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Burst Lightning card art
Live Play Data

Burst Lightning

{R} · Instant · Foundations (FDN)
1%
Live Inclusion
Times Brought
239
Decks Running
104
Median Cast Turn
6.0
Drawn → Played
67%
Format

First-cast turn

n=42
2%
T1
5%
T2
7%
T3
21%
T4
10%
T5
40%
T6-9
14%
T10+
Median 6.0 P25 4 · P75 8 · max 14
On curve 2% (1 / 42 cast on T1) Cast same turn as drawn 30%

The "good card" funnel

239 brought · 97 players
Brought to game
239
Ever drawn
63
Reached battlefield
42
Still on board at game end
3
≥ -11.0pp

Players who cast this card win 25% of the time (n=38) , vs 22% when it never left the library (n=143).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 17% (n=20).

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 +3.2pp; 95% confidence interval -11.0pp to +17.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

68 instances
2.9%
Library
4.4%
Battlefield
58.8%
Graveyard
7.4%
Exile
Card text
Burst Lightning card

Burst Lightning

{R}
Instant
Kicker {4} (You may pay an additional {4} as you cast this spell.) Burst Lightning deals 2 damage to any target. If this spell was kicked, it deals 4 damage instead.
Foundations (FDN) · Common · Illustrated by Vance Kovacs

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.