Live Play Data

Sam's Desperate Rescue

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

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

198

Decks Running

Median Cast Turn

—

Drawn → Played

54%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=19

Not enough observed casts yet to show a reliable distribution.

The "good card" funnel

198 brought · 87 players

Brought to game

198

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -21.9pp

Players who cast this card win 22% of the time (n=16) , vs 23% when it never left the library (n=132).

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 -1.4pp; 95% confidence interval -21.9pp to +19.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

43 instances

4.7%

Library

65.1%

Graveyard

14.0%

Exile

16.3%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, the Dark Lord 32 decks
2 Sméagol, Helpful Guide 21 decks
3 Lord of the Nazgûl 20 decks
4 Frodo, Sauron's Bane 6 decks
5 Kotis, the Fangkeeper 3 decks
6 Frodo, Adventurous Hobbit 2 decks
7 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 2 decks
8 Baron Helmut Zemo 1 decks
9 Bilbo, Birthday Celebrant 1 decks
10 Extus, Oriq Overlord // Awaken the Blood Avatar 1 decks

Card text

Sam's Desperate Rescue

Sorcery

Return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand. The Ring tempts you.

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR) · Common · Illustrated by Lixin Yin

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.