Live Play Data

Cornered by Black Mages

· Sorcery · Final Fantasy (FIN)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

295

Decks Running

167

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

63%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=45

13%

11%

16%

47%

T6-9

13%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 13

On curve 13% (6 / 45 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 30%

The "good card" funnel

295 brought · 157 players

Brought to game

295

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -9.4pp

Players who cast this card win 28% of the time (n=40) , vs 22% when it never left the library (n=183).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 20% (n=23).

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 +5.4pp; 95% confidence interval -9.4pp to +20.2pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

78 instances

6.4%

Library

2.6%

Battlefield

57.7%

Graveyard

7.7%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Kuja, Genome Sorcerer // Trance Kuja, Fate Defied 60 decks
2 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 35 decks
3 Kefka, Court Mage // Kefka, Ruler of Ruin 11 decks
4 Inalla, Archmage Ritualist 9 decks
5 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 5 decks
6 Black Waltz No. 3 4 decks
7 Judith, Carnage Connoisseur 3 decks
8 Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin 3 decks
9 Sephiroth, Planet's Heir 3 decks
10 Abigale, Poet Laureate // Heroic Stanza 2 decks

Card text

Cornered by Black Mages

Sorcery

Target opponent sacrifices a creature of their choice. Create a 0/1 black Wizard creature token with "Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, this token deals 1 damage to each opponent."

Final Fantasy (FIN) · Common · Illustrated by Smirtouille

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.