Live Play Data

Dread Return

· Sorcery · Commander Masters (CMM)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

1529

Decks Running

786

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

49%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=159

67%

T6-9

17%

T10+

Median 7 P25 6 · P75 9 · max 17

On curve 8% (9 / 159 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 17%

The "good card" funnel

1534 brought · 677 players

Brought to game

1534

Ever drawn

326

Reached battlefield

159

Still on board at game end

≥ +5.7pp

Players who cast this card win 35% of the time (n=145) , vs 22% when it never left the library (n=928).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 21% (n=152).

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 +13.3pp; 95% confidence interval +5.7pp to +20.9pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

449 instances

4.2%

Library

1.6%

Battlefield

51.7%

Graveyard

15.4%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Szarekh, the Silent King 70 decks
2 Teval, the Balanced Scale 67 decks
3 Imotekh the Stormlord 32 decks
4 Sauron, the Dark Lord 21 decks
5 The Necrobloom 17 decks
6 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 16 decks
7 Uugguu, the Omniplasm 16 decks
8 Bartolomé del Presidio 12 decks
9 Grist, the Hunger Tide 12 decks
10 Terra, Herald of Hope 11 decks

Card text

Dread Return

Sorcery

Return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield. Flashback—Sacrifice three creatures. (You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost. Then exile it.)

Commander Masters (CMM) · Common · Illustrated by Kev Walker

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 720,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.