Live Play Data

Silverback Elder

· Creature — Ape Shaman · Dominaria United (DMU)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

659

Decks Running

320

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

68%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=121

12%

19%

60%

T6-9

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 13

On curve 32% (23 / 121 cast on T5) Cast same turn as drawn 28%

The "good card" funnel

659 brought · 283 players

Brought to game

659

Ever drawn

178

Reached battlefield

121

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.

≥ +3.9pp

Players who cast this card win 41% of the time (n=105) , vs 28% when it never left the library (n=400).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 25% (n=52).

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 +13.4pp; 95% confidence interval +3.9pp to +22.9pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

193 instances

3.6%

Library

35.2%

Battlefield

24.9%

Graveyard

10.4%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

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

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 710,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.