Card Preview

Esper Sentinel

· Artifact Creature — Human Soldier · Modern Horizons 2 (MH2)

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

5150

Decks Running

2602

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

Esper Sentinel

Artifact Creature — Human Soldier

Whenever an opponent casts their first noncreature spell each turn, draw a card unless that player pays {X}

, where X is this creature's power.

1 / 1

Modern Horizons 2 (MH2) · Rare · Illustrated by Eric Deschamps

Final zone distribution

1227 instances

2.4%

Library

47.1%

Battlefield

29.7%

Graveyard

7.9%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 70 decks
2 Kaalia of the Vast 63 decks
3 Toph, the First Metalbender 54 decks
4 Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer 46 decks
5 Giada, Font of Hope 45 decks
6 Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER 41 decks
7 Marneus Calgar 35 decks
8 Winota, Joiner of Forces 35 decks
9 Grand Arbiter Augustin IV 32 decks
10 Ms. Bumbleflower 32 decks

The "good card" funnel

5155 brought · 1644 players

Brought to game

5155

Ever drawn

1146

Reached battlefield

962

Still on board at game end

578

Once cast, 60% of this card is still on the battlefield at game end. This reflects how often it survives removal, not just whether it's a permanent.

≥ -0.5pp

Players who cast this card win 27% of the time (n=747) , vs 26% when it never left the library (n=2922).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 28% (n=128).

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 +1.5pp; 95% confidence interval -0.5pp to +3.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=962

34%

11%

10%

20%

T6-9

T10+

Median 3.0 P25 1 · P75 6 · max 19

On curve 34% (327 / 962 cast on T1) Cast same turn as drawn 78%

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 740,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.