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Painful Quandary

· Enchantment · Foundations (FDN)

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Times Brought

812

Decks Running

372

In Decks

—

Decklist Inclusion

—

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Showing 1v1 (duel) data only. 1v1 is a different format from multiplayer Commander, so these numbers are not comparable.

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

Final zone distribution

163 instances

2.5%

Library

47.9%

Battlefield

18.4%

Graveyard

4.9%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls 37 decks
2 Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern 25 decks
3 Tinybones, Bauble Burglar 21 decks
4 Kefka, Court Mage // Kefka, Ruler of Ruin 18 decks
5 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 16 decks
6 Liesa, Shroud of Dusk 14 decks
7 Mogis, God of Slaughter 13 decks
8 Sheoldred, the Apocalypse 11 decks
9 The Lord of Pain 10 decks
10 Nekusar, the Mindrazer 8 decks

The "good card" funnel

813 brought · 342 players

Brought to game

813

Ever drawn

147

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 83% 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.

≥ +2.3pp

Players who cast this card win 30% of the time (n=71) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=466).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 27% (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 +8.4pp; 95% confidence interval +2.3pp to +14.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=94

19%

52%

T6-9

10%

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 14

On curve 38% (18 / 94 cast on T5) Cast same turn as drawn 31%

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 760,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.