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The Balrog of Moria

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

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Times Brought

172

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

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

47 instances

53.2%

Battlefield

21.3%

Graveyard

10.6%

Exile

14.9%

Hand

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 42 decks
2 Sauron, the Dark Lord 22 decks
3 Be'lakor, the Dark Master 7 decks
4 Kaalia of the Vast 3 decks
5 Raphael, Fiendish Savior 2 decks
6 Bladewing, Deathless Tyrant 1 decks
7 Evereth, Viceroy of Plunder 1 decks
8 Jodah, Archmage Eternal 1 decks
9 Jodah, the Unifier 1 decks
10 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager // Nicol Bolas, the Arisen 1 decks

The "good card" funnel

172 brought · 78 players

Brought to game

172

Ever drawn

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

Once cast, 81% 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.

≥ +2.2pp

Players who cast this card win 32% of the time (n=23) , vs 18% when it never left the library (n=78).

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 +13.2pp; 95% confidence interval +2.2pp to +24.3pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=31

16%

61%

T6-9

10%

T10+

Median 6 P25 5 · P75 8 · max 13

On curve 65% (4 / 31 cast on T7) Cast same turn as drawn 19%

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.