Live Play Data

Saruman's Trickery

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

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

232

Decks Running

124

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

44%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=29

10%

62%

T6-9

21%

T10+

Median 7 P25 6 · P75 9 · max 23

On curve 0% (0 / 29 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 18%

The "good card" funnel

232 brought · 115 players

Brought to game

232

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -12.8pp

Players who cast this card win 25% of the time (n=23) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=135).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 21% (n=31).

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 +4.4pp; 95% confidence interval -12.8pp to +21.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

75 instances

5.3%

Library

5.3%

Battlefield

49.3%

Graveyard

10.7%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, the Dark Lord 78 decks
2 Saruman, the White Hand 15 decks
3 Y'shtola, Night's Blessed 6 decks
4 Lord of the Nazgûl 3 decks
5 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 3 decks
6 Baral, Chief of Compliance 2 decks
7 Marneus Calgar 2 decks
8 Bilbo, Retired Burglar 1 decks
9 Bruvac the Grandiloquent 1 decks
10 Captain America, First Avenger 1 decks

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

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.