Card Preview

Riddles in the Dark

· Instant · The Hobbit (HOB)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

Decks Running

In Decks

241

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

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

Final zone distribution

33 instances

Not enough tracked games yet to show a reliable final-zone breakdown.

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, the Dark Lord 11 decks
2 Bilbo, Thief in the Night 7 decks
3 Gandalf, Party Guest 7 decks
4 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 6 decks
5 Thranduil, the Elvenking 5 decks
6 Whtz, the Bibliophile 4 decks
7 Bard, King of Dale 2 decks
8 The Celestial Toymaker 2 decks
9 Be'lakor, the Dark Master 1 decks
10 Doctor Doom, King of Latveria 1 decks

The "good card" funnel

88 brought · 57 players

Brought to game

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -3.3pp

Players who cast this card win 36% of the time (n=20) , vs 17% when it never left the library (n=45).

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 +19.6pp; 95% confidence interval -3.3pp to +42.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=22

14%

32%

T6-9

27%

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 4 · P75 10 · max 14

On curve 18% (2 / 22 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 29%

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 700,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.