Live Play Data

Desperate Ritual

· Instant — Arcane · Ultimate Masters (UMA)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

1578

Decks Running

768

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

64%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=243

14%

15%

17%

37%

T6-9

T10+

Median 5 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 16

On curve 9% (19 / 243 cast on T2) Cast same turn as drawn 35%

The "good card" funnel

1582 brought · 632 players

Brought to game

1582

Ever drawn

381

Reached battlefield

243

Still on board at game end

≥ -0.4pp

Players who cast this card win 33% of the time (n=220) , vs 27% when it never left the library (n=1000).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 35% (n=120).

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 +5.9pp; 95% confidence interval -0.4pp to +12.2pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

420 instances

6.0%

Library

5.2%

Battlefield

54.8%

Graveyard

10.5%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Fire Lord Azula 85 decks
2 Raph & Mikey, Troublemakers 43 decks
3 Vivi Ornitier 41 decks
4 Etali, Primal Conqueror // Etali, Primal Sickness 36 decks
5 Prismari, the Inspiration 31 decks
6 Krenko, Mob Boss 26 decks
7 Slicer, Hired Muscle // Slicer, High-Speed Antagonist 15 decks
8 Smaug the Impenetrable 15 decks
9 Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin 14 decks
10 Ral, Monsoon Mage // Ral, Leyline Prodigy 14 decks

Card text

Desperate Ritual

Instant — Arcane

Add

. Splice onto Arcane {1}

(As you cast an Arcane spell, you may reveal this card from your hand and pay its splice cost. If you do, add this card's effects to that spell.)

Ultimate Masters (UMA) · Uncommon · Illustrated by Wayne Reynolds

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.