Tom Bombadil’s Sagas: Building with a Flavorful New Commander

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth Prerelease weekend has passed, and hopefully you were able to get your hands on some Prerelease packs or other sealed product.  I had a great time cracking some packs and reveling in such a flavor-driven cool set.  Of the many cards I was excited to get my hands on was Tom Bombadil, our new five-color Saga overlord!

Presales for Tom had been north of $20 for quite some time, and I wasn’t in the market to pay so much money for an incredibly narrow card, no matter how much fun you could have with it. So cracking one in a pack was quite exciting, but even more exciting was finding out that the cost to pick up one if you weren’t lucky enough to open one in a booster was quite reasonable.  So it occurred to me, as excited as I was about brewing up a cool Saga deck around a (now quite reasonably priced) new commander, others might be excited as well!

Quite the Character

Plus, Tom Bombadil is such a weird and wonderful character from the original The Lord of the Rings trilogy of novels, and was so weird that Tom didn’t make it into Peter Jackson’s wildly popular The Lord of the Rings movies. Tom is a uniquely strange being whose main purpose appears to just exist, explore, and witness events throughout time.

Frodo and his Hobbit companions very early in their journey had a near-disastrous run-in with a creature called Old Man Willow, and Tom Bombadil helped rescue them and invited them to stay with him and his wife Goldberry for a few days. Frodo told Tom about The One Ring and Tom even put it on, but seemed to not at all be affected by it, and could even see Frodo when he put the Ring on himself.

As a being who has witnessed to events large and small throughout all of history, it’s a flavor home-run that Tom Bombadil would be the perfect commander to run any Sagas throughout all of Magic’s history.

Ability Breakdown

 Let’s take a look at his abilities:

Given that most Sagas have three chapters and go away after the third chapter, it will be more difficult than you think to unlock this first ability. You are going to need multiple Sagas on the battlefield, and likely some way to manipulate the lore counters in response to an effect that targets or destroys Tom. I would probably rely on some cards like Spellskite, Mother of Runes, Tamiyo’s Safekeeping, or Deflecting Swat providing additional protection to our jolly Bard God. I might even run Bastion Protector and Guardian Augmenter.

Release Notes Aside

Another thing to keep in mind, from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth Release Notes:

So an untimely Naturalize can fizzle out Tom’s protection from damage after combat has been done.

Back to Abilities

Okay, now to Tom’s jackpot ability:

Now this is where the magic happens for Tom, but barring shenanigans, you’ll have to wait until your next turn and a Saga’s final ability resolving before you get the payoff. This is where manipulating lore counters will prove helpful, or maybe even being able to cast Tom with flash to hit the battlefield at some point before your next main phase begins.

Another thing to keep in mind from the release notes:

Okay, let’s dig into what cards we might want to run in our Tom Bombadil deck, starting with – what else? – Sagas!!