Live Play Data

Essence Anchor

· Artifact · Tarkir: Dragonstorm (TDM)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

180

Decks Running

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

59%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=29

14%

17%

24%

10%

28%

T6-9

T10+

Median 4 P25 3 · P75 6 · max 12

On curve 34% (5 / 29 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 21%

The "good card" funnel

180 brought · 78 players

Brought to game

180

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 69% 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.

≥ -10.6pp

Players who cast this card win 29% of the time (n=25) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=92).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 25% (n=17).

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 +8.2pp; 95% confidence interval -10.6pp to +27.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

71 instances

1.4%

Library

28.2%

Battlefield

38.0%

Graveyard

11.3%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Essence Anchor

Artifact

At the beginning of your upkeep, surveil 1. (Look at the top card of your library. You may put it into your graveyard.) {T}

: Create a 2/2 black Zombie Druid creature token. Activate only during your turn and only if a card left your graveyard this turn.

Tarkir: Dragonstorm (TDM) · Uncommon · Illustrated by David Astruga

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 700,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.