Tainted Field
87% of drawn Tainted Fields are played before the game ends, one of the highest land-to-battlefield conversion rates on Playgroup Live, with a median first-cast turn of 4.
Tainted Field converts drawn copies into played lands at an 87% rate across 527 tracked multiplayer Commander games on Playgroup Live. That figure is among the clearest early signals the dataset surfaces for any utility land: when players draw it, it hits the table.
The card's appeal is structural. It enters untapped and taps for colorless unconditionally, but inside any deck that already runs Swamps it becomes a dual land for White and Black at zero mana cost. The conditional clause rarely fails to fire in the Orzhov and Mardu shells that dominate its commander list. 95% battlefield stickiness reflects that lands are almost never removed once down.
At 12% of tracked decks, Tainted Field sits in a niche slice of the metagame, mostly Black-White shells and three-color builds that include Black. The commander distribution is notably spread: 300 distinct players have brought it to a tracked game, and no single player accounts for more than a small fraction of observations, lending the data reasonable breadth for its sample size.
- 12% of tracked Commander decks include Tainted Field
- 87% of drawn copies reached the battlefield before the game ended
- T4 median turn Tainted Field first hit play
- 95% battlefield stickiness once the land is played
- 300 distinct players have brought Tainted Field to a tracked game
First-cast turn
n=117The "good card" funnel
551 brought · 300 playersOf 551 Tainted Fields brought to games, 135 were drawn, 117 of those were played, and nearly all stayed on the battlefield through the end of the game.
Players who cast this card win 28% of the time (n=112) , vs 24% when it never left the library (n=358).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 21% (n=17) — 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 +4.9pp; 95% confidence interval -4.0pp to +13.7pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
152 instancesThe vast majority of Tainted Field copies finish on the battlefield, a sharp contrast to most singleton cards that spend entire games buried in the library without being found.
Commanders that played this card
in tracked games-
1
Caesar, Legion's Emperor
20 decks
-
2
Teysa Karlov
16 decks
-
3
Aminatou, Veil Piercer
13 decks
-
4
Edgar Markov
13 decks
-
5
Clavileño, First of the Blessed
10 decks
-
6
Mr. House, President and CEO
10 decks
-
7
Astarion, the Decadent
9 decks
-
8
Breena, the Demagogue
8 decks
-
9
Silverquill, the Disputant
8 decks
-
10
Brimaz, Blight of Oreskos
7 decks
The commander list spans Orzhov, Mardu, and Esper builds, with no single commander dominating, reflecting how broadly any Black-White shell can slot in a free conditional dual.