Live Play Data

Sauron, the Necromancer

· Legendary Creature — Avatar Horror · The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

321

Decks Running

128

Median Cast Turn

7.0

Drawn → Played

56%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=42

24%

45%

T6-9

19%

T10+

Median 7.0 P25 5 · P75 9 · max 14

On curve 36% (10 / 42 cast on T5) Cast same turn as drawn 27%

The "good card" funnel

321 brought · 124 players

Brought to game

321

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 53% 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.

≥ -11.5pp

Players who cast this card win 26% of the time (n=35) , vs 23% when it never left the library (n=195).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 31% (n=25).

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 +3.0pp; 95% confidence interval -11.5pp to +17.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

84 instances

1.2%

Library

23.8%

Battlefield

48.8%

Graveyard

8.3%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

Sauron, the Necromancer

Legendary Creature — Avatar Horror

Menace Whenever Sauron attacks, exile target creature card from your graveyard. Create a tapped and attacking token that's a copy of that card, except it's a 3/3 black Wraith with menace. At the beginning of the next end step, exile that token unless Sauron is your Ring-bearer.

4 / 4

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