Magic: The Gathering Commander Focus: Lord of the Nazgûl

Commander's singleton focus makes for card variety and depending on how tutor heavy your deck is, unpredictable games. In theory it's one of the things that makes Commander fun, and when you play a deck of singletons versus another deck of singletons it means you can have two completely separate games. I threw 99 cards into an online calculator to get how may possible combinations there are if you draw a set of 7. It's 14,887,031,544. I'm sure someone will fact check that and say the number is wrong, it's been a while since statistics and obviously you might run multiple of basic lands, run Gitaxian Probe or Manamorphose, a partner, maybe a companion. The actual number doesn't really matter so much as the concept - every game of Commander is relatively unique.

Obviously, making a more competitive deck is often about building in predictability - lots of draw, lots of tutors, cards that do virtually the same thing. Kodama's Reach and Cultivate are effectively the same card with different names, and then there are 6 two cost green land tutors, and Flare of Cultivation. Adding that package of 9 cards smooths out green decks considerably.

There's also an increasing number of cards that specifically allow you to override card limits in your deck. There's about 10 cards you can run any number, and then a couple with specific numbers in Seven Dwarves and Nazgûl. I think if Lord of the Rings was written today it'd be nine books long, and we'd find out the names of all the Nazgûl, and probably most of them would die by the end. Also probably most of the fellowship, though it's hard to say because modern fantasy very much owes a lot to Lord of the Rings, and while it might be nice if it was more in the vein of older fantasy authors like Lord Dunsany, we'll never really know. What is pertinent is the books and movies basically talk about how badass the Nazgûl are and how they were each powerful Númenóreans but only a couple of them ever get named, and so when there was a Universes Beyond set, the Nazgûl were represented multiple ways, but in terms of a card for each, there is basically the card Nazgûl. FTS note: Technically we only know that three of them were Númenóreans, and the one fully named Nazgûl we know is Khamûl, known among other things as 'the Easterling' because he is one. The witch-king is titled not named.

This is a solid way to represent the Ringwraiths, and there's also several versions of the Witch-King, since he was titled.

Nazgûl is a solid card, and if you can get tempted by the Ring you'll deposit +1/+1 counters on all your Wraiths. This comes quit in handy because our commander has a cool trick to make all our Wraiths suddenly get quite large.

Credit: Wizards of the Coast

The core of this deck is the commander of course, and getting enough Wraiths out to trigger his ability which turns all your Wraiths into 9/9 creatures. 9, 9 power creatures is 81 power right there, enough to kill all your opponents in one turn - in theory. It's possible they might block at that point. Nonetheless it's a fun trick that your opponents will probably, definitely see coming. Frankly it's a very telegraphed ability for a bunch of creatures that are inky black and semi-see through. Then again they never really seem to actually sneak up on anyone in the books.

Okay, so we get our Lord of the Nazgûl out, and then try to get at least one or two Nazgûl, and then just fill out your board with Wraiths till you hit 9. For a tribal Wraith deck there sadly aren't that many great Wraiths. Even though Bog Wraith dates back to Alpha, there's really not that many extant Wraiths, but between the 9 Nazgûl and a few others, we can fill out to 20 or so playable Wraiths.

With a couple of Ring temptations in there your Wraiths should be rolling out at around 12/12 or so and then you can just slam them into your opponents, and hopefully kill a couple of them.

The deck plays in a fairly linear way, you're looking for a couple of rocks early so you can drop a land turn 1, turn 2 land and a mana rock, turn 3 hopefully either two rocks or a land and another rock, and drop your Lord of the Nazgûl on turn 4. After that you're praying for a couple of more Wraiths, which you can find once you start digging through the deck with the fully bevy of black's fairly standardized "lose 2 life, draw 2 cards, and either scry or surveil or some other bonus" cards. There are a couple of important caveats though.

First: don't just dump out all your mana rocks. You may need ways to discard cards, or get targeted by discard or something like that. Once you hit 5 or 6 mana, you generally don't want to keep ramping. There's just not much to do with it.

Second: hold your interaction, your draw sorceries, and your other instants, until you've got your commander out. The key to your game plan is getting 9 Wraiths in play with Lord of the Nazgûl out so you can turn them all into beefy 9/9 Wraiths.

Third: be careful with your life total. This deck has a fair amount of ways to lose life, including The One Ring. Don't overdraw, in it's current form the deck has no way to regain that life. You could easily end up killing yourself, which is somewhat intentional for a deck built around being the Lord of the Nazgûl.

Final note, there's a few ways to get copies of the Lord of the Nazgûl with Spark Double, Sakshima the Imposter, or Imposter Syndrome; if you can grab one of these it's fun, do it.

While this deck can theoretically knock out the whole table on like turn 8 or 9, that's solidly into bracket 2 territory. It'll be a somewhat inconsistent, and sometimes stalling, slow ramp deck that then turns into a threat if it's basically unmolested. Even if nobody actively stops you, board clears will set you back severely. If you don't hit critical Wraith mass you just have a bunch of anemic swamp walking or death touching small to mid size creatures. A more powerful version of this deck would probably do something like mass mill, then mass reanimate with haste to slam out all you Wraiths at once and then pop your opponents out of nowhere.

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