Live Play Data

Deadly Rollick

· Instant · Commander Masters (CMM)

14%

Live Inclusion

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

1647

Decks Running

832

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

73%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Deadly Rollick appears in 14% of tracked Commander decks and reaches the battlefield in 73% of drawn instances, with a median first-cast turn of 6.

Deadly Rollick is a free exile effect when you control a commander, and 14% of the 6105 tracked Commander decks that have played a live game on Playgroup Live include it. That puts it in 832 distinct decklists across 1429 tracked games.

The cast pattern reflects the instant's nature: median first cast lands on turn 6, well past the card's printed mana value of 4. Players are holding it for the right target rather than jamming it early. Of drawn copies, 73% reached the cast step before the game ended. Because Deadly Rollick is an instant, it routes to the graveyard on resolution rather than staying in play, so the low battlefield-persistence number is expected and not a useful signal here.

The free-cast clause is the defining feature in Commander. A no-mana exile is a tempo swing that other formats do not tolerate: Deadly Rollick is banned in Duel Commander and in Brawl. In multiplayer Commander it remains legal and is a go-to answer in any black deck that runs a commander consistently.

At a glance

14% of tracked Commander decks include Deadly Rollick
25% draw rate across participations, typical for a singleton in a 100-card deck
73% of drawn copies were cast before the game ended
T6 median first-cast turn, reflecting deliberate target selection
571 distinct players have brought this card to a tracked game
18% of casts landed on-curve at mana value 4, most hitting later

First-cast turn

n=297

11%

18%

54%

T6-9

10%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 17

On curve 18% (32 / 297 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 26%

The "good card" funnel

1649 brought · 571 players

Brought to game

1649

Ever drawn

409

Reached battlefield

297

Still on board at game end

73%

Of 1649 copies brought to games, 409 were drawn, 297 of those were cast, confirming that the biggest filter is simply whether the card shows up in hand at the right moment.

≥ +0.7pp

Players who cast this card win 31% of the time (n=288) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=1101).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 25% (n=105) — 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 +6.1pp; 95% confidence interval +0.7pp to +11.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

463 instances

2.4%

Library

1.9%

Battlefield

62.4%

Graveyard

11.2%

Exile

The overwhelming majority of Deadly Rollick instances end in the graveyard after resolving, which is exactly right for an instant; the tiny battlefield count reflects copies that were somehow stranded in play through unusual effects.

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 34 decks
2 Kuja, Genome Sorcerer // Trance Kuja, Fate Defied 20 decks
3 Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow 20 decks
4 Deadpool, Trading Card 18 decks
5 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 14 decks
6 Fire Lord Azula 13 decks
7 Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls 12 decks
8 Silverquill, the Disputant 11 decks
9 Jodah, the Unifier 10 decks
10 Kotis, the Fangkeeper 10 decks

Y'shtola, Night's Blessed leads the list with the most decks, but the spread across 571 distinct players and dozens of commander identities shows Deadly Rollick is not a one-archetype card.

Frequently Asked

How often is Deadly Rollick drawn in a Commander game?

Across 1429 tracked games where Deadly Rollick was in the deck, it was drawn 25% of the time. That is a normal rate for a singleton in a 100-card deck. Of the 409 instances that reached a player's hand, 73% were cast before the game concluded.

What turn does Deadly Rollick typically get cast?

Median first-cast turn is 6, and the distribution clusters between turns 5 and 8. The card's printed mana value is 4, but players overwhelmingly hold it as an instant-speed answer rather than tapping out on curve. The free-cast clause means mana is not the bottleneck; finding the right moment to exile a creature is.

Is Deadly Rollick banned anywhere?

Yes. Deadly Rollick is banned in Duel Commander and Brawl. It is legal in multiplayer Commander, Legacy, Vintage, Historic, Timeless, Gladiator, and Oathbreaker. The free-cast condition is powerful enough in smaller, faster formats that those formats have restricted it outright.

Does casting Deadly Rollick actually improve your win odds?

In 288 participations where Deadly Rollick was cast, the win rate was 31%. In 1101 participations where it never left the library, the win rate was 25%. The delta is +6.1 percentage points. Both sample buckets are meaningful in size, but the confidence interval still overlaps zero, so treat this as a directional early signal rather than a proven effect.

How spread is the data across players and commanders?

571 distinct players have brought Deadly Rollick to a tracked game, and the single heaviest contributor accounts for just 2% of all instances. That low concentration is a healthy sign: the observed patterns are not driven by one prolific player. The top commander slot is Y'shtola, Night's Blessed, but the card appears across a wide spread of black commanders.

Why does Deadly Rollick almost never show up on the battlefield in the final-zone data?

Deadly Rollick is an instant that resolves entirely on the stack. It exiles a creature and then itself moves to the graveyard. A permanent never enters play, so battlefield as a final zone is essentially zero by design. The relevant final zones are the graveyard (resolved normally) and exile (the spell itself was countered or otherwise exiled before resolution).