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Defiler of Dreams

· Creature — Phyrexian Sphinx · Dominaria United (DMU)

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Times Brought

251

Decks Running

122

In Decks

—

Decklist Inclusion

—

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Showing 1v1 (duel) data only. 1v1 is a different format from multiplayer Commander, so these numbers are not comparable.

Card text

Defiler of Dreams

Creature — Phyrexian Sphinx

Flying As an additional cost to cast blue permanent spells, you may pay 2 life. Those spells cost {U}

less to cast if you paid life this way. This effect reduces only the amount of blue mana you pay. Whenever you cast a blue permanent spell, draw a card.

4 / 3

Dominaria United (DMU) · Rare · Illustrated by Ryan Pancoast

Final zone distribution

71 instances

2.8%

Library

39.4%

Battlefield

23.9%

Graveyard

5.6%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 The Ur-Sphinx 46 decks
2 Minn, Wily Illusionist 5 decks
3 The Mindskinner 5 decks
4 Atemsis, All-Seeing 4 decks
5 Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign 4 decks
6 Aragorn, the Uniter 3 decks
7 Errant and Giada 3 decks
8 Jin-Gitaxias // The Great Synthesis 3 decks
9 The Lord of the Eagles 3 decks
10 Whtz, the Bibliophile 3 decks

The "good card" funnel

251 brought · 114 players

Brought to game

251

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 65% of this card is still on the battlefield at game end. This reflects how often it survives removal, not just whether it's a permanent.

≥ -6.9pp

Players who cast this card win 28% of the time (n=37) , vs 26% when it never left the library (n=145).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 31% (n=16).

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 +2.2pp; 95% confidence interval -6.9pp to +11.3pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=43

19%

33%

12%

28%

T6-9

T10+

Median 4 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 12

On curve 65% (5 / 43 cast on T5) Cast same turn as drawn 31%

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.