Live Play Data
Painful Quandary
·
Enchantment
·
Foundations (FDN)
3%
Live Inclusion
Times Brought
409
Decks Running
217
Median Cast Turn
6.0
Drawn → Played
68%
Format
First-cast turn
n=64
2%
T1
2%
T2
6%
T3
9%
T4
23%
T5
48%
T6-9
9%
T10+
Median
6.0
P25
5
· P75
8
· max
17
On curve
42%
(15 / 64 cast on T5)
Cast same turn as drawn
31%
The "good card" funnel
411 brought · 196 playersBrought to game
411
Ever drawn
94
Reached battlefield
64
Still on board at game end
34
Once cast, 53% 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.
≥ -5.4pp
Players who cast this card win 26% of the time (n=61) , vs 20% when it never left the library (n=245).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 15% (n=30).
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 +5.6pp; 95% confidence interval -5.4pp to +16.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
113 instances3.5%
Library
30.1%
Battlefield
36.3%
Graveyard
8.0%
Exile
Commanders that played this card
in tracked games-
1
Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls
20 decks
-
2
The Lord of Pain
14 decks
-
3
Tinybones, Bauble Burglar
13 decks
-
4
Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern
9 decks
-
5
Y'shtola, Night's Blessed
9 decks
-
6
Kefka, Court Mage // Kefka, Ruler of Ruin
8 decks
-
7
Aminatou, Veil Piercer
6 decks
-
8
Mogis, God of Slaughter
5 decks
-
9
Anikthea, Hand of Erebos
4 decks
-
10
Dr. Eggman
4 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 680,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.