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Hostage Taker

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

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Times Brought

251

Decks Running

132

In Decks

—

Decklist Inclusion

—

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Showing 1v1 (duel) data only. 1v1 is a different format from multiplayer Commander, so these numbers are not comparable.

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.

2 / 3

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

Final zone distribution

58 instances

44.8%

Battlefield

31.0%

Graveyard

8.6%

Exile

15.5%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

The "good card" funnel

251 brought · 124 players

Brought to game

251

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 70% 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.

≥ -3.9pp

Players who cast this card win 27% of the time (n=31) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=133).

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 +5.8pp; 95% confidence interval -3.9pp to +15.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=37

16%

19%

43%

T6-9

16%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 14

On curve 22% (6 / 37 cast on T4) Cast same turn as drawn 34%

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 680,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.