Live Play Data

Flare of Malice

· Instant · Modern Horizons 3 (MH3)

Live Inclusion

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

976

Decks Running

481

Median Cast Turn

6.0

Drawn → Played

72%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=142

17%

58%

T6-9

15%

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 15

On curve 11% (12 / 142 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 34%

The "good card" funnel

979 brought · 431 players

Brought to game

979

Ever drawn

198

Reached battlefield

142

Still on board at game end

≥ -8.0pp

Players who cast this card win 27% of the time (n=133) , vs 27% when it never left the library (n=624).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 25% (n=47).

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 -0.2pp; 95% confidence interval -8.0pp to +7.6pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

226 instances

1.8%

Library

4.9%

Battlefield

65.5%

Graveyard

9.7%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 111 decks
2 Vren, the Relentless 24 decks
3 Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow 23 decks
4 Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern 20 decks
5 Vincent Valentine // Galian Beast 16 decks
6 Avacyn, Angel of Horror 10 decks
7 Super Shredder 8 decks
8 Ares, God of War 7 decks
9 Baron Helmut Zemo 6 decks
10 Fumulus, the Infestation 5 decks

Card text

Flare of Malice

Instant

You may sacrifice a nontoken black creature rather than pay this spell's mana cost. Each opponent sacrifices a creature or planeswalker with the greatest mana value among creatures and planeswalkers they control.

Modern Horizons 3 (MH3) · Rare · Illustrated by David Palumbo

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 720,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.