Live Play Data

Sauron's Ransom

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

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

346

Decks Running

163

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

49%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=43

21%

19%

12%

28%

T6-9

14%

T10+

Median 5 P25 3 · P75 7 · max 14

On curve 28% (9 / 43 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 17%

The "good card" funnel

346 brought · 147 players

Brought to game

346

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ +3.0pp

Players who cast this card win 34% of the time (n=37) , vs 17% when it never left the library (n=208).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 22% (n=39).

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 +17.6pp; 95% confidence interval +3.0pp to +32.2pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

102 instances

2.0%

Library

1.0%

Battlefield

64.7%

Graveyard

10.8%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, the Dark Lord 98 decks
2 Lord of the Nazgûl 31 decks
3 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 12 decks
4 The Celestial Toymaker 7 decks
5 Saruman, the White Hand 5 decks
6 Admiral Brass, Unsinkable 1 decks
7 Alela, Cunning Conqueror 1 decks
8 Atraxa, Grand Unifier 1 decks
9 Emet-Selch, Unsundered // Hades, Sorcerer of Eld 1 decks
10 Morophon, the Boundless 1 decks

Card text

Sauron's Ransom

Instant

Choose an opponent. They look at the top four cards of your library and separate them into a face-down pile and a face-up pile. Put one pile into your hand and the other into your graveyard. The Ring tempts you.

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