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Three Steps Ahead card art
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Three Steps Ahead

{U} · Instant · Outlaws of Thunder Junction (OTJ)
1%
Decklist Inclusion
Times Brought
365
Decks Running
191
In Decks
1214
Decklist Inclusion
1%
Format

Final zone distribution

118 instances
4.2%
Library
1.7%
Battlefield
56.8%
Graveyard
11.0%
Exile

The "good card" funnel

366 brought · 172 players
Brought to game
366
Ever drawn
94
Reached battlefield
54
Still on board at game end
2
≥ +1.0pp

Players who cast this card win 34% of the time (n=53) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=220).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 26% (n=37) — 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 +13.1pp; 95% confidence interval +1.0pp to +25.2pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=54
0%
T1
2%
T2
4%
T3
17%
T4
15%
T5
54%
T6-9
9%
T10+
Median 6.0 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 14
On curve 0% (0 / 54 cast on T1) Cast same turn as drawn 40%
54 of 100 times cast 54%

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 640,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.