Live Play Data
Painful Quandary
·
Enchantment
·
Foundations (FDN)
2%
Live Inclusion
Times Brought
1001
Decks Running
476
Median Cast Turn
6
Drawn → Played
71%
Format
First-cast turn
n=159
1%
T1
1%
T2
4%
T3
11%
T4
19%
T5
51%
T6-9
13%
T10+
Median
6
P25
5
· P75
8
· max
17
On curve
36%
(30 / 159 cast on T5)
Cast same turn as drawn
30%
The "good card" funnel
1003 brought · 425 playersBrought to game
1003
Ever drawn
223
Reached battlefield
159
Still on board at game end
94
Once cast, 59% 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.
≥ +1.0pp
Players who cast this card win 30% of the time (n=146) , vs 22% when it never left the library (n=637).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 12% (n=59).
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 +8.6pp; 95% confidence interval +1.0pp to +16.2pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
257 instances3.1%
Library
36.6%
Battlefield
31.1%
Graveyard
8.6%
Exile
Commanders that played this card
in tracked games-
1
Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls
52 decks
-
2
Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern
32 decks
-
3
Y'shtola, Night's Blessed
27 decks
-
4
Kefka, Court Mage // Kefka, Ruler of Ruin
22 decks
-
5
Tinybones, Bauble Burglar
22 decks
-
6
The Lord of Pain
21 decks
-
7
Mogis, God of Slaughter
14 decks
-
8
Aminatou, Veil Piercer
13 decks
-
9
Liesa, Shroud of Dusk
11 decks
-
10
Tinybones, Trinket Thief
10 decks
Card text
Painful Quandary
Enchantment
Whenever an opponent casts a spell, that player loses 5 life unless they discard a card.
Foundations (FDN)
·
Rare
·
Illustrated by David Palumbo
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 710,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.