Card Preview

Flare of Malice

· Instant · Modern Horizons 3 (MH3)

Decklist Inclusion

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

455

Decks Running

232

In Decks

1523

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

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

Final zone distribution

100 instances

3.0%

Library

3.0%

Battlefield

68.0%

Graveyard

9.0%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 49 decks
2 Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern 11 decks
3 Vren, the Relentless 11 decks
4 Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow 11 decks
5 Baron Helmut Zemo 6 decks
6 Ares, God of War 4 decks
7 Braids, Arisen Nightmare 4 decks
8 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth 4 decks
9 Super Shredder 4 decks
10 Ashcoat of the Shadow Swarm 3 decks

The "good card" funnel

456 brought · 217 players

Brought to game

456

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -15.8pp

Players who cast this card win 25% of the time (n=64) , vs 30% when it never left the library (n=294).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 15% (n=21) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.

Observed gap -4.8pp; 95% confidence interval -15.8pp to +6.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=66

23%

56%

T6-9

15%

T10+

Median 7.0 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 14

On curve 6% (4 / 66 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 32%

66 of 100 times cast 66%

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 660,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.