Live Play Data

The Balrog, Durin's Bane

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

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

230

Decks Running

109

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

67%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=59

10%

17%

49%

T6-9

14%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 15

On curve 66% (9 / 59 cast on T7) Cast same turn as drawn 21%

The "good card" funnel

230 brought · 104 players

Brought to game

230

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 50% 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.

≥ -4.4pp

Players who cast this card win 29% of the time (n=30) , vs 18% when it never left the library (n=150).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 22% (n=18).

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 +10.8pp; 95% confidence interval -4.4pp to +26.1pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

60 instances

3.3%

Library

30.0%

Battlefield

35.0%

Graveyard

6.7%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

The Balrog, Durin's Bane

Legendary Creature — Avatar Demon

This spell costs {1}

less to cast for each permanent sacrificed this turn. Haste The Balrog can't be blocked except by legendary creatures. When The Balrog dies, destroy target artifact or creature an opponent controls.

7 / 5

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR) · Rare · Illustrated by Kekai Kotaki

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 740,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.