Live Play Data

Merchant of Venom

· Creature — Cat Warlock · Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

252

Decks Running

150

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

79%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=49

22%

45%

T6-9

18%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 19

On curve 14% (4 / 49 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 23%

The "good card" funnel

252 brought · 143 players

Brought to game

252

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 29% 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.

≥ -6.2pp

Players who cast this card win 28% of the time (n=49) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=156).

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 +7.4pp; 95% confidence interval -6.2pp to +21.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

64 instances

1.6%

Library

21.9%

Battlefield

42.2%

Graveyard

14.1%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Dina, Essence Brewer 125 decks
2 Dina, Soul Steeper 3 decks
3 Gorma, the Gullet 3 decks
4 Marchesa, the Black Rose 3 decks
5 Blech, Loafing Pest 2 decks
6 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 2 decks
7 Tom, Bert, and William 2 decks
8 Torgaar, Famine Incarnate 2 decks
9 Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate 1 decks
10 Beledros Witherbloom 1 decks

Card text

Merchant of Venom

Creature — Cat Warlock

Menace When this creature enters, each player sacrifices a creature of their choice. Whenever a player sacrifices a permanent, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature.

1 / 1

Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC) · Rare · Illustrated by Diana Franco

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 700,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.