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Excava, the Risen Past

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

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Times Brought

270

Decks Running

149

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

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

88 instances

4.5%

Library

30.7%

Battlefield

28.4%

Graveyard

12.5%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Quintorius, History Chaser 131 decks
2 Shadowfax, Lord of Horses 7 decks
3 Isshin, Two Heavens as One 6 decks
4 Rainbow Dash 2 decks
5 Jandor, Fortuned Traveler 1 decks
6 Optimus Prime, Hero // Optimus Prime, Autobot Leader 1 decks
7 Princess Twilight Sparkle 1 decks

The "good card" funnel

270 brought · 136 players

Brought to game

270

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 61% 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.

≥ -12.0pp

Players who cast this card win 24% of the time (n=35) , vs 27% when it never left the library (n=126).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 31% (n=26).

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 -2.5pp; 95% confidence interval -12.0pp to +7.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=45

11%

18%

64%

T6-9

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 7 · max 14

On curve 16% (5 / 45 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 32%

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.