CUT #23 - Elrond vs Saruman vs Frodo and Sam
Welcome back to another rendition of CUT! In this one, our deck builders will take us on journeys with characters from Middle-Earth, as all the challenges are themed around Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth. It's been out for a little bit, and before it disappears into the aether of new product previews, let's dive into it one more time. First, let's see who won the last CUT!
With a photo finish, the winner is David! Thanks so much for participating again! Also a big thank you to Sinclair, even though you didn't win, you're still a winner to this guy (because you also beat me last round). I loved reading all the brews y'all came up with, and I hope I can have you on again. Moving on to the challenges that our new deckbuilders had to face:
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Must play The One Ring
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Commander Must be from the main set of LTR
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Must play at least 20 cards from LTR
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Must play at least one of each: Elf, Human, Dwarf, Halfling, Wizard.
First up we have Alejandro!
The Ring Bearer
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As someone who loves converting janky engines into powerful win conditions, the first Frodo spoiled was incredibly appealing to me. Like, how many loops do I have to jump through to get this thing to work? I need six mana, four ring tempts, evasion, protection, and goodwill from the rest of the table before I can one shot someone. I better get to work.
I threw together a mock up, and quickly realized the deck was never going to function. With the ideal hand, you can put Frodo into play on turn one, cast Call of the Ring on turn two, and then maybe three turns later, you have all the temptations and you've upgraded Frodo to the danger zone. But now you're facing down the interaction of three other players. Even if you have your Lightning Greaves on the hobbit, the board is probably going to get wiped before you decide who to take out. Let's be real though. With Frodo heading your deck, you're not even getting that far. If I see that thing in the command zone, I know what I'm saving my removal for. So what do we do? How are we going to not look like we want to one-shot someone? Well, here's the trick. We're just not going to play Frodo, Sauron's Bane at all. We're gonna look real innocent with our precon Frodo and Sam chilling out and making food, until turn six or so, when we blitz Frodo out of our hand, Dark Ritual his abilities up, and rush him under someone's defences. If that sounds really tough to do, that's because it is. But I guarantee that this has a higher success rate than running him out where everyone can see.
There's a few things we're going to need.
Ways to find Frodo: Worldly Tutor and Eladamri's Call are unacceptable, just casually leaking our plan to the entire world. Demonic Tutor works fine, but the best ways to get Frodo into play are gonna be Chord of Calling, Green Sun's Zenith, and Finale of Devastation, which all can be cast for X=1. The big raging dino also doubles as a way to get our secret commander back if things go awry. Ways to make him go fast. Without red, it's a bit tough to give him haste, but there's still a few good options. The two boots, obviously, and Concordant Crossroads, but that's not quite enough. Delving a little deeper, I found Crashing Drawbridge, and something that should see more play, Instill Energy.
Protection/Evasion
The most efficient means of keeping Frodo on the board is giving him protection from certain colors, and that also happens to be the best way of getting him through blockers. Mother of Runes and her daughter are perfect, but we really just need godhood for one turn, so Brave the Elements and Cliffside Rescuer also work pretty well.Mana, Quickly!This deck is only going to win games when all but one other player have been knocked out, but still, getting Frodo out there is mana intensive, so the deck is packed with ramp. Some of the little dorks are here, most notably Delighted Halfling, who can prevent our commander from being countered. But if we need that mana quickly, Rain of Filth and Culling Ritual can provide it in the blink of an eye.
Temptations
Frodo, Adventurous Hobbit is actually our best way to get the Ring to full, but if we need to quicken the clock, there's some cards with great utility. Frodo Baggins, (yes, there's another one, and yes it's confusing,) can pull blockers out of the way for cool Frodo. Call of the Ring is basically Phyrexian Arena, which is great, because this deck desperately needs to draw cards. Finally, the Nazgûl are deathtouch blockers who keep big scary things away until we make our small scary thing.
The rest of the deck is basically just a bunch of utility to keep the board how we want it, along with a bit of group hug stuff thrown in to make it clear that we're just a cute, harmless, don't worry about it deck.
Testing...
Running it through Archidekts playtester, it does better than I expected. The pile of cards manages to regularly assemble the Frodo combo by turn seven, or six if we're lucky. If you can do that as when the game is at a 1v1, you've got it. Alternatively, there's Blade of Selves, which in a dream scenario will take down every player at once. I have to say, this is some of the better jank I've made.
Next we have K.Mason!
