Live Play Data

Graven Cairns

Land · Duskmourn: House of Horror Commander (DSC)

13%

Live Inclusion

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

1374

Decks Running

675

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

77%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Graven Cairns appears in 13% of tracked Commander decks on Playgroup Live, and 77% of drawn copies reach the battlefield, median first play on turn 4.

Graven Cairns is a consistent mana-fixing staple for any Commander deck running black and red. Across 1305 tracked multiplayer games on Playgroup Live, it sits in 675 of 5354 distinct decks, a 13% inclusion rate that reflects its near-automatic slot in Rakdos, Mardu, and Grixis builds.

The draw-to-play rate of 77% means most copies that reach a hand do eventually hit the table. Median first play lands on turn 4, which is exactly where a mana-fixer wants to be. The data is well-spread across 568 unique players, with no single contributor accounting for more than a small fraction of observations, lending the numbers reasonable breadth for a card at this inclusion level.

As a filter land, Graven Cairns asks for a black or red mana to unlock double-colored production. That cost makes it slightly less explosive than a basic dual but far more flexible than most single-color fixers. The commander distribution reflects that: it shows up most in pure Rakdos builds but threads comfortably into three-color pairings that touch black and red.

At a glance

13% of tracked Commander decks include Graven Cairns
77% of drawn copies are played before the game ends
T4 median first-play turn
93% battlefield stickiness once it enters play
568 unique players have brought Graven Cairns to a tracked game
1379 total times brought to a game across the dataset

First-cast turn

n=227

14%

18%

11%

24%

T6-9

T10+

Median 4 P25 2 · P75 6 · max 15

Cast same turn as drawn 50%

The "good card" funnel

1379 brought · 568 players

Brought to game

1379

Ever drawn

294

Reached battlefield

227

Still on board at game end

211

77%

Of 1379 copies brought to games, 294 were drawn, 227 of those were played, and the overwhelming majority remained on the battlefield through the end of the game.

≥ -5.9pp

Players who cast this card win 25% of the time (n=201) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=899).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 25% (n=62) — 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 +0.3pp; 95% confidence interval -5.9pp to +6.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

336 instances

2.7%

Library

62.8%

Battlefield

17.3%

Graveyard

5.4%

Exile

Most Graven Cairns copies that were never interacted with stayed in the library, the normal fate for any singleton in a 100-card deck. The 93% stickiness figure shows that copies which do land almost always stay there.

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls 98 decks
2 Terra, Herald of Hope 72 decks
3 Kuja, Genome Sorcerer // Trance Kuja, Fate Defied 29 decks
4 Smaug the Impenetrable 24 decks
5 Kaalia of the Vast 19 decks
6 Fire Lord Azula 18 decks
7 The Lord of Pain 17 decks
8 Deadpool, Trading Card 16 decks
9 Edgar Markov 15 decks
10 Shadow the Hedgehog 13 decks

Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls leads comfortably, but the list spans pure Rakdos, Mardu, and Grixis commanders, showing Graven Cairns earns its slot across the full range of black-red shells rather than clustering in a single archetype.

Card text

Graven Cairns

Land

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Duskmourn: House of Horror Commander (DSC) · Rare · Illustrated by Anthony S. Waters

Frequently Asked

How often is Graven Cairns drawn in a Commander game?

Across 1305 tracked multiplayer games where Graven Cairns was in the deck, it was drawn 21% of the time. That is consistent with what you'd expect from a singleton in a 100-card deck. Of the 294 copies that reached a hand, 77% were played before the game ended. The remainder are mostly games that ended before the land could be deployed.

What turn does Graven Cairns typically hit the battlefield?

Median first play is turn 4. The distribution is fairly wide, with a cluster of early plays in turns 1 through 3 (likely from opening hands) and a longer tail stretching out to turn 10 and beyond. The p25-p75 range runs from turn 3 to turn 7, so most game-impactful copies land in that window.

Does casting Graven Cairns correlate with winning?

The win rate when Graven Cairns reached the battlefield is 25%, compared to 25% when it stayed in the library. The delta of +0.3 percentage points is small and the confidence interval crosses zero, so treat this as directional noise rather than a strong effect. As a land, Graven Cairns enables your strategy rather than winning by itself, so a neutral win-rate signal is expected.

Is Graven Cairns legal in Commander?

Yes. Graven Cairns is legal in Commander, Duel Commander, Legacy, Modern, Vintage, Oathbreaker, and several other formats. It is not legal in Standard, Pioneer, Alchemy, Historic, Pauper, or Brawl. Its color identity is black and red, so it can only be included in Commander decks whose commander also has a black and red identity (or a superset of those colors).

Which commanders most commonly run Graven Cairns?

Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls leads the pack on Playgroup Live, followed by Terra, Herald of Hope and Kuja, Genome Sorcerer. The spread is wide, covering pure Rakdos commanders as well as Mardu and Grixis builds. That breadth makes sense: any deck with both black and red in its identity can slot this land in as straightforward color fixing.

How reliable is the Graven Cairns data on Playgroup Live?

The dataset covers 1305 tracked multiplayer games and 336 observed instances with meaningful move events. Data comes from 568 distinct players, and the single heaviest contributor accounts for only 21% of instances, so the spread is healthy. Sample sizes for win-rate buckets are above 15 observations each, making the directional signals worth noting, though not statistically conclusive given the overall scale of the dataset.