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Gandalf of the Secret Fire

· Legendary Creature — Avatar Wizard · Tales of Middle-earth Commander (LTC)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

Decks Running

In Decks

134

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Gandalf of the Secret Fire

Legendary Creature — Avatar Wizard

Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell from your hand during an opponent's turn, exile that card with three time counters on it instead of putting it into your graveyard as it resolves. Then if the exiled card doesn't have suspend, it gains suspend. (At the beginning of your upkeep, remove a time counter. When the last is removed, you may play it without paying its mana cost.)

3 / 4

Tales of Middle-earth Commander (LTC) · Mythic · Illustrated by Matt Stewart

Final zone distribution

32 instances

Not enough tracked games yet to show a reliable final-zone breakdown.

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Gandalf, Party Guest 22 decks
2 Aragorn, the Uniter 4 decks
3 Codie, Vociferous Codex 1 decks
4 Omnath, Locus of All 1 decks
5 Rose Tyler 1 decks
6 The Face of Boe 1 decks
7 The Tenth Doctor 1 decks
8 Tom Bombadil 1 decks

The "good card" funnel

80 brought · 32 players

Brought to game

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 60% 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.

≥ +1.6pp

Players who cast this card win 32% of the time (n=18) , vs 9% when it never left the library (n=41).

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 +22.8pp; 95% confidence interval +1.6pp to +44.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=30

10%

13%

10%

50%

T6-9

13%

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 4 · P75 8 · max 17

On curve 27% (4 / 30 cast on T4)

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 740,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.