Crumbling Necropolis
32% of Playgroup Live's tracked Grixis Commander decks run Crumbling Necropolis. When it reaches a player's hand, 74% of copies are played before the game ends, with a median first-play turn of 4.
Crumbling Necropolis is a steady fixture in Grixis Commander decks on Playgroup Live. Across 590 tracked multiplayer games, 32% of tracked Grixis builds include it, and it has shown up in 348 of the 1093 distinct decks with at least one tracked game.
As a land, Crumbling Necropolis enters tapped and produces one of blue, black, or red. It costs nothing beyond a deck slot, which explains its presence in the format. The core play pattern is straightforward: 74% of drawn copies are played before the game ends, and the median turn it hits the battlefield is turn 4. The mode is turn 1, reflecting copies kept in the opening hand. Once it resolves, stickiness is near-total at 92%. Lands are almost never removed.
Every commander at the top of the distribution shares the same Grixis color identity (blue, black, red), which is structurally expected for a fixing land. The spread across 299 unique players, with no single player accounting for more than a small slice of the data, gives this dataset reasonable breadth for a card of its profile.
- 32% of tracked Grixis Commander decks include Crumbling Necropolis
- 25% draw rate per game, typical for a singleton in a 100-card deck
- 74% of drawn copies reach the battlefield before the game ends
- T4 median turn the land first enters play
- 92% battlefield stickiness once it resolves
- 299 distinct players contributing data, spread evenly across the dataset
First-cast turn
n=117The "good card" funnel
620 brought · 299 playersOf 620 copies brought to games, 158 were drawn, 117 of those were played, and the vast majority remained on the battlefield through the end of the game.
Players who cast this card win 31% of the time (n=111) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=404).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 28% (n=39) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.
Observed gap +9.5pp; 95% confidence interval +1.0pp to +17.9pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
182 instancesMost tracked copies of Crumbling Necropolis finish on the battlefield, which makes sense for a land: it enters and stays. The small graveyard count reflects mill or sacrifice effects rather than removal, and the handful left in hand shows games that ended before the land could be deployed.
Commanders that played this card
in tracked games-
1
Doctor Doom, King of Latveria
46 decks
-
2
Sauron, the Dark Lord
29 decks
-
3
Sauron, Lord of the Rings
21 decks
-
4
Fire Lord Azula
20 decks
-
5
Nekusar, the Mindrazer
18 decks
-
6
Edward Kenway
12 decks
-
7
Abaddon the Despoiler
11 decks
-
8
Davros, Dalek Creator
11 decks
-
9
Be'lakor, the Dark Master
9 decks
-
10
Lynde, Cheerful Tormentor
9 decks
All ten commanders in this chart share Grixis color identity, so the distribution is less about strategic affinity and more about which Grixis commanders are most popular in the tracked player pool. Doctor Doom, King of Latveria leads by a wide margin in raw deck count.