Elrond - The CUT
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Hello! My name's K. Mason Brantley, and I'm one of EDHREC's first writers. However, that doesn't mean much any with how much talent we've brought on and my series has been dusty and shelved for a few years. Before I started to stick with reviews, I wrote the Underdog's Corner, a series that covered underrated and overlooked commanders. However, with how many legends have started to release, it means there are way more of those commanders than before. However, I still foster those embers of being a hipster-at-heart, and stuck with Elrond, Master of Healing. He currently sits as the 14th most built legend in Tales from Middle-earth. While that might be out of 85 and he is relatively high-ranked, he still is sitting at 16.5% of the decks of the 4th most-built commander from the set, Shelob, Child of Ungoliant. That percent is often how I defined my "underdog" picks.THE CUT: Tales from Middle-earthFor my commander, I chose Elrond, Master of Healing. I originally intended to use this experience to work on either Sauron, the Dark Lord or Aragorn, the Uniter, but I decided to focus my efforts elsewhere. This made it easier on me as the blue and green archetype for this set is centered in Scry and Elves. Many of these cards would make my deck even without the restriction as about half of my 20 required cards come from searching "scry" in Tales from Middle-earth. This proved to be immensely helpful, as Kasmina, Enigma Sage and Littjara Kinseekers are the only pre-existing cards to have both. Despite that, neither actually made my build for now; I'm still considering Kasmina.
Scry is a long-lived mechanic with plenty of cards and while Elrond has a fun, if well-tenured, payoff with counters, I don't want to include Scry for scry's sake.I decided on a heuristic for determining what cards to consider:
1. If it's a consistent effect (triggers each turn cycle), I don't worry about the Scry value unless it has a slim chance of triggering in the deck.
2. One-shot effects have to be Scry 2 or higher unless the base effect is good on its own.eg. Opt vs. Preordain and Mystic Speculation- Mystic Speculation gets a pass though as a single shot Scry 3 can smooth out a draw without or with buyback before Elrond arrives. Or in the late game it's a mana sink that also generates at least three counter every cast.-I was a bit torn on Kenessos, Priest of Thassa until I goldfished the deck, and... he's a lock. Turning Scry 1 from Season of Growth into Scry 2 doesn't seem like much until you start stacking counters on counters. Play Elrond into those two cards, and suddenly your distributing two counters on every creature ETB, token or nontoken. Plus, Kenessos gives me an excuse to add 2-3 sea monsters that I could, on an off-chance, flip. Or maybe someone is threatened enough to kill him based on that alone.
"But what if Elrond dies?"This is the question I always ask myself. Seeing my commander sniped early and often in my learning days scarred me into always building my deck to function without the commander. Luckily for us, counters in blue and green are so prevalent that we will be able to function well enough. Scry becomes less potent, but from my few goldfish games I've been impressed by how good stacking scry 2 in multiples can feel for consistency.Using the multitudes of scry to set up a top-deck strategy is also viable, but I only leaned into that a little bit with Reason // Believe and Nissa, Steward of Elements. There's a chance that I split the themes too much, but time will tell.Creature Types of the Fellowship; Building Woes of a PartyFrankly, remembering this stopped me in my tracks halfway. Were there any dwarves in blue and green at all? I didn't want to scrap everything, so I cautiously searched Scryfall. Yes, I could've leaned into Changelings, but that felt very against the spirit of the challenge. The answer? Exactly four, but just barely though. 3/4 were released in the last calendar year. However, Reveka, Wizard Savant could have bailed me out.I sadly don't produce much content, but you can follow me on Twitter (@K_Mason64) for when I occasionally tweet about Magic or my other card game hobbies like Ashes Reborn, Arkham Horror: the Card Game, Flesh and Blood, and in the near future, Earthborne Rangers and Sorcery: Contested Realms.
Finally, we have Christian! You may recognize him from CUT #12, now he's back to share is LoTR brew!
Saruman - CUT
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Hey Everyone! I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan and when Travis asked me to join this set's CUT, I was totally game! After much deliberation (and opening my own packs to find out what I opened), I decided to go with Saruman of Many Colors as my Commander for this challenge. For a while now, I have been interested in the idea of what I call "second spell" strategies. I have built various forms of Firja, Judge of Valor and Oji, the Exquisite Blade, but always felt like I'd want access to the other's secondary color beyond white. This time around, I got the best of both in an Esper commander! It was fairly easy to go to both of those deck lists and evaluate what would fit well with Saruman and what wouldn't be able to make the cut.
The main overall strategy I went with was to have a pretty even split between cards with a mana value 2 or less, and cards with a mana value greater than 2. This was to make sure I could easily throw out a cheap spell to begin with, followed by a larger spell when triggering Saruman's ability. This was also followed with a Mill subtheme so that I could fill up my opponents' graveyards to get the most out of Saruman's ability as well. From there, it was easy to narrow down all of the LTR cards I would need to include. Starting off, we have several cheap cards that support the above themes, or are straight up card advantage. Gollum, Scheming Guide; Ruin Crab; and Lotho, Corrupt Shirriff are all great cheap creatures that support the primary 3 strategies of Card advantage, Mill, and "Second Spell" respectively. A lot of the other <2 mana value spells are where we add most of our removal, counterspells, artifact ramp, and board interaction.
Now that the decks are in front of you, you get to decide who gets to move on to the finals! Whose journey comes to an end, and who gets to continue on? A big thank you to everyone who participated in this round. We will see you next time with our finalists and new challenges! So remember, if you don't love it, CUT it!
If you or a friend would like to participate in a future CUT article, feel free to email the.only.travis.stanley@gmail.com or reach out to me on twitter (for as long as it's around) @chipman007.
