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Excava, the Risen Past

· Legendary Creature — Spirit Horse · Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

128

Decks Running

In Decks

578

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Excava, the Risen Past

Legendary Creature — Spirit Horse

Flying, haste Whenever Excava attacks, return up to one target artifact, creature, or non-Aura enchantment card with mana value 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter on it. It's a 1/1 Spirit creature with flying in addition to its other types. (If a creature with a finality counter on it would die, exile it instead.)

3 / 3

Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC) · Mythic · Illustrated by Ilse Gort

Final zone distribution

43 instances

2.3%

Library

39.5%

Battlefield

18.6%

Graveyard

20.9%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Quintorius, History Chaser 66 decks
2 Isshin, Two Heavens as One 6 decks
3 Excava, the Risen Past 2 decks
4 Princess Twilight Sparkle 2 decks
5 Shadowfax, Lord of Horses 2 decks
6 Kirol, History Buff // Pack a Punch 1 decks

The "good card" funnel

128 brought · 73 players

Brought to game

128

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 52% 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.

≥ -2.4pp

Players who cast this card win 50% of the time (n=23) , vs 31% when it never left the library (n=79).

Observed gap +18.9pp; 95% confidence interval -2.4pp to +40.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=25

12%

60%

T6-9

T10+

Median 8 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 12

On curve 20% (2 / 25 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 36%

25 of 100 times cast 25%

Full analysis unlocks as more games are tracked. Stats refresh nightly.

Frequently Asked

Why isn't there more data on this card?

Playgroup Live collects per-card gameplay data from real Commander games. Basic play counts appear once a card reaches 100 tracked games; the full deep-dive page needs a larger, more diverse sample (at least 300 tracked games played by 10 or more different pilots, with no single pilot over 40 percent of the copies). 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 650,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.