Commander Deck of the Week: Gollum, Patient Plotter

I preordered my The Lord of the Rings Bundle because it guaranteed a copy of The One Ring, along with the other three copies of the extended scene cards depicting the story climax at Mount Doom.  When I was looking at new legends I wanted to build a paper Commander deck around, I kept coming back to the really cool artwork for Gollum, Patient Plotter by Marta Nael, grasping desperately for his Precious, The One Ring, and I knew I had to build a deck around it.

Relatively recently, I’d built a mono-black deck around Ashnod, Flesh Mechanist, and while it was fun for a couple of games, it’s pretty linear in what it wants to do, which meant I’d grown tired of it.

Luckily for me, there was a fair amount of the deck that I would want in my Gollum, Patient Plotter deck, so pulling together Gollum, Patient Plotter went quickly, and now I can share it with you!

Plots, Plots, Plots

Gollum comes down from the command zone on Turn 2, and if it dies, you can usually just leave it in the graveyard, where you can sacrifice a creature to bring Gollum back to your hand. Gollum leaving the battlefield means that the Ring tempts you, so it should be pretty easy to ramp up the power of the Ring to Level 4, which makes your Ring-bearer problematic. A lot of the creatures I’d want to run are recursive creatures that come back from the graveyard and have low power, which makes them perfect for skulking past blockers, sifting through extra cards, and draining your opponents for life.

Let’s dig into the decklist!  Keep in mind if you don’t have The One Ring, you can still run a Gollum, Patient Plotter deck without it; I’m just running it for flavor reasons.

The Ring Tempts You

Gollum’s ability to have the Ring tempt you unfortunately means that Gollum won’t be able to become Ring-bearer himself most of the time, so I decided to run just about all the cards I could that say “the Ring tempts you.”  Notably absent are the Nazgul, but I’m not going to pay $15 apiece for nine uncommons, no matter how well they fit the theme. Claim the Precious is a poor version of Murder, but the flavor is perfect.

Ringwraiths doesn’t tempt you, but it does come back from the graveyard when the Ring tempts you, and I’ve found that this card plays much better than you think if you’ve got plenty of tempting going on, and with that effect tied to the commander, this fits.