Gray Merchant of Asphodel

Across 160 tracked games, Gary was drawn in 21.4% of deck-participations where it was included. That is slightly below the baseline expectation for a singleton in a 100-card deck, consistent with the card sitting in the mid-to-high end of the mana curve and often arriving too late to survive to a draw step. Of the 38 instances we observed in hand, 20 were cast before the game ended — a draw-to-play rate of 44.7%.

Gary costs five mana and demands meaningful black devotion to be impactful. Players who draw it early may deliberately hold it until they've built a critical mass of black permanents, which the hand-to-cast data supports: the median wait from draw to cast is 1 turn but the average is 3.06 turns, with one player holding it for 12 turns. Only 29% of copies are cast on the same turn they are drawn. Some late-drawn copies simply run out of time before the game ends.

It means that, in our tracked game sample, decks casting Gary won 55% of the time compared to 41.6% for games where it sat in the library all game. The direction is clear: getting Gary onto the battlefield is correlated with winning. We treat this as a strong directional signal rather than a definitive proof — Playgroup Live's live-game dataset is still growing, and the 20-game cast bucket is meaningful but not enormous. The 137-game library bucket gives us a solid baseline for comparison.

The median first-cast turn is 8, with the middle 50% of casts falling between turns 7 and 9. The earliest recorded cast is turn 4, likely via ramp. Only 1 of the 20 recorded casts landed exactly on curve (turn 5), and 18 landed behind curve — mostly because the card was drawn after the early game rather than held deliberately. By turn 7 or later, black devotion is typically high enough for Gary to drain for 6 or more life per opponent.

The top two slots are Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls (13 decks) and Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver (12 decks), both of which lean heavily on black permanents even if they branch into a second color. Pure mono-black commanders like Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER (9 decks), Braids, Arisen Nightmare (6), Liliana, Heretical Healer (6), and Moseo, Vein's New Dean (6) follow closely. The spread across ten distinct commanders suggests Gary sees play across a broad range of black-focused strategies, not just a single archetype.

Gary is legal in Commander, Pauper Commander, Pioneer, Legacy, Modern, Vintage, Historic, Timeless, Gladiator, Duel Commander, and Brawl. It is not legal in Standard (it has rotated out), PreDH, Old School, or Premodern. Despite being an uncommon, its power ceiling in mono-black devotion shells is high enough that it has never been a ban target in Commander.