Teferi's Protection
·
Instant
·
Double Masters 2022 (2X2)
16% of tracked Commander decks run Teferi's Protection, and when drawn it reaches the stack 59% of the time, with a median first-cast turn of 8.0.
Teferi's Protection sits in 16% of the 5679 decks tracked on Playgroup Live, appearing across 901 distinct lists. That figure reflects white's broadest safety-valve spell: three mana to phase out your board, lock your life total, and gain protection from everything until your next turn.
The card is a reactive instant, so the cast-turn distribution tells an important story. The median first cast lands on turn 8.0, well past the early-game ramp window. Players hold it as a response piece: the median time a drawn copy sat in hand before being cast was 4 turns, and only 14% of casts happened on the same turn the card was drawn. That patience is by design. You don't cast Teferi's Protection; you deploy it when the board demands it.
In multiplayer Commander, decks running Teferi's Protection show a 32% win rate in games where it resolved, compared to 25% when it stayed in the library the entire game. That's a directional +7.1 percentage-point lift across a healthy sample of 232 cast observations and 1153 library observations. The data is consistent with the card's reputation as a game-extending, often game-deciding panic button.
- 16% of tracked Commander decks include Teferi's Protection
- T8.0 median first-cast turn, reflecting its role as a reactive instant held for the right moment
- 59% of drawn copies reached the stack before the game ended
- 14% same-turn cast rate, players almost always hold it rather than slamming it immediately
- +7.1pp win-rate lift when cast versus when it stayed in the library all game
- 590 unique players have brought Teferi's Protection to a tracked game, a well-spread dataset
First-cast turn
n=242The "good card" funnel
1728 brought · 590 playersOf 1728 copies brought to games, 412 were drawn, 242 of those resolved on the stack, and from there the card exiles itself, so its impact lives in the turns that follow rather than in a persistent battlefield presence.
Players who cast this card win 32% of the time (n=232) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=1153).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 30% (n=158) — 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 +7.1pp; 95% confidence interval +1.1pp to +13.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
460 instancesMost copies end the game in the graveyard or hand rather than exile, because only cast copies hit the exile zone stipulated by the card's own text. The library bucket is small, meaning a meaningful share of brought copies were actually interacted with or drawn.
Commanders that played this card
in tracked games-
1
The Ur-Dragon
32 decks
-
2
Giada, Font of Hope
22 decks
-
3
Baylen, the Haymaker
18 decks
-
4
Gishath, Sun's Avatar
17 decks
-
5
Kaalia of the Vast
17 decks
-
6
Edgar Markov
15 decks
-
7
Mr. House, President and CEO
14 decks
-
8
Y'shtola, Night's Blessed
13 decks
-
9
Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER
12 decks
-
10
Esika, God of the Tree // The Prismatic Bridge
12 decks
The top commanders span five-color goodstuff, mono-white angels, and aggro-midrange Mardu and Naya builds, a spread that confirms Teferi's Protection is a white-staple role-player rather than a narrow archetype pick.