Live Play Data

The Ancient One

· Legendary Creature — Spirit God · The Lost Caverns of Ixalan (LCI)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

111

Decks Running

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

89%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=37

11%

19%

35%

T6-9

T10+

Median 4 P25 2 · P75 7 · max 9

On curve 30% (7 / 37 cast on T2) Cast same turn as drawn 39%

The "good card" funnel

111 brought · 34 players

Brought to game

111

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 67% 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.

≥ -6.1pp

Players who cast this card win 23% of the time (n=23) , vs 12% when it never left the library (n=72).

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 +11.0pp; 95% confidence interval -6.1pp to +28.2pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

33 instances

48.5%

Battlefield

30.3%

Graveyard

12.1%

Exile

9.1%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Phenax, God of Deception 10 decks
2 Emet-Selch, Unsundered // Hades, Sorcerer of Eld 3 decks
3 Lazav, Wearer of Faces 2 decks
4 Mimeoplasm, Revered One 2 decks
5 Captain N'ghathrod 1 decks
6 Doctor Doom, King of Latveria 1 decks
7 Edward Kenway 1 decks
8 Eriette, the Beguiler 1 decks
9 Esika, God of the Tree // The Prismatic Bridge 1 decks
10 Golbez, Crystal Collector 1 decks

Card text

The Ancient One

Legendary Creature — Spirit God

Descend 8 — The Ancient One can't attack or block unless there are eight or more permanent cards in your graveyard. {2}

: Draw a card, then discard a card. When you discard a card this way, target player mills cards equal to its mana value.

8 / 8

The Lost Caverns of Ixalan (LCI) · Mythic · Illustrated by Victor Adame Minguez

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 680,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.