Live Play Data

Hostage Taker

· Creature — Human Pirate · Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander (OTC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

789

Decks Running

394

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

71%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=137

18%

51%

T6-9

12%

T10+

Median 7 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 14

On curve 19% (13 / 137 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 33%

The "good card" funnel

789 brought · 358 players

Brought to game

789

Ever drawn

192

Reached battlefield

137

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 39% 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.

≥ -4.8pp

Players who cast this card win 22% of the time (n=122) , vs 19% when it never left the library (n=486).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 22% (n=50).

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 +2.7pp; 95% confidence interval -4.8pp to +10.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

214 instances

1.9%

Library

25.2%

Battlefield

36.0%

Graveyard

15.9%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Hostage Taker

Creature — Human Pirate

When this creature enters, exile another target creature or artifact until this creature leaves the battlefield. You may cast that card for as long as it remains exiled, and mana of any type can be spent to cast that spell.

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Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander (OTC) · Rare · Illustrated by Wayne Reynolds

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.