Card Preview

Confounding Riddle

· Instant · The Lost Caverns of Ixalan (LCI)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

Decks Running

In Decks

268

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Confounding Riddle

Instant

Choose one — • Look at the top four cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand and the rest into your graveyard. • Counter target spell unless its controller pays {4}

The Lost Caverns of Ixalan (LCI) · Uncommon · Illustrated by A. M. Sartor

Final zone distribution

37 instances

Not enough tracked games yet to show a reliable final-zone breakdown.

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Melek, Reforged Researcher 5 decks
2 Riku of Many Paths 4 decks
3 Cormela, Glamour Thief 3 decks
4 Sin, Spira's Punishment 3 decks
5 Codie, Vociferous Codex 2 decks
6 Emet-Selch of the Third Seat 2 decks
7 Jin-Gitaxias // The Great Synthesis 2 decks
8 Octavia, Living Thesis 2 decks
9 Omnath, Locus of Creation 2 decks
10 Ovika, Enigma Goliath 2 decks

The "good card" funnel

94 brought · 60 players

Brought to game

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ +1.6pp

Players who cast this card win 41% of the time (n=25) , vs 19% when it never left the library (n=50).

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 +21.7pp; 95% confidence interval +1.6pp to +41.9pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=26

19%

54%

T6-9

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 14

On curve 12% (2 / 26 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 30%

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.