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

316

Decks Running

144

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

58%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=35

66%

T6-9

11%

T10+

Median 7 P25 6 · P75 8 · max 16

On curve 0% (0 / 35 cast on T1) Cast same turn as drawn 29%

The "good card" funnel

316 brought · 132 players

Brought to game

316

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -5.6pp

Players who cast this card win 31% of the time (n=32) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=205).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 25% (n=22).

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 +9.9pp; 95% confidence interval -5.6pp to +25.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

69 instances

5.8%

Library

62.3%

Graveyard

13.0%

Exile

18.8%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

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 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.