Live Play Data

The Black Gate

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

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

992

Decks Running

483

Median Cast Turn

4.0

Drawn → Played

82%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=202

22%

11%

12%

13%

29%

T6-9

T10+

Median 4.0 P25 2 · P75 6 · max 16

Cast same turn as drawn 61%

The "good card" funnel

993 brought · 410 players

Brought to game

993

Ever drawn

247

Reached battlefield

202

Still on board at game end

188

Once cast, 93% 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.

≥ +0.4pp

Players who cast this card win 30% of the time (n=179) , vs 23% when it never left the library (n=611).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 33% (n=39).

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 +7.4pp; 95% confidence interval +0.4pp to +14.4pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

279 instances

1.4%

Library

67.4%

Battlefield

15.1%

Graveyard

5.0%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, the Dark Lord 129 decks
2 Sauron, Lord of the Rings 55 decks
3 Saruman, the White Hand 25 decks
4 Lord of the Nazgûl 18 decks
5 Jin Sakai, Ghost of Tsushima 16 decks
6 Betor, Ancestor's Voice 13 decks
7 Nine-Fingers Keene 10 decks
8 Child of Alara 9 decks
9 The Infamous Cruelclaw 8 decks
10 Zenos yae Galvus // Shinryu, Transcendent Rival 7 decks

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

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.