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Tainted Strike

· Instant · Scars of Mirrodin (SOM)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

223

Decks Running

117

In Decks

810

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Tainted Strike

Instant

Target creature gets +1/+0 and gains infect until end of turn. (It deals damage to creatures in the form of -1/-1 counters and to players in the form of poison counters.)

Scars of Mirrodin (SOM) · Common · Illustrated by James Ryman

Final zone distribution

55 instances

1.8%

Library

7.3%

Battlefield

49.1%

Graveyard

3.6%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Atraxa, Praetors' Voice 19 decks
2 Jin Sakai, Ghost of Tsushima 11 decks
3 Karumonix, the Rat King 4 decks
4 The Serpent Society 4 decks
5 Wick, the Whorled Mind 4 decks
6 Indoraptor, the Perfect Hybrid 3 decks
7 Zenos yae Galvus // Shinryu, Transcendent Rival 3 decks
8 Black Waltz No. 3 2 decks
9 Greven, Predator Captain 2 decks
10 Ixhel, Scion of Atraxa 2 decks

The "good card" funnel

223 brought · 109 players

Brought to game

223

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -8.7pp

Players who cast this card win 34% of the time (n=22) , vs 22% when it never left the library (n=150).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 15% (n=22) — 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 +12.2pp; 95% confidence interval -8.7pp to +33.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=24

13%

58%

T6-9

13%

T10+

Median 7.0 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 15

On curve 4% (1 / 24 cast on T1) Cast same turn as drawn 33%

24 of 100 times cast 24%

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.