Card Preview

Ill-Timed Explosion

· Sorcery · Murders at Karlov Manor (MKM)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

Decks Running

In Decks

282

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Ill-Timed Explosion

Sorcery

Draw two cards. Then you may discard two cards. When you do, Ill-Timed Explosion deals X damage to each creature, where X is the greatest mana value among cards discarded this way.

Murders at Karlov Manor (MKM) · Rare · Illustrated by Aaron J. Riley

Final zone distribution

32 instances

Not enough tracked games yet to show a reliable final-zone breakdown.

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 The Emperor of Palamecia // The Lord Master of Hell 15 decks
2 Ashling, Rekindled // Ashling, Rimebound 5 decks
3 Cormela, Glamour Thief 5 decks
4 Lilah, Undefeated Slickshot 5 decks
5 Captain Howler, Sea Scourge 4 decks
6 Human Torch 3 decks
7 Norman Osborn // Green Goblin 3 decks
8 Rootha, Mastering the Moment 2 decks
9 Admiral Brass, Unsinkable 1 decks
10 Alania, Divergent Storm 1 decks

The "good card" funnel

98 brought · 61 players

Brought to game

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -13.6pp

Players who cast this card win 28% of the time (n=15) , vs 19% when it never left the library (n=64).

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 +9.4pp; 95% confidence interval -13.6pp to +32.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

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 760,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.