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Wandering Archaic // Explore the Vastlands

Creature — Avatar // Sorcery · Strixhaven: School of Mages (STX)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

382

Decks Running

207

In Decks

1448

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Wandering Archaic

Creature — Avatar

Whenever an opponent casts an instant or sorcery spell, they may pay {2}

. If they don't, you may copy that spell. You may choose new targets for the copy.

4 / 4

Explore the Vastlands

Sorcery

Each player looks at the top five cards of their library and may reveal a land card and/or an instant or sorcery card from among them. Each player puts the cards they revealed this way into their hand and the rest on the bottom of their library in a random order. Each player gains 3 life.

Strixhaven: School of Mages (STX) · Rare · Illustrated by Wayne Reynolds

Final zone distribution

116 instances

3.4%

Library

35.3%

Battlefield

23.3%

Graveyard

7.8%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Zhulodok, Void Gorger 29 decks
2 Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy 13 decks
3 Animar, Soul of Elements 9 decks
4 Etali, Primal Conqueror // Etali, Primal Sickness 9 decks
5 Molecule Man 7 decks
6 Hashaton, Scarab's Fist 5 decks
7 Ultima, Origin of Oblivion 5 decks
8 Grand Arbiter Augustin IV 4 decks
9 Karn, Legacy Reforged 4 decks
10 Ms. Bumbleflower 4 decks

The "good card" funnel

383 brought · 179 players

Brought to game

383

Ever drawn

109

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 59% 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.

≥ +4.7pp

Players who cast this card win 42% of the time (n=64) , vs 26% when it never left the library (n=224).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 28% (n=30) — 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 +16.2pp; 95% confidence interval +4.7pp to +27.7pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=69

12%

20%

45%

T6-9

14%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 15

On curve 41% (14 / 69 cast on T5) Cast same turn as drawn 52%

69 of 100 times cast 69%

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.