Live Play Data

Flare of Malice

· Instant · Modern Horizons 3 (MH3)

Live Inclusion

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

685

Decks Running

346

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

74%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=109

19%

59%

T6-9

14%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 14

On curve 8% (7 / 109 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 33%

The "good card" funnel

686 brought · 319 players

Brought to game

686

Ever drawn

148

Reached battlefield

109

Still on board at game end

≥ -9.9pp

Players who cast this card win 27% of the time (n=101) , vs 28% when it never left the library (n=433).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 21% (n=32).

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 -0.9pp; 95% confidence interval -9.9pp to +8.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

167 instances

1.8%

Library

4.2%

Battlefield

65.9%

Graveyard

10.8%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 81 decks
2 Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow 18 decks
3 Vren, the Relentless 14 decks
4 Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern 12 decks
5 Vincent Valentine // Galian Beast 7 decks
6 Ares, God of War 6 decks
7 Baron Helmut Zemo 6 decks
8 Super Shredder 5 decks
9 Braids, Arisen Nightmare 4 decks
10 Carmen, Cruel Skymarcher 4 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 690,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.