Live Play Data

Mages' Contest

· Instant · Invasion (INV)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

137

Decks Running

Median Cast Turn

—

Drawn → Played

52%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=16

Not enough observed casts yet to show a reliable distribution.

The "good card" funnel

138 brought · 55 players

Brought to game

138

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -27.0pp

Players who cast this card win 20% of the time (n=16) , vs 27% when it never left the library (n=94).

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 -7.1pp; 95% confidence interval -27.0pp to +12.8pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

37 instances

5.4%

Library

10.8%

Battlefield

43.2%

Graveyard

8.1%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Kuja, Genome Sorcerer // Trance Kuja, Fate Defied 5 decks
2 Alexios, Deimos of Kosmos 2 decks
3 Greven, Predator Captain 2 decks
4 Marisi, Breaker of the Coil 2 decks
5 Mr. House, President and CEO 2 decks
6 Xantcha, Sleeper Agent 2 decks
7 Yusri, Fortune's Flame 2 decks
8 Adamaro, First to Desire 1 decks
9 Aisha of Sparks and Smoke 1 decks
10 Ashaya's Enduring Bond 1 decks

Card text

Mages' Contest

Instant

You and target spell's controller bid life. You start the bidding with a bid of 1. In turn order, each player may top the high bid. The bidding ends if the high bid stands. The high bidder loses life equal to the high bid. If you win the bidding, counter that spell.

Invasion (INV) · Rare · Illustrated by Bradley Williams

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 770,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.