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Grave Researcher // Reanimate

· Creature — Troll Warlock // Sorcery · Secrets of Strixhaven (SOS)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

403

Decks Running

194

In Decks

1189

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Grave Researcher

Creature — Troll Warlock

At the beginning of your upkeep, surveil 1. Then if there are three or more creature cards in your graveyard, this creature becomes prepared. (While it's prepared, you may cast a copy of its spell. Doing so unprepares it.)

3 / 3

Reanimate

Sorcery

Put target creature card from a graveyard onto the battlefield under your control. You lose life equal to that card's mana value.

Secrets of Strixhaven (SOS) · Rare · Illustrated by Izzy

Final zone distribution

137 instances

2.9%

Library

20.4%

Battlefield

43.8%

Graveyard

11.7%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 10 decks
2 Terra, Herald of Hope 10 decks
3 Dina, Essence Brewer 9 decks
4 Teval, the Balanced Scale 8 decks
5 Sauron, the Dark Lord 6 decks
6 Betor, Ancestor's Voice 5 decks
7 Meren of Clan Nel Toth 5 decks
8 Mirko, Obsessive Theorist 4 decks
9 Silverquill, the Disputant 4 decks
10 Baron Helmut Zemo 3 decks

The "good card" funnel

405 brought · 171 players

Brought to game

405

Ever drawn

103

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 44% of this card is still on the battlefield at game end. This reflects how often it survives removal, not just whether it's a permanent.

≥ -9.2pp

Players who cast this card win 30% of the time (n=52) , vs 27% when it never left the library (n=225).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 21% (n=35) — 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 +3.8pp; 95% confidence interval -9.2pp to +16.8pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=64

11%

14%

42%

T6-9

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 4 · P75 8 · max 15

On curve 25% (9 / 64 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 25%

64 of 100 times cast 64%

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.