Hidden Strings card art
Live Play Data

Hidden Strings

{1} {U} · Sorcery · Dragon's Maze (DGM)
1%
Live Inclusion
Times Brought
299
Decks Running
136
Median Cast Turn
5
Drawn → Played
49%
Format

First-cast turn

n=37
0%
T1
3%
T2
3%
T3
14%
T4
32%
T5
38%
T6-9
11%
T10+
Median 5 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 12
On curve 3% (1 / 37 cast on T2) Cast same turn as drawn 44%

The "good card" funnel

299 brought · 133 players
Brought to game
299
Ever drawn
76
Reached battlefield
37
Still on board at game end
16
≥ -11.5pp

Players who cast this card win 35% of the time (n=32) , vs 30% when it never left the library (n=182).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 51% (n=33).

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 +5.3pp; 95% confidence interval -11.5pp to +22.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

80 instances
5.0%
Library
20.0%
Battlefield
28.7%
Graveyard
10.0%
Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games
Card text
Hidden Strings card

Hidden Strings

{1} {U}
Sorcery
You may tap or untap target permanent, then you may tap or untap another target permanent. Cipher (Then you may exile this spell card encoded on a creature you control. Whenever that creature deals combat damage to a player, its controller may cast a copy of the encoded card without paying its mana cost.)
Dragon's Maze (DGM) · Common · Illustrated by Daarken

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 730,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.