Live Play Data

Whirlpool Whelm

· Instant · Commander 2011 (CMD)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

110

Decks Running

Median Cast Turn

7.0

Drawn → Played

57%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=20

10%

30%

60%

T6-9

T10+

Median 7.0 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 9

On curve 0% (0 / 20 cast on T2)

The "good card" funnel

110 brought · 44 players

Brought to game

110

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -10.8pp

Players who cast this card win 26% of the time (n=20) , vs 17% when it never left the library (n=65).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 23% (n=15).

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 +9.3pp; 95% confidence interval -10.8pp to +29.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

36 instances

61.1%

Graveyard

2.8%

Exile

36.1%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Marvo, Deep Operative 37 decks
2 Zedruu the Greathearted 4 decks
3 Rashmi and Ragavan 1 decks
4 Rona, Herald of Invasion // Rona, Tolarian Obliterator 1 decks
5 Whtz, the Bibliophile 1 decks

Card text

Whirlpool Whelm

Instant

Clash with an opponent, then return target creature to its owner's hand. If you win, you may put that creature on top of its owner's library instead. (Each clashing player reveals the top card of their library, then puts that card on their choice of the top or bottom. A player wins if their card had a greater mana value.)

Commander 2011 (CMD) · Common · Illustrated by Cyril Van Der Haegen

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 760,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.