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Desolation of Smaug

· Sorcery · The Hobbit (HOB)

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Times Brought

245

Decks Running

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

Desolation of Smaug

Sorcery

Desolation of Smaug deals 3 damage to each non-Dragon creature. Add four mana in any combination of colors. Spend this mana only to cast Dragon spells.

The Hobbit (HOB) · Rare · Illustrated by Irvin Rodriguez

Final zone distribution

50 instances

2.0%

Library

4.0%

Battlefield

38.0%

Graveyard

10.0%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Smaug the Impenetrable 16 decks
2 Smaug the Magnificent 16 decks
3 The Ur-Dragon 14 decks
4 Smaug, Wicked Worm 9 decks
5 Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm 5 decks
6 Thorin, King of Durin's Folk 4 decks
7 Ganax, Astral Hunter 3 decks
8 Lathliss, Dragon Queen 3 decks
9 Ureni of the Unwritten 3 decks
10 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager // Nicol Bolas, the Arisen 2 decks

The "good card" funnel

245 brought · 97 players

Brought to game

245

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -9.7pp

Players who cast this card win 31% of the time (n=18) , vs 28% when it never left the library (n=148).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 30% (n=20).

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 +2.5pp; 95% confidence interval -9.7pp to +14.8pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=24

13%

17%

42%

T6-9

13%

T10+

Median 6.5 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 13

On curve 29% (4 / 24 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 30%

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 730,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.