Live Play Data

Sauron, Lord of the Rings

· Legendary Creature — Avatar Horror · Tales of Middle-earth Commander (LTC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

175

Decks Running

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

63%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=109

11%

68%

T6-9

14%

T10+

Median 7 P25 6 · P75 8 · max 16

On curve 79% (23 / 109 cast on T8) Cast same turn as drawn 29%

The "good card" funnel

176 brought · 81 players

Brought to game

176

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 56% of this card is still on the battlefield at game end. This reflects how often it survives removal, not just whether it's a permanent.

≥ -3.2pp

Players who cast this card win 27% of the time (n=32) , vs 14% when it never left the library (n=102).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 23% (n=15).

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 +12.3pp; 95% confidence interval -3.2pp to +27.8pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

57 instances

5.3%

Library

31.6%

Battlefield

36.8%

Graveyard

5.3%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Sauron, Lord of the Rings

Legendary Creature — Avatar Horror

When you cast this spell, amass Orcs 5, mill five cards, then return a creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield. Trample Whenever a commander an opponent controls dies, the Ring tempts you.

9 / 9

Tales of Middle-earth Commander (LTC) · Mythic · Illustrated by Alex Brock

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.