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Painful Quandary

· Enchantment · Foundations (FDN)

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Times Brought

215

Decks Running

121

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

47 instances

42.6%

Battlefield

21.3%

Graveyard

6.4%

Exile

29.8%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls 10 decks
2 Kefka, Court Mage // Kefka, Ruler of Ruin 7 decks
3 Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern 7 decks
4 Tinybones, Bauble Burglar 7 decks
5 The Lord of Pain 5 decks
6 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 5 decks
7 Liesa, Shroud of Dusk 4 decks
8 Zur, Eternal Schemer 3 decks
9 Aminatou, Veil Piercer 2 decks
10 Anikthea, Hand of Erebos 2 decks

The "good card" funnel

215 brought · 116 players

Brought to game

215

Ever drawn

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.

≥ -2.5pp

Players who cast this card win 28% of the time (n=23) , vs 20% when it never left the library (n=138).

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 +8.2pp; 95% confidence interval -2.5pp to +18.9pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=24

25%

29%

46%

T6-9

T10+

Median 5.0 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 9

On curve 54% (7 / 24 cast on T5) Cast same turn as drawn 21%

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.