Card Preview

Sadistic Shell Game

· Sorcery · Duskmourn: House of Horror Commander (DSC)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

166

Decks Running

In Decks

530

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Sadistic Shell Game

Sorcery

Starting with the next opponent in turn order, each player chooses a creature you don't control. Destroy the chosen creatures.

Duskmourn: House of Horror Commander (DSC) · Rare · Illustrated by Karl Kopinski

Final zone distribution

47 instances

2.1%

Library

2.1%

Battlefield

51.1%

Graveyard

6.4%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

The "good card" funnel

167 brought · 93 players

Brought to game

167

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -19.4pp

Players who cast this card win 21% of the time (n=21) , vs 22% when it never left the library (n=110).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 9% (n=16) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.

Observed gap -1.0pp; 95% confidence interval -19.4pp to +17.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=23

22%

57%

T6-9

22%

T10+

Median 7 P25 6 · P75 9 · max 15

On curve 22% (5 / 23 cast on T5)

23 of 100 times cast 23%

Full analysis unlocks as more games are tracked. Stats refresh nightly.

Frequently Asked

Why isn't there more data on this card?

Playgroup Live collects per-card gameplay data from real Commander games. Basic play counts appear once a card reaches 100 tracked games; the full deep-dive page needs a larger, more diverse sample (at least 300 tracked games played by 10 or more different pilots, with no single pilot over 40 percent of the copies). 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 660,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.