Card Preview

Desperate Ritual

· Instant — Arcane · Ultimate Masters (UMA)

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

827

Decks Running

420

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

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

Final zone distribution

198 instances

2.0%

Library

7.1%

Battlefield

58.6%

Graveyard

9.1%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Fire Lord Azula 37 decks
2 Etali, Primal Conqueror // Etali, Primal Sickness 32 decks
3 Raph & Mikey, Troublemakers 29 decks
4 Vivi Ornitier 24 decks
5 Ral, Monsoon Mage // Ral, Leyline Prodigy 19 decks
6 Prismari, the Inspiration 15 decks
7 Krenko, Mob Boss 14 decks
8 Krark, the Thumbless 10 decks
9 Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh 10 decks
10 Kuja, Genome Sorcerer // Trance Kuja, Fate Defied 9 decks

The "good card" funnel

827 brought · 363 players

Brought to game

827

Ever drawn

182

Reached battlefield

120

Still on board at game end

≥ -2.4pp

Players who cast this card win 27% of the time (n=101) , vs 24% when it never left the library (n=440).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 15% (n=43).

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 +3.0pp; 95% confidence interval -2.4pp to +8.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=120

15%

23%

13%

11%

26%

T6-9

T10+

Median 4.0 P25 3 · P75 7 · max 15

On curve 19% (18 / 120 cast on T2) Cast same turn as drawn 43%

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.