Live Play Data

Riddles in the Dark

· Instant · The Hobbit (HOB)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

191

Decks Running

109

Median Cast Turn

6.5

Drawn → Played

69%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=42

12%

14%

45%

T6-9

21%

T10+

Median 6.5 P25 4 · P75 9 · max 15

On curve 14% (5 / 42 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 32%

The "good card" funnel

191 brought · 96 players

Brought to game

191

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -9.0pp

Players who cast this card win 32% of the time (n=37) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=100).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 43% (n=15).

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 +7.7pp; 95% confidence interval -9.0pp to +24.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

70 instances

2.9%

Battlefield

62.9%

Graveyard

12.9%

Exile

21.4%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, the Dark Lord 20 decks
2 Bilbo, Thief in the Night 14 decks
3 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 12 decks
4 Gandalf, Party Guest 10 decks
5 Thranduil, the Elvenking 6 decks
6 Whtz, the Bibliophile 5 decks
7 Lord of the Nazgûl 3 decks
8 The Celestial Toymaker 3 decks
9 Bard, King of Dale 2 decks
10 Emet-Selch, Unsundered // Hades, Sorcerer of Eld 2 decks

Card text

Riddles in the Dark

Instant

Look at the top four cards of your library and separate them into a face-down pile and a face-up pile. An opponent chooses one of the piles. Put that pile into your hand and the other into your graveyard.

The Hobbit (HOB) · Rare · Illustrated by Lorenzo Mastroianni

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.