Card Preview

Pensive Professor

· Creature — Human Wizard · Secrets of Strixhaven (SOS)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

279

Decks Running

114

In Decks

509

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Pensive Professor

Creature — Human Wizard

Increment (Whenever you cast a spell, if the amount of mana you spent is greater than this creature's power or toughness, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature.) Whenever one or more +1/+1 counters are put on this creature, draw a card.

0 / 2

Secrets of Strixhaven (SOS) · Rare · Illustrated by Billy Christian

Final zone distribution

59 instances

3.4%

Library

30.5%

Battlefield

23.7%

Graveyard

5.1%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

The "good card" funnel

279 brought · 104 players

Brought to game

279

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

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.

≥ -16.6pp

Players who cast this card win 22% of the time (n=31) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=189).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 46% (n=21) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.

Observed gap -2.6pp; 95% confidence interval -16.6pp to +11.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=34

15%

18%

21%

26%

T6-9

12%

T10+

Median 5.0 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 12

On curve 24% (5 / 34 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 25%

34 of 100 times cast 34%

Full analysis unlocks as more games are tracked. Stats refresh nightly.

Frequently Asked

Why isn't there more data on this card?

Playgroup Live collects per-card gameplay data from real Commander games. Basic play counts appear once a card reaches 100 tracked games; the full deep-dive page needs a larger, more diverse sample (at least 300 tracked games played by 10 or more different pilots, with no single pilot over 40 percent of the copies). 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 650,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.