auto_awesome #23 in Black Commander Staples
Force of Despair card art
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Force of Despair

{1} {B} {B} · Instant · Modern Horizons (MH1)
Times Brought
298
Decks Running
143
In Decks
Decklist Inclusion
Format

Showing 1v1 (duel) data only. 1v1 is a different format from multiplayer Commander, so these numbers are not comparable.

Card text
Force of Despair card

Force of Despair

{1} {B} {B}
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

59 instances
3.4%
Library
5.1%
Battlefield
37.3%
Graveyard
23.7%
Exile

The "good card" funnel

298 brought · 128 players
Brought to game
298
Ever drawn
47
Reached battlefield
24
Still on board at game end
3
≥ -23.2pp

Players who cast this card win 13% of the time (n=15) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=156).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 21% (n=17).

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 -12.0pp; 95% confidence interval -23.2pp to -0.8pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=24
17%
T1
4%
T2
8%
T3
4%
T4
25%
T5
33%
T6-9
8%
T10+
Median 5.0 P25 3 · P75 7 · max 10
On curve 29% (2 / 24 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 23%

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 subset of that corpus.