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Part of Tales of Middle-earth
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Legendary Creature — Avatar Demon
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The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR)
Live Play Data
The Balrog, Durin's Bane
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Legendary Creature — Avatar Demon
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The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR)
1%
Live Inclusion
Times Brought
168
Decks Running
77
Median Cast Turn
7
Drawn → Played
68%
Format
First-cast turn
n=45
4%
T1
0%
T2
13%
T3
4%
T4
9%
T5
53%
T6-9
16%
T10+
Median
7
P25
5
· P75
9
· max
15
On curve
58%
(7 / 45 cast on T7)
Cast same turn as drawn
20%
The "good card" funnel
168 brought · 74 playersBrought to game
168
Ever drawn
47
Reached battlefield
32
Still on board at game end
16
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.
≥ -6.6pp
Players who cast this card win 27% of the time (n=26) , vs 17% when it never left the library (n=101).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 27% (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 +9.6pp; 95% confidence interval -6.6pp to +25.8pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
53 instances1.9%
Library
30.2%
Battlefield
39.6%
Graveyard
7.5%
Exile
Commanders that played this card
in tracked games-
1
Sauron, the Dark Lord
27 decks
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2
Sauron, Lord of the Rings
9 decks
-
3
Kaalia of the Vast
6 decks
-
4
Raphael, Fiendish Savior
5 decks
-
5
Ognis, the Dragon's Lash
4 decks
-
6
Rakdos, Lord of Riots
4 decks
-
7
Be'lakor, the Dark Master
3 decks
-
8
Shadow the Hedgehog
2 decks
-
9
Smaug the Impenetrable
2 decks
-
10
Akul the Unrepentant
1 decks
Card text
The Balrog, Durin's Bane
Legendary Creature — Avatar Demon
This spell costs 
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.
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)
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Rare
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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 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.