
7
Shorikai, Genesis Engine
16 decks
-
8
Urza, Lord High Artificer
16 decks
-
9
Dr. Madison Li
15 decks
- 10 Molecule Man 15 decks
The top commanders span artifact combo, vehicle, and token strategies, with no single archetype claiming dominance. The spread across 741 unique players reinforces that Buried Ruin is a broad utility pick, not an archetype-specific tool.