Live Play Data

Kaervek the Merciless

· Legendary Creature — Human Shaman · Duskmourn: House of Horror Commander (DSC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

911

Decks Running

350

Median Cast Turn

7.0

Drawn → Played

53%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=124

10%

59%

T6-9

20%

T10+

Median 7.0 P25 6 · P75 9 · max 19

On curve 58% (21 / 124 cast on T7) Cast same turn as drawn 40%

The "good card" funnel

914 brought · 320 players

Brought to game

914

Ever drawn

214

Reached battlefield

114

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 48% 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.

≥ -9.3pp

Players who cast this card win 27% of the time (n=106) , vs 28% when it never left the library (n=576).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 25% (n=87).

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 -0.6pp; 95% confidence interval -9.3pp to +8.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

236 instances

2.5%

Library

23.3%

Battlefield

30.9%

Graveyard

9.3%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls 157 decks
2 Kardur, Doomscourge 38 decks
3 The Lord of Pain 32 decks
4 Yurlok of Scorch Thrash 23 decks
5 The Infamous Cruelclaw 13 decks
6 Rakdos, Lord of Riots 12 decks
7 Mogis, God of Slaughter 7 decks
8 Obosh, the Preypiercer 5 decks
9 Nekusar, the Mindrazer 4 decks
10 Vial Smasher the Fierce 4 decks

Card text

Kaervek the Merciless

Legendary Creature — Human Shaman

Whenever an opponent casts a spell, Kaervek deals damage equal to that spell's mana value to any target.

5 / 4

Duskmourn: House of Horror Commander (DSC) · Rare · Illustrated by Heonhwa

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 720,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.