At Pro Tour March of the Machine in Minneapolis, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) finally revealed what the mechanic “the Ring tempts you” means from the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth Magic set. The set’s official debut and previews begin in a few weeks on May 30, the Prerelease begins June 16, and it releases June 23, which also happens to be my birthday weekend! I thought now might be a good time to dig into the mechanic and think about how we might want to use it in our Commander decks.
The Ring Tempts You
So what happens when the Ring tempts you? One side of The Ring token card breaks down the rules.
- The Ring can tempt you even if you don’t control a creature.
- The Ring gains its abilities in order from top to bottom. Once it gains an ability, it has that ability for the rest of the game.
- Each time the Ring tempts you, you must choose a creature if you control one.
- Each player can have only one emblem named The Ring and only one Ring-bearer at a time.
Getting Tempted
So the first step is playing a card that says “the Ring tempts you.” As of this writing, we’ve seen six cards previewed that will do the trick:
The most powerful of the bunch in my opinion is Call of the Ring; as an enchantment, it’s a bit less fragile than relying on creatures to tempt you. Also, it triggers at the beginning of your upkeep, so after four triggers, the full power of The Ring will be unlocked. The downside, of course, is that you have to wait until your upkeep to get the first trigger, and if an opponent destroys the enchantment before then, you’ll need some other way for the Ring to tempt you.
Bilbo, Retired Burglar; Frodo Baggins; and Samwise the Stouthearted are legendary creatures, so you can have them in your command zone to always have access to “the Ring tempts you” simply by having them enter the battlefield. Frodo Baggins provides additional triggers for the mechanic each time a legendary creature enters the battlefield.
This sounds a lot like you’d want to build your own Fellowship of the Ring for your Frodo Baggins deck, doesn’t it? I hope there will be versions of Gandalf, Gimli, Legolas, Aragorn, Boromir, Merry, and Pippin that would fit in a Selesnya color identity deck with Frodo Baggins as the commander! We’ve already seen two versions of Sam that will fit into the deck, but the two versions of Gandalf we’ve seen so far have blue in the color identity.
Now You See Them, Now You Don’t
For several of the cards, “the Ring tempts you” is an enters-the-battlefield trigger, so I’d start pulling aside various cards that can help you leverage that further. Blink effects are one way to go about it:
Emiel fits right into Frodo Baggins’s color identity. While I don’t recall a Unicorn being in The Lord of the Rings, it’s definitely a classic fantasy creature that could slot right into the deck. Sword of Hearth and Home definitely sounds like the kind of blade that a Hobbit (or, rather, Halfling) would find appealing.
Not Dead Yet!
Another option for these creatures with “the Ring tempts you” triggers is to have ways to bring them back from the graveyard if they should die.
Luminous Broodmoth does sweet work alongside blink effects, since you can reset a creature that’s come back from the graveyard with a flying counter. I’d be tempted (heh) to get an alter done on Luminous Broodmoth’s artwork and call it The Eagles, the flying deus ex machina of Tolkien’s tales.
Gollum, Patient Plotter is a nifty choice as your commander; black has plenty of ways to sacrifice Gollum and getting that “the Ring tempts you” trigger. Hilariously, poor Gollum can’t normally become the Ring-bearer this way, since he’ll be in your graveyard, but if you’ve got instant-speed ways to bring him back from the graveyard to the battlefield, then Gollum will be able to finally reclaim his Precious!
What Does The Ring Do?
So what advantages does The Ring emblem provide? To my mind, the incremental advantages remind me of the room benefits you gain as you venture through the various dungeons. They’re nice value engines, but not necessarily game-breaking. Also keep in mind, each time the Ring tempts you, the powers accumulate; you get the next level power plus keep all the previous level powers.
The Ring abilities are all tied to whatever creature is your Ring-bearer, so if that creature is killed, bounced, or otherwise neutralized, the benefits are lost until a Ring-bearer is chosen again. They are also all combat-oriented, and specifically as an attacker, which is awesome—because there are so many disincentives for attacking in Commander, I love to see mechanics like this that support entering combat.
