Live Play Data

Forbidden Alchemy

· Instant · Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander (TDC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

471

Decks Running

239

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

64%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=75

17%

13%

40%

T6-9

T10+

Median 5 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 12

On curve 24% (13 / 75 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 29%

The "good card" funnel

471 brought · 218 players

Brought to game

471

Ever drawn

118

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ +1.4pp

Players who cast this card win 34% of the time (n=64) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=242).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 19% (n=35).

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 +13.2pp; 95% confidence interval +1.4pp to +25.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

174 instances

2.3%

Library

1.1%

Battlefield

70.7%

Graveyard

13.8%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 82 decks
2 Teval, the Balanced Scale 72 decks
3 Sauron, the Dark Lord 30 decks
4 Sefris of the Hidden Ways 15 decks
5 Saruman, the White Hand 7 decks
6 Lord of the Nazgûl 3 decks
7 Sin, Spira's Punishment 3 decks
8 Araumi of the Dead Tide 2 decks
9 Be'lakor, the Dark Master 2 decks
10 Emet-Selch, Unsundered // Hades, Sorcerer of Eld 2 decks

Card text

Forbidden Alchemy

Instant

Look at the top four cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand and the rest into your graveyard. Flashback {6}

(You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost. Then exile it.)

Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander (TDC) · Common · Illustrated by David Rapoza

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 730,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.