Live Play Data

Rootborn Defenses

· Instant · The List (PLST)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

1787

Decks Running

785

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

42%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=149

60%

T6-9

28%

T10+

Median 8 P25 7 · P75 10 · max 18

On curve 1% (1 / 149 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 21%

The "good card" funnel

1787 brought · 693 players

Brought to game

1787

Ever drawn

353

Reached battlefield

149

Still on board at game end

≥ +0.6pp

Players who cast this card win 30% of the time (n=137) , vs 22% when it never left the library (n=1215).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 24% (n=183).

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 +8.2pp; 95% confidence interval +0.6pp to +15.9pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

380 instances

3.4%

Library

4.2%

Battlefield

43.7%

Graveyard

3.9%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Rootborn Defenses

Instant

Populate. Creatures you control gain indestructible until end of turn. (To populate, create a token that's a copy of a creature token you control.)

The List (PLST) · Common · Illustrated by Mark Zug

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 770,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.