Live Play Data

Gandalf, Friend of the Shire

· Legendary Creature — Avatar Wizard · The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

197

Decks Running

101

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

59%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=25

12%

60%

T6-9

12%

T10+

Median 7 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 12

On curve 24% (3 / 25 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 13%

The "good card" funnel

197 brought · 95 players

Brought to game

197

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 42% 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.

≥ -20.8pp

Players who cast this card win 11% of the time (n=21) , vs 18% when it never left the library (n=125).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 31% (n=16).

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 -7.7pp; 95% confidence interval -20.8pp to +5.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

56 instances

3.6%

Library

17.9%

Battlefield

58.9%

Graveyard

5.4%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Gandalf, Friend of the Shire

Legendary Creature — Avatar Wizard

Flash You may cast sorcery spells as though they had flash. Whenever the Ring tempts you, if you chose a creature other than Gandalf as your Ring-bearer, draw a card.

2 / 4

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR) · Uncommon · Illustrated by Dmitry Burmak

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 710,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.