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Stinging Study

· Instant · Commander 2021 (C21)

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Times Brought

203

Decks Running

107

In Decks

—

Decklist Inclusion

—

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Showing 1v1 (duel) data only. 1v1 is a different format from multiplayer Commander, so these numbers are not comparable.

Card text

Stinging Study

Instant

You draw X cards and you lose X life, where X is the mana value of a commander you own on the battlefield or in the command zone.

Commander 2021 (C21) · Rare · Illustrated by Kieran Yanner

Final zone distribution

39 instances

2.6%

Battlefield

56.4%

Graveyard

10.3%

Exile

30.8%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

The "good card" funnel

203 brought · 101 players

Brought to game

203

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ +1.8pp

Players who cast this card win 36% of the time (n=18) , vs 23% when it never left the library (n=125).

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 +13.3pp; 95% confidence interval +1.8pp to +24.8pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

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 690,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.