Card Preview

Silverback Elder

· Creature — Ape Shaman · Dominaria United (DMU)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

240

Decks Running

133

In Decks

879

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Silverback Elder

Creature — Ape Shaman

Whenever you cast a creature spell, choose one — • Destroy target artifact or enchantment. • Look at the top five cards of your library. You may put a land card from among them onto the battlefield tapped. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order. • You gain 4 life.

5 / 7

Dominaria United (DMU) · Mythic · Illustrated by Alexander Mokhov

Final zone distribution

58 instances

5.2%

Library

39.7%

Battlefield

22.4%

Graveyard

12.1%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

The "good card" funnel

240 brought · 118 players

Brought to game

240

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 56% of this card is still on the battlefield at game end. This reflects how often it survives removal, not just whether it's a permanent.

≥ +0.4pp

Players who cast this card win 41% of the time (n=36) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=159).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 18% (n=15) — 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 +16.2pp; 95% confidence interval +0.4pp to +32.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=41

17%

15%

59%

T6-9

10%

T10+

Median 7 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 13

On curve 32% (6 / 41 cast on T5) Cast same turn as drawn 24%

41 of 100 times cast 41%

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 650,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.