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Force of Despair

· Instant · Modern Horizons (MH1)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

289

Decks Running

121

In Decks

819

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Force of Despair

Instant

If it's not your turn, you may exile a black card from your hand rather than pay this spell's mana cost. Destroy all creatures that entered this turn.

Modern Horizons (MH1) · Rare · Illustrated by Seb McKinnon

Final zone distribution

75 instances

6.7%

Library

60.0%

Graveyard

18.7%

Exile

14.7%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Vren, the Relentless 8 decks
2 Tinybones, Bauble Burglar 7 decks
3 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 6 decks
4 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 5 decks
5 Baron Helmut Zemo 4 decks
6 Jodah, the Unifier 4 decks
7 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth 4 decks
8 Sheoldred, the Apocalypse 4 decks
9 Toshiro Umezawa 4 decks
10 Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow 4 decks

The "good card" funnel

290 brought · 110 players

Brought to game

290

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -1.1pp

Players who cast this card win 44% of the time (n=39) , vs 29% when it never left the library (n=184).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 49% (n=19) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.

Observed gap +15.1pp; 95% confidence interval -1.1pp to +31.3pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=41

10%

15%

54%

T6-9

20%

T10+

Median 7 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 11

On curve 2% (1 / 41 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 8%

41 of 100 times cast 41%

Full analysis unlocks as more games are tracked. Stats refresh nightly.

Frequently Asked

Why isn't there more data on this card?

Playgroup Live collects per-card gameplay data from real Commander games. Basic play counts appear once a card reaches 100 tracked games; the full deep-dive page needs a larger, more diverse sample (at least 300 tracked games played by 10 or more different pilots, with no single pilot over 40 percent of the copies). 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 650,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.