Live Play Data

Flare of Malice

· Instant · Modern Horizons 3 (MH3)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

1318

Decks Running

609

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

69%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=193

10%

17%

55%

T6-9

15%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 15

On curve 13% (20 / 193 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 35%

The "good card" funnel

1321 brought · 534 players

Brought to game

1321

Ever drawn

281

Reached battlefield

193

Still on board at game end

≥ -6.0pp

Players who cast this card win 29% of the time (n=180) , vs 29% when it never left the library (n=835).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 24% (n=73).

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 -6.0pp to +7.8pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

323 instances

1.9%

Library

4.0%

Battlefield

64.4%

Graveyard

9.9%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 139 decks
2 Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow 32 decks
3 Vren, the Relentless 31 decks
4 Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern 28 decks
5 Avacyn, Angel of Horror 23 decks
6 Vincent Valentine // Galian Beast 16 decks
7 Super Shredder 11 decks
8 Ares, God of War 8 decks
9 The Ghoul, Gunslinger 8 decks
10 Baron Helmut Zemo 7 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 760,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.