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Sauron's Ransom

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

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Times Brought

143

Decks Running

In Decks

—

Decklist Inclusion

—

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Showing 1v1 (duel) data only. 1v1 is a different format from multiplayer Commander, so these numbers are not comparable.

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

Final zone distribution

36 instances

11.1%

Battlefield

63.9%

Graveyard

11.1%

Exile

13.9%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, the Dark Lord 36 decks
2 Lord of the Nazgûl 7 decks
3 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 3 decks
4 Kefka, Court Mage // Kefka, Ruler of Ruin 2 decks
5 Tasigur, the Golden Fang 2 decks
6 The Celestial Toymaker 2 decks
7 Atraxa, Grand Unifier 1 decks
8 Ertai Resurrected 1 decks
9 Gale, Waterdeep Prodigy 1 decks
10 Inalla, Archmage Ritualist 1 decks

The "good card" funnel

143 brought · 55 players

Brought to game

143

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ +1.1pp

Players who cast this card win 32% of the time (n=17) , vs 19% when it never left the library (n=76).

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 +13.3pp; 95% confidence interval +1.1pp to +25.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=22

18%

14%

45%

T6-9

T10+

Median 6.0 P25 4 · P75 7 · max 11

On curve 14% (2 / 22 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 36%

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.