Live Play Data

Chain Lightning

· Sorcery · Dominaria Remastered (DMR)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

442

Decks Running

185

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

63%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=59

10%

20%

53%

T6-9

10%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 7 · max 13

On curve 0% (0 / 59 cast on T1) Cast same turn as drawn 38%

The "good card" funnel

443 brought · 173 players

Brought to game

443

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ +7.4pp

Players who cast this card win 47% of the time (n=55) , vs 26% when it never left the library (n=299).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 20% (n=32).

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 +20.4pp; 95% confidence interval +7.4pp to +33.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

106 instances

1.9%

Library

18.9%

Battlefield

50.0%

Graveyard

5.7%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Smaug the Impenetrable 100 decks
2 Imodane, the Pyrohammer 8 decks
3 Heartless Hidetsugu 4 decks
4 Massimo, the Magician 3 decks
5 Spider-Man 2099 3 decks
6 Vivi Ornitier 3 decks
7 Aegar, the Freezing Flame 2 decks
8 Auntie Blyte, Bad Influence 2 decks
9 Krenko, Mob Boss 2 decks
10 Kuja, Genome Sorcerer // Trance Kuja, Fate Defied 2 decks

Card text

Chain Lightning

Sorcery

Chain Lightning deals 3 damage to any target. Then that player or that permanent's controller may pay {R}

. If the player does, they may copy this spell and may choose a new target for that copy.

Dominaria Remastered (DMR) · Common · Illustrated by Christopher Moeller

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 760,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.