Live Play Data

Lash of the Balrog

· Sorcery · The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

148

Decks Running

Median Cast Turn

6.5

Drawn → Played

69%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=20

10%

15%

45%

T6-9

25%

T10+

Median 6.5 P25 5 · P75 10 · max 12

On curve 0% (0 / 20 cast on T1) Cast same turn as drawn 35%

The "good card" funnel

148 brought · 89 players

Brought to game

148

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -19.0pp

Players who cast this card win 9% of the time (n=20) , vs 14% when it never left the library (n=88).

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 -5.3pp; 95% confidence interval -19.0pp to +8.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

35 instances

5.7%

Library

2.9%

Battlefield

62.9%

Graveyard

8.6%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Lash of the Balrog

Sorcery

As an additional cost to cast this spell, sacrifice a creature or pay {4}

. Destroy target creature.

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR) · Common · Illustrated by Antonio José Manzanedo

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.