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The Balrog of Moria

· Legendary Creature — Avatar Demon · Tales of Middle-earth Commander (LTC)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

241

Decks Running

116

In Decks

643

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

The Balrog of Moria

Legendary Creature — Avatar Demon

Trample, haste When The Balrog of Moria dies, you may exile it. When you do, for each opponent, exile up to one target creature that player controls. Cycling {3}

(

, Discard this card: Draw a card.) When you cycle this card, create two Treasure tokens.

8 / 8

Tales of Middle-earth Commander (LTC) · Rare · Illustrated by Rudy Siswanto

Final zone distribution

70 instances

24.3%

Battlefield

31.4%

Graveyard

22.9%

Exile

21.4%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 43 decks
2 Sauron, the Dark Lord 42 decks
3 Be'lakor, the Dark Master 10 decks
4 Eddie Brock // Venom, Lethal Protector 2 decks
5 Evereth, Viceroy of Plunder 2 decks
6 Kaalia of the Vast 2 decks
7 Raphael, Fiendish Savior 2 decks
8 Dihada, Binder of Wills 1 decks
9 Kefka, Court Mage // Kefka, Ruler of Ruin 1 decks
10 Kroxa and Kunoros 1 decks

The "good card" funnel

242 brought · 99 players

Brought to game

242

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 43% 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.

≥ -6.8pp

Players who cast this card win 28% of the time (n=39) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=148).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 13% (n=18) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.

Observed gap +7.4pp; 95% confidence interval -6.8pp to +21.6pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=40

68%

T6-9

25%

T10+

Median 8.0 P25 7 · P75 10 · max 20

On curve 45% (11 / 40 cast on T7) Cast same turn as drawn 26%

40 of 100 times cast 40%

Full analysis unlocks as more games are tracked. Stats refresh nightly.

Frequently Asked

Why isn't there more data on this card?

Playgroup Live collects per-card gameplay data from real Commander games. Basic play counts appear once a card reaches 100 tracked games; the full deep-dive page needs a larger, more diverse sample (at least 300 tracked games played by 10 or more different pilots, with no single pilot over 40 percent of the copies). 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 650,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live subset of that corpus.