I have embraced the "Mayor of Flavortown" honorific that has been bestowed on me. Guy Fieri, despite looking like someone spilled a can of Monster energy drink in the vat when they were trying to clone the guy from Smashmouth, is a kind and helpful person. It's not by copying his philanthropic efforts or anything that I have come to be referred to as Mr. Fieri or "His Guyness" as he likes to be called. No, it's because someone photoshopped Guy Fieri to have normal-looking hair and it's just a picture of me.

The thing is, it turns out I don't need to be exactly like Guy Fieri to enter the Kingdom of Flavortown - the flavor was there all along - inside of me. It made appearances when I built decks or wrote award-eligible articles. Now that we are in week two of the Lord of the Rings mania which will end in a week when Commander Masters previews start, I am absolutely feeling the flavor. It's not, however, to Flavortown that I will take you today. No, like sneaky Black creatures with flash, I have deceived you and led you down a twisting path into a part of the Shire you've never seen before. Today, I'm taking you to Sacville.

Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is a Hobbit related to the other Bagginses and that's basically all I remember. Her excellent power and toughness for three mana coupled with her long list of abilities makes her formidable in combat but even more formidable in your hand, waiting for the perfect time to capitalize on a recent tragic death, I assume by robbing their corpse. Yet, there is one element of Lobelia the makes her the ideal 75% commander.

Lol, psych, I fooled you again. We are playing with the 75% Lobelia and I only talked about the other Lobelia to show she was a Baggins and her other name was Sackville. Plus, she is really good in this deck because she makes a lot of treasures you can sac to play their cards.

It's ironic they named the cards this way, since Defender of Bag End is the one taking us to Sacville - so named because of all of the sacrificing we're going to be doing. Tl:dr - We're going to play their cards, and playing their cards has always been fun. But how does this deck get broken?

The trick is to make her costs not really costs at all. The first issue is that you have to wait a turn to use her and if they kill her, you can't get any of the cards you exiled when you cast Lobelia that time. The other issue is that we have to sacrifice artifacts and I read in an article one time that card disadvantage was bad. I think there are very suitable workarounds for both of those drawbacks to be found among Magic's many 'facts. In 'fact (pun intended), I think it's possible to build this deck where the only creatures are Artifact creatures, and I am going to do that. Part of it is that I will have to put like 5 or 6 "cute" cards in the deck to make sure I have enough creatures, and those are cards you wouldn't have seen my opinion about otherwise. Another reason is that I think all of the other ideas I had were kind of boring. This lends itself to Cloudstone Curio which means I'll play Gray Merchant which means- annnnnnd I'm asleep. I am not saying that kind of deck is boring to play, I'm saying it's boring to build and since I'm building a deck today, I want to build one that's fun to build AND fun to play. I could either write a bunch of paragraphs about why I think Mirkwood Bats is boring and don't like that I'm basically forced to play it to keep up or I could just come up with a creative way to explain why they're not in the deck. Because Gray Merchant, Bats, Syr Konrad and the rest of the Boring Builder Brigade would have been in the deck. Of course they would have. And now they won't be, but only because they can't. Or maybe I would have stuck to my principles and not included them in a deck without making any restrictions for myself. But probably not. Have you READ Mirkwood Bats? That's a COMMON.

A deck with a ton of artifact creatures doesn't have to be bad - there is a long list of artifact creatures we would have run regardless. I'm not running Solemn Simulacrum and Scrap Trawler because I am forced to by a silly restriction, I'm running them because they're excellent Magic cards and they're in like 90% of the Lobelia decks in the world. Going deeper on a list of potential artifact creatures than you would have ordinarily