Live Play Data

Forbidden Alchemy

· Instant · Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander (TDC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

230

Decks Running

116

Median Cast Turn

6.0

Drawn → Played

64%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=34

12%

15%

50%

T6-9

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 12

On curve 21% (4 / 34 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 33%

The "good card" funnel

230 brought · 107 players

Brought to game

230

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ +8.7pp

Players who cast this card win 48% of the time (n=28) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=121).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 23% (n=16).

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 +27.3pp; 95% confidence interval +8.7pp to +45.9pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

82 instances

2.4%

Library

2.4%

Battlefield

73.2%

Graveyard

14.6%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 43 decks
2 Teval, the Balanced Scale 42 decks
3 Sauron, the Dark Lord 10 decks
4 Sefris of the Hidden Ways 8 decks
5 Be'lakor, the Dark Master 2 decks
6 Emet-Selch of the Third Seat 2 decks
7 Araumi of the Dead Tide 1 decks
8 Dakkon Blackblade 1 decks
9 Emet-Selch, Unsundered // Hades, Sorcerer of Eld 1 decks
10 Golbez, Crystal Collector 1 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 670,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.