Live Play Data

Venser's Journal

· Artifact — Book · Commander 2021 (C21)

Live Inclusion

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

546

Decks Running

269

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

54%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=85

25%

41%

T6-9

19%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 16

On curve 40% (21 / 85 cast on T5) Cast same turn as drawn 27%

The "good card" funnel

547 brought · 219 players

Brought to game

547

Ever drawn

156

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.

≥ +8.8pp

Players who cast this card win 38% of the time (n=76) , vs 18% when it never left the library (n=321).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 27% (n=63).

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 +20.0pp; 95% confidence interval +8.8pp to +31.2pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

172 instances

4.1%

Library

33.1%

Battlefield

20.3%

Graveyard

7.6%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Venser's Journal

Artifact — Book

You have no maximum hand size. At the beginning of your upkeep, you gain 1 life for each card in your hand.

Commander 2021 (C21) · Rare · Illustrated by Christopher Moeller

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 690,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.