Live Play Data

Risky Shortcut

· Sorcery · Aetherdrift (DFT)

Live Inclusion

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

448

Decks Running

203

Median Cast Turn

6.0

Drawn → Played

69%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=66

12%

21%

52%

T6-9

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 5 · P75 7 · max 13

On curve 14% (8 / 66 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 23%

The "good card" funnel

448 brought · 188 players

Brought to game

448

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -11.6pp

Players who cast this card win 26% of the time (n=59) , vs 26% when it never left the library (n=298).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 32% (n=23).

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 +0.1pp; 95% confidence interval -11.6pp to +11.7pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

108 instances

1.9%

Library

0.9%

Battlefield

58.3%

Graveyard

15.7%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 104 decks
2 Kuja, Genome Sorcerer // Trance Kuja, Fate Defied 16 decks
3 Rakdos, Lord of Riots 5 decks
4 Belbe, Corrupted Observer 3 decks
5 Far Fortune, End Boss 3 decks
6 Gev, Scaled Scorch 3 decks
7 Kardur, Doomscourge 3 decks
8 Phage the Untouchable 3 decks
9 Strefan, Maurer Progenitor 3 decks
10 Zenos yae Galvus // Shinryu, Transcendent Rival 3 decks

Card text

Risky Shortcut

Sorcery

Draw two cards. Each player loses 2 life.

Aetherdrift (DFT) · Common · Illustrated by Ignatius Budi

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.