Card Preview

The Black Gate

Legendary Land — Gate · Tales of Middle-earth Commander (LTC)

Decklist Inclusion

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Times Brought

588

Decks Running

298

In Decks

1940

Decklist Inclusion

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

Card text

The Black Gate

Legendary Land — Gate

As The Black Gate enters, you may pay 3 life. If you don't, it enters tapped. {T}

: Add

: Choose a player with the most life or tied for most life. Target creature can't be blocked by creatures that player controls this turn.

Tales of Middle-earth Commander (LTC) · Rare · Illustrated by Marc Simonetti

Final zone distribution

156 instances

1.3%

Library

67.9%

Battlefield

16.7%

Graveyard

5.1%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

The "good card" funnel

589 brought · 258 players

Brought to game

589

Ever drawn

139

Reached battlefield

116

Still on board at game end

106

Once cast, 91% 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.

≥ +3.9pp

Players who cast this card win 34% of the time (n=105) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=393).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 30% (n=20) — 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 +13.3pp; 95% confidence interval +3.9pp to +22.6pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

First-cast turn

n=116

21%

10%

15%

13%

31%

T6-9

T10+

Median 4.0 P25 2 · P75 7 · max 16

Cast same turn as drawn 58%

574 of 300 tracked games 99%

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.