Live Play Data

The Battle of Bywater

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

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

927

Decks Running

383

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

66%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=161

15%

63%

T6-9

16%

T10+

Median 7 P25 6 · P75 9 · max 14

On curve 1% (2 / 161 cast on T3) Cast same turn as drawn 27%

The "good card" funnel

928 brought · 355 players

Brought to game

928

Ever drawn

243

Reached battlefield

161

Still on board at game end

≥ +6.3pp

Players who cast this card win 39% of the time (n=152) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=578).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 37% (n=72).

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 +14.2pp; 95% confidence interval +6.3pp to +22.2pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

254 instances

3.5%

Library

3.5%

Battlefield

58.7%

Graveyard

7.9%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

Card text

The Battle of Bywater

Sorcery

Destroy all creatures with power 3 or greater. Then create a Food token for each creature you control. (It's an artifact with " {2}

, Sacrifice this token: You gain 3 life.")

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

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.