Live Play Data

Kess, Dissident Mage

· Legendary Creature — Human Wizard · New Capenna Commander (NCC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

454

Decks Running

189

Median Cast Turn

5.0

Drawn → Played

55%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=108

11%

15%

22%

44%

T6-9

T10+

Median 5.0 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 12

On curve 29% (16 / 108 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 31%

The "good card" funnel

454 brought · 177 players

Brought to game

454

Ever drawn

137

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 46% 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.

≥ +5.0pp

Players who cast this card win 37% of the time (n=68) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=263).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 24% (n=58).

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 +16.5pp; 95% confidence interval +5.0pp to +28.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

150 instances

2.0%

Library

23.3%

Battlefield

34.0%

Graveyard

5.3%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Kess, Dissident Mage

Legendary Creature — Human Wizard

Flying Once during each of your turns, you may cast an instant or sorcery spell from your graveyard. If a spell cast this way would be put into your graveyard, exile it instead.

3 / 4

New Capenna Commander (NCC) · Mythic · Illustrated by Izzy

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 740,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.