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Ral Zarek, Guest Lecturer

· Legendary Planeswalker — Ral · Secrets of Strixhaven (SOS)

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Times Brought

173

Decks Running

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

Ral Zarek, Guest Lecturer

Legendary Planeswalker — Ral

+1: Surveil 2. −1: Any number of target players each discard a card. −2: Return target creature card with mana value 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield. −7: Flip five coins. Target opponent skips their next X turns, where X is the number of coins that came up heads.

Loyalty 3

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

Final zone distribution

39 instances

33.3%

Battlefield

48.7%

Graveyard

2.6%

Exile

15.4%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Tam, the Possibility 8 decks
2 Mirko, Obsessive Theorist 7 decks
3 Imotekh the Stormlord 4 decks
4 Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern 4 decks
5 Kefka, Court Mage // Kefka, Ruler of Ruin 3 decks
6 Setzer, Wandering Gambler 3 decks
7 Baron Helmut Zemo 2 decks
8 Garland, Knight of Cornelia // Chaos, the Endless 2 decks
9 Golbez, Crystal Collector 2 decks
10 Grist, Voracious Larva // Grist, the Plague Swarm 2 decks

The "good card" funnel

173 brought · 82 players

Brought to game

173

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 62% 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.

≥ -22.2pp

Players who cast this card win 15% of the time (n=18) , vs 26% when it never left the library (n=91).

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 -11.1pp; 95% confidence interval -22.2pp to +-0.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=21

29%

10%

48%

T6-9

10%

T10+

Median 6 P25 4 · P75 8 · max 13

On curve 5% (0 / 21 cast on T3)

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 740,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.