Live Play Data

Emeria, the Sky Ruin

Land · Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

671

Decks Running

352

Median Cast Turn

4.0

Drawn → Played

71%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

4% of tracked multiplayer Commander decks run Emeria, the Sky Ruin. When drawn, 71% of copies are played before the game ends, with a median first-play turn of 4.0.

Emeria, the Sky Ruin sits in 4% of the 8036 Commander decks tracked on Playgroup Live. It is a niche card by format-wide standards, but every deck that runs it is making a deliberate, build-around commitment: the land does nothing until you control seven or more Plains, so it only appears in heavily mono-white or near-mono-white lists.

The data shows a bimodal cast pattern. The mode is turn 1, because Emeria enters as a land drop, and a large cluster of plays land in turns 6-8, once the Plains count threshold is in reach and the recursion trigger becomes live. Median first play lands on turn 4.0. Of 167 drawn copies, 71% were played before the game ended. Once on the battlefield, 88% of copies remain there at end of game, consistent with what you'd expect from a land that has no text making it a removal target until it starts generating value.

The concentration picture is healthy: 321 distinct players have brought Emeria to a tracked game, and the single heaviest contributor accounts for just 3% of all instances. That spread gives the data reasonable directional reliability, even on a modest sample of 654 tracked games.

At a glance

4% of tracked multiplayer Commander decks include Emeria, the Sky Ruin
71% of drawn copies are played before the game ends
T4.0 median first-play turn across all casts
88% battlefield stickiness once played
321 distinct players have brought this card to a tracked game
33% win rate in games where Emeria reached the battlefield

First-cast turn

n=118

27%

10%

30%

T6-9

T10+

Median 4.0 P25 1 · P75 7 · max 16

Cast same turn as drawn 54%

The "good card" funnel

671 brought · 321 players

Brought to game

671

Ever drawn

167

Reached battlefield

118

Still on board at game end

104

71%

Of 671 Emerias brought to games, 167 were drawn, 118 of those were played as a land, and 88% of played copies remained on the battlefield through the end of the game.

≥ -3.1pp

Players who cast this card win 33% of the time (n=104) , vs 27% when it never left the library (n=424).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 34% (n=39) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.

Observed gap +6.3pp; 95% confidence interval -3.1pp to +15.7pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

187 instances

3.7%

Library

55.6%

Battlefield

15.5%

Graveyard

4.8%

Exile

Most Emeria copies finish on the battlefield or graveyard. The very small library bucket reflects how rarely this card sits uninteracted with across a full game once it has been played as a land.

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Quintorius, History Chaser 61 decks
2 Giada, Font of Hope 45 decks
3 Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer 20 decks
4 Cloud, Midgar Mercenary 12 decks
5 The Sentry, Golden Guardian 11 decks
6 Darien, King of Kjeldor 9 decks
7 Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines 8 decks
8 Avacyn, Angel of Hope 7 decks
9 Gisela, the Broken Blade 7 decks
10 Delney, Streetwise Lookout 5 decks

Quintorius and Giada dominate the top two slots by a wide margin, but the list fans out quickly across a broad range of mono-white commanders, showing Emeria is a consistent white-deck include rather than a single-archetype staple.

Card text

Emeria, the Sky Ruin

Land

This land enters tapped. At the beginning of your upkeep, if you control seven or more Plains, you may return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield. {T}

: Add

Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC) · Rare · Illustrated by Jaime Jones

Frequently Asked

How often is Emeria, the Sky Ruin drawn in a Commander game?

Across 654 tracked multiplayer Commander games where Emeria was in the deck, the draw rate is 25%. That is expected territory for a singleton land in a 100-card deck. Of 167 drawn copies, 71% were played before the game concluded. The remainder is largely a game-length effect: copies drawn late in a closing game often have no opportunity to hit the table.

What turn does Emeria, the Sky Ruin usually get played?

Median first-play turn is 4.0, but the distribution is bimodal. A meaningful cluster hits on turn 1, representing opening-hand land drops. A second cluster appears in turns 6-8, which maps to when a mono-white deck is likely to cross the seven-Plains threshold and unlock the recursion trigger. The mean is pulled higher by occasional very late plays. Playing Emeria early is a pure land drop; the payoff doesn't begin until the Plains count catches up.

Is Emeria, the Sky Ruin legal in Commander?

Yes. Emeria, the Sky Ruin is legal in Commander, as well as Legacy, Modern, Vintage, Duel Commander, Oathbreaker, and Premodern. It is not legal in Standard, Pioneer, Alchemy, Historic, Pauper, or Brawl. In Commander it is unrestricted and appears in any deck whose color identity is mono-white or contains white with minimal off-Plains nonbasics.

Does casting Emeria actually improve your win rate?

The multiplayer data shows a +6.3 percentage-point lift in win rate when Emeria reaches the battlefield versus when it stays in the library all game. Both sample sizes are reasonable (104 cast observations, 424 library observations), but the confidence interval crosses zero on the current sample. Treat it as an early directional signal rather than a settled conclusion. The card's value likely depends heavily on how far into the game the recursion trigger activates.

Which commanders most commonly run Emeria, the Sky Ruin?

Quintorius, History Chaser leads the tracked list with 60 decks, an unusual pairing given his Boros (red-white) identity, likely driven by Plains-heavy shell construction. Giada, Font of Hope follows with 41 decks, a natural fit for a mono-white Angel strategy that naturally accumulates Plains. Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer, Cloud, Midgar Mercenary, and The Sentry, Golden Guardian round out the top five. The spread across commanders is fairly even below the top two, suggesting Emeria is a format-wide white staple rather than a commander-specific include.

How sticky is Emeria once it hits the battlefield?

88% of Emeria copies that reach the battlefield are still there at game end. That figure is high even by land standards. Lands rarely get destroyed outside specific hate cards like Ghost Quarter or Dust Bowl, so this stickiness is more a reflection of Emeria's card type than evidence that opponents are choosing not to answer it. Once the recursion trigger activates, opponents have limited in-format ways to remove a land before it generates further value.