Let’s take a look at each level’s power:
Level One
In a flavor win, you want your Ring-bearer to be “small” with low power in order to sneak past blockers, which has Halflings written all over it. Bilbo, Retired Burglar is perfect for this, as a 1/3 will slip past bigger blockers, and Bilbo even has a combat damage trigger on an opponent, creating a Treasure token. We might want to start looking for small-power creatures that would make good Ring-bearers:
Having an indestructible, card-drawing Squirrel as your Ring-bearer? Sign me up, Toski! Zur the Enchanter is an intriguing choice too, since it can tutor up the enchantment Call of the Ring. Then there are toughness-matters creatures like Doran, the Siege Tower and Baldin, Century Herdmaster, where being the Ring-bearer makes it all but unblockable! Marton Stromgald is a fantastic combat-oriented commander, but it’s often tough to get him to live through combat; making him Ring-bearer will likely solve that problem.
I also really love the idea of making Taunting Kobold or Minion of the Mighty the Ring-bearer, letting them attack for great effect and not worry about being blocked. That being said, once you’ve unlocked the Level Four power, you’ll want to be able to do combat damage.
Level Two
Everyone loves drawing cards, and while this isn’t raw card drawing power, since you need to also discard a card, it’s a great way to filter cards you can’t or don’t want to play right now and hopefully find something more playable.
Not only that, discarding can be a benefit if you’ve built your deck to exploit it.
Sheoldred, the Apocalypse will gain you extra life for the extra card draw. Elenda and Azor and The Locust God will churn out extra token creatures. You can add madness cards to your deck like Big Game Hunter or From Under the Floorboards. Bone Miser and Surly Badgersaur give you benefits depending on what you discard. How about discarding a land and drawing an extra card with The Gitrog Monster, or playing that land from your graveyard with Conduit of Worlds?
Then there’s the reanimation angle. Discard some huge and expensive monster to the graveyard and then bring it back with Victimize or Unburial Rites!
Level Three
The Level Three ability shifts gears a bit, going from wanting your Ring-bearer to be too small to block to maybe actually wanting your Ring-bearer to be blocked. First, if your Ring-bearer is small, we’ll need ways to increase the power:
Equipment seems perfect for this, since another creature can wield it until you want to hand it off to the Ring-bearer. Blackblade Reforged is one of my all-time favorite cards, and it works great here. Even if your Ring-bearer isn’t inherently legendary, being Ring-bearer makes it legendary.
Power-boosting spells like Colossal Might or Might of Oaks can serve double-duty—you can boost your own Ring-bearer to allow it to be blocked, or if you want to disable a potential small power blocker, you can target your opponent’s creature with it so your Ring-bearer can slip past.
Okay, so our Ring-bearer is big enough to be blocked. Now what?
Lure + Thicket Basilisk has been a battlefield-clearing combo since the beginning of Magic: The Gathering, and we can have our Ring-bearer do a mighty fine Basilisk impression with this third ability of The Ring.
Level Four
The last ability goes back to our earlier plans of sneaking our Ring-bearer past blockers, this time in order to deal combat damage. This means the creature needs to have at least one power.
Each opponent losing three life per combat is not insignificant, but also not exactly game-ending unless you’ve got ways to crank out multiple combats. We might want to look for cards that care about opponents losing life:
Neheb, the Eternal really jumps out to me. In a typical four-player Commander pod, each opponent losing three life will equate to nine red mana added to your mana pool at the beginning of your postcombat main phase. This could easily pay for something like Aggravated Assault to keep going!
Neheb’s art looks like a creature of Sauron, so I think this wicked combo would definitely fit if you’re fighting on the bad guy side of Middle-earth!
Bearing the Temptation
Frodo, Sauron’s Bane is a new card with an effect that cares about the number of times the Ring has tempted you. Sauron, the Necromancer’s ability cares about whether Sauron is your Ring-bearer. There will surely be a fair number of these sorts of cards revealed as The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth previews begin, and will certainly play an important part of any deck where The Ring is involved. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the Commander decks tied to the set specifically revolves around the mechanic, and I think it’s going to be great fun building this mini-quest into your decks.
What cards do you think will work great with this mechanic that I might have overlooked? Are you more interested in being on the side of the Fellowship, or of the villainous Sauron?
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And lastly, I just want to say: let us love each other and stay healthy and happy.
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