Lotus Petal
83% of drawn Lotus Petals are cast before the game ends, and the most common first-cast turn is turn 1. That's the signature of a card played exclusively for speed.
Lotus Petal sits in 5% of tracked Commander decks on Playgroup Live, a deliberately narrow niche that reflects its role as a pure fast-mana piece rather than a generalist inclusion. When a copy reaches a player's hand, 83% of those copies are cast before the game concludes.
The cast-turn distribution tells the real story. The single most common turn to cast Lotus Petal is turn 1, and the median sits at turn 3. Players are not holding it for value. They tap it the moment it serves a combo or ramp line. The same-turn cast rate of 79% reinforces this: three-quarters of drawn copies go to the stack on the very turn they are drawn.
Because Lotus Petal is a zero-mana one-shot mana source, it is essentially invisible to anyone not building around storm counts, artifact synergies, or fast combo lines. Its colorless identity means any commander can run it, but in practice it clusters in blue and artifact-heavy strategies where every half-turn of acceleration matters. It is legal in Commander and restricted in Vintage, a useful data point on the card's ceiling.
- 5% of tracked Commander decks include Lotus Petal
- 83% of drawn copies are cast before the game ends
- T3 median first-cast turn, with turn 1 as the single most common cast turn
- 79% of drawn copies are cast on the same turn they are drawn
- 252 distinct players have brought Lotus Petal to a tracked game, well spread across the dataset
- 22% battlefield stickiness, expected for a sacrifice-on-use mana rock
First-cast turn
n=181The "good card" funnel
818 brought · 252 playersOf 818 Lotus Petals brought to tracked games, 217 were drawn and 181 of those were cast, a draw-to-play rate of 83% that is among the highest of any card in the dataset.
Players who cast this card win 32% of the time (n=177) , vs 27% when it never left the library (n=542).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 32% (n=36) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.
Observed gap +4.5pp; 95% confidence interval -2.4pp to +11.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
244 instancesThe large graveyard share reflects Lotus Petal's design: it sacrifices itself to produce mana, so most resolved copies end their game in the bin rather than sitting on the battlefield or cycling back to the library.
Commanders that played this card
in tracked games-
1
Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy
8 decks
-
2
Urza, Lord High Artificer
7 decks
-
3
Esika, God of the Tree // The Prismatic Bridge
6 decks
-
4
Kenrith, the Returned King
6 decks
-
5
Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow
6 decks
-
6
Emry, Lurker of the Loch
5 decks
-
7
Etali, Primal Conqueror // Etali, Primal Sickness
5 decks
-
8
Krenko, Mob Boss
5 decks
-
9
Lumra, Bellow of the Woods
5 decks
-
10
Vivi Ornitier
5 decks
The top-commander list spans five different color identities, from mono-blue Emry to colorless Kozilek, a direct consequence of Lotus Petal's own colorless identity making it a fit for any deck that values a zero-cost mana burst.