Live Play Data

Contest of Claws

· Sorcery · The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Commander (LCC)

Live Inclusion

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

347

Decks Running

174

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

56%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=47

28%

57%

T6-9

11%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 13

On curve 0% (0 / 47 cast on T2) Cast same turn as drawn 38%

The "good card" funnel

347 brought · 169 players

Brought to game

347

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -11.7pp

Players who cast this card win 29% of the time (n=43) , vs 26% when it never left the library (n=203).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 25% (n=28).

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 +3.0pp; 95% confidence interval -11.7pp to +17.7pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

97 instances

2.1%

Library

1.0%

Battlefield

64.9%

Graveyard

8.2%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Contest of Claws

Sorcery

Target creature you control deals damage equal to its power to another target creature. If excess damage was dealt this way, discover X, where X is that excess damage. (Exile cards from the top of your library until you exile a nonland card with that mana value or less. Cast it without paying its mana cost or put it into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom in a random order.)

The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Commander (LCC) · Rare · Illustrated by Cristi Balanescu

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 720,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.