Magic: the Gathering Commander Focus: Tom Bombadil Is a Merry Fellow

Boots of yellow or something. Truth be told I'm not a big Lord of the Rings fan. The Hobbit (book) was good (better) than the Lord of the Rings, and I'm a big fan of that moment when the Witch-king of Angmar is asked what of the wizard, and he says "I will break him", but other than that, I wanted to walk out of the second movie and I don't think I've even seen the third one. Please feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments, which I mostly don't read. (Frodo should die at the end, instantly better story; Sam should come back and people should believe he betrayed him, instantly even better.)

All that being said, Tom Bombadil is a fun-looking WUBRG commander who will lead to interesting games and interactions, and Sagas are kind of random and wacky. There are some powerful effects in there, and Read Ahead allows you to skip to what you want on a Saga without wasting precious turns.

• 702.155. Read Ahead
  • 702.155a Read ahead is a keyword found on some Saga cards. “Read ahead” means “Chapter abilities of this Saga can’t trigger the turn it entered the battlefield unless it has exactly the number of lore counters on it specified in the chapter symbol of that ability.” See rule 714, “Saga Cards.”
  • 702.155b As a Saga with the read ahead ability enters the battlefield, its controller chooses a number from one to that Saga’s final chapter number. That Saga enters the battlefield with the chosen number of lore counters on it. See rule 714, “Saga Cards.”
  • 702.155c Multiple instances of read ahead on the same object are redundant.

You could combine this with certain token manipulation cards to keep having the same Saga effects occur over and over, and make more of a combo style deck around this, tutoring out specific Sagas and causing them to trigger over and over. There's quite a few effects now that allow you to remove a counter, generically, from a permanent. This article from years ago is about just such a deck, using Tayam, Luminous Enigma so we've done this, and it really seems more flavorful to just go for it with random Sagas with desirable effects. There's also an argument to be made for only running really big Sagas, i.e. expensive ones, because Tom Bombadil grabs you a new Saga out of your yard when a current Saga ends, so inherently you want these to be the most expensive Sagas possible (that do something good). However the Saga's abilities are just all over the place. A lot of them will board clear, but you probably don't really want a board clear, Bombadil himself is frequently indestructible and hexproof, which is neat, though it certainly gives your opponents an incentive to respond to a Saga trigger going on the stack by blowing up enough of your Sagas so you don't have enough lore counters on them to keep Bombabil indestructible, which is not great for you. It's also true though that most of the interaction that most people run is either creature removal or counter spells, and enchantment removal tends to be fairly low down the list of priorities.

Okay, so Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, and he just sort of rolls with the punches, so it's more appropriate in my opinion to just run the Sagas we want, a mixture of high cost and low cost. In truth we should be hot to manipulate our library and put cards from our hand back on top so when a Saga ends we can control what gets summoned out, and that would be cards like Sensei's Divining Top and Brainstorm but we're skipping that and using the excuse that he's a merry fellow.

Bright blue his jacket is, and may be, but running a lot of interaction from the hand feels very unfitting, as I recall Mr. Bombadil sort of chilled in his house and ate honey or whatever, and was not all about the stack. Our interaction is going to have to come from the Sagas, and that's slow, and undependable, but this deck is about telling a story or a series of stories, or whatever, and not so much about winning the game.

and his boots are yellow, and this is important, because a lot of these cards are expensive and even with cheating out creatures you'll need lots of gold in the form of Treasure and lands. That makes sense somehow. Especially as lots of the good value low cost Sagas include ramp, running a strong suite of basics and then true duals and fetches, with the land tutors makes a lot of sense. It lets you mana fix and also ramp out so you can cast your 4-6 cost Sagas and coincidentally also get Tommy Boy out.

None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the Master which, is a bit confusing. Why doesn't he have evasion? I guess we can interpret this as the hexproof thing, so try to keep 4 counters on your Sagas. This is actually fairly difficult to do as most Sagas have 3 chapters and then go away, the only way to really ensure this is by having at least 3 Sagas in play all the time. If that's your route, then you want to ramp and then ramp again, getting lots of Sagas out, then bring out Tommy Boy.

While Tom Bombadil should have hexproof and indestructible, most of the time he won't unless you really take your time bringing him out. There's definitely a temptation to cast a cheap 2-4 cost Saga as soon as possible, then rush out Bombadil to get the trigger and start the loop. Given this deck is really pretty fundamentally at the midpoint between bracket 2 and 3 that's largely going to be a fair strategy.

In terms of bracketing this deck, it can do some spectacular things, and some really odd ones, and make a lot of counters or generate tons of Sagas and Saga triggers, that's just not all that good. You really need WUBRG out to cast your commander, which comes out mostly naked, or you need to hang around for a while then finally cast him. Yes, there's some acceleration, but actually closing out a game is fairly rough. To do so you'll need to pull off some weirdly unique effects.

Sagas entering or going to your yard can cause life loss or damage:

• Balemurk Leech
• Grim Guardian
• Forgeborn Oreads
• Narci, Fable Singer

There's also a couple of ways to turn your enchanments themselves into creatures

• Starfield of Nyx
• Opalescence

The deck also has a ton of copy effects:

Copy Enchantment

Mirrormade

Estrid's Invocation

Ian Chesterton

Yenna, Redtooth Regent

The Sixth Doctor

The Apprentice's Folly

Strionic Resonator

Lithoform Engine

This can let you generate loads of Sagas, tokens, triggers, and so on. Some way or another you should be able to massively disrupt your opponents board state with various effects, as well as making token creatures and token copies of creatures (either your tokens or weird copies of things), steal creatures from opponents, and just generally muck about. Combining that with your various damage and life loss triggers, this should let you close out the game eventually, but each one ought to be kind of a weird set of stories - this deck really won't play out the same way any given time, given how variable the Sagas and copy effects are.

For an opening hand you're really needing at least two lands, including a source of green mana, and ideally at least one ramp spell. Your truly ideal starting hand is probably three lands, three ramp, and one Saga, but you'll mostly have to take what you can get. As you tutor, always try to tutor out dual lands first whenever you can, because some of your land tutors will only allow you to get basics. There's 12 basics in the deck, so that's plenty, but you could run out of what you want or need.

Bracketing this deck is a bit delicate. It technically runs three tutors but the tutors are uh, bad. Search for Glory, The Cruelty of Gix, and War of the Last Alliance are all, well, they're not even fine cards. They're Sagas in a gimmick deck. They're expensive, slow, and conditional tutors, compared to a card like Vampiric Tutor it's sort of absurd to put them in the same category. I would tend to argue that in terms of power scale this is a lot more like a bracket 2 deck. It'll be fairly slow, clunky, disruptable, and random, without a clearly defined way to end the game consistently. So I'd generally play it at that level, and see how it goes.



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