Live Play Data

Forbidden Alchemy

· Instant · Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander (TDC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

364

Decks Running

186

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

64%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=59

15%

14%

15%

42%

T6-9

T10+

Median 6 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 12

On curve 20% (9 / 59 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 26%

The "good card" funnel

364 brought · 173 players

Brought to game

364

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ +2.1pp

Players who cast this card win 37% of the time (n=50) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=187).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 19% (n=27).

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 +15.9pp; 95% confidence interval +2.1pp to +29.7pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

133 instances

1.5%

Library

1.5%

Battlefield

72.9%

Graveyard

14.3%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 69 decks
2 Teval, the Balanced Scale 58 decks
3 Sauron, the Dark Lord 21 decks
4 Sefris of the Hidden Ways 9 decks
5 Saruman, the White Hand 7 decks
6 Be'lakor, the Dark Master 2 decks
7 Emet-Selch, Unsundered // Hades, Sorcerer of Eld 2 decks
8 Lord of the Nazgûl 2 decks
9 Sin, Spira's Punishment 2 decks
10 Teval, Arbiter of Virtue 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 700,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.