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Saruman's Trickery

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

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

142

Decks Running

In Decks

468

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

Saruman's Trickery

Instant

Counter target spell. Amass Orcs 1. (Put a +1/+1 counter on an Army you control. It's also an Orc. If you don't control an Army, create a 0/0 black Orc Army creature token first.)

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR) · Uncommon · Illustrated by Yongjae Choi

Final zone distribution

46 instances

6.5%

Library

4.3%

Battlefield

52.2%

Graveyard

8.7%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

The "good card" funnel

142 brought · 69 players

Brought to game

142

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -18.4pp

Players who cast this card win 25% of the time (n=17) , vs 23% when it never left the library (n=86).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 17% (n=19) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.

Observed gap +2.5pp; 95% confidence interval -18.4pp to +23.3pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=20

10%

60%

T6-9

25%

T10+

Median 7.5 P25 6 · P75 10 · max 23

On curve 0% (0 / 20 cast on T3)

20 of 100 times cast 20%

Full analysis unlocks as more games are tracked. Stats refresh nightly.

Frequently Asked

Why isn't there more data on this card?

Playgroup Live collects per-card gameplay data from real Commander games. Basic play counts appear once a card reaches 100 tracked games; the full deep-dive page needs a larger, more diverse sample (at least 300 tracked games played by 10 or more different pilots, with no single pilot over 40 percent of the copies). 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 650,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.