This week I’m back with a seasonal brew helmed by Frodo, Adventurous Hero and Sam, Loyal Attendant. This deck tries to generate as many Food tokens as possible, and then use them for drawing cards, stabilizing its life total, and turning them into drain effects on its way to victory.
The Commanders: Frodo, Adventurous Hobbit and Sam, Loyal Attendant
Much like in the Lord of the Rings, Frodo is like… a helpful guy who does some good stuff, I guess, but the real star of the show is good old Samwise Gamgee. He gets the ball rolling creating Food tokens, and reducing the cost of activating them by half is extremely useful as well. Honestly there is an argument for doing a deck led by several of the legendary creatures contained within the 99, but hitting this combination of colors is where we want to be, and this partner pairing allows us to get there while still being at least somewhat on theme.
The Ramp
Since the token our primary goal creates requires 2 to activate by default and we have a couple of spicy X spells, the more mana we can generate the better. The deck does this not only with a few typical mana rocks like Sol Ring and Arcane Signet, we can also play with our Food to create mana with Night of the Sweets’ Revenge, turn Food creation into Treasure creation with Academy Manufactor or Nuka-Cola Vending Machine, and ramp out lands directly with Elanor Gardner. With our relatively low land count of 34 I suspect that after playtesting this deck for a while we will want to cut a couple of cards that underperform in favor of more traditional ramp or additional lands, but the curve of the deck is low enough that a lot of the time you should be able to get the deck rolling and drawing cards at which point it should function just fine.
The Card Draw
Speaking of card draw, in addition to Food tokens we also incidentally create a bunch of Halflings and Soldiers and Rats and the like with cards like Apothecary White, Experimental Confectioner, and Farmer Cotten so Skullclamp is an absolute All-Star. Greta, Bonecache Overseer, Trading Post, Peregrin Took, and Savvy Hunter turn Food tokens directly into card draw, while The Gaffer and Well of Lost Dreams key off of the life gain from the tokens. We also have Bilbo’s Ring and Phyrexian Arena as further sources, and Trail of Crumbs as both selection and card advantage.
The Utility
Next, we have a whole host of the little effects that make a deck go. Bog Naughty gives us a repeatable way to pick off utility creatures, Gyome, Master Chef offers protection, and The Battle of Bywater adds a thematic Wrath. Delney, Streetwise Lookout doubles up the triggers of a bunch of our creatures, and Anointed Procession, Mondrak, Glory Dominus, and Doubling Season double up all of our tokens. Hazel’s Brewmaster is very interesting, and depending on what we can get exiled underneath it our Foods can turn into a whole host of useful abilities. Revive the Shire and Samwise Gamgee offer graveyard recursion. Food Coma, Spider Food, and Bake into a Pie join some usual removal suspects for flavorful ways of dealing with problems.
The Win Conditions
Finally we need to close out the game with one of three methods. The first is slinging around +1/+1 counters with cards like Rosie Cotton of South Lane and Treebeard, Gracious Host, or the similar anthem effects of Sierra, Nuka’s Biggest Fan, Pippin, Warden of Isengard and Motivated Pony. Insatiable Fugivore offers both a huge power boost and menace. Secondly we have big beaters in Banquet Guests, Feasting Hobbit, Rapacious Guest, and Ygra, Eater of All. Lastly our plan is to use our host of drain effects in Cauldron Familiar, Kambal Profiteering Mayor, Marionette Master, Mirkwood Bats, Nadier’s Nightblade, Agent of the Iron Throne, and Sanguine Bond to finish our opponents off. If you wanted to you can easily loop in some form of the Exquisite Blood combo but I think this deck is perfectly deadly without it.
Thanks for joining us for our latest kitchen table Commander deck! Make sure to keep an eye out for the other decks in the series!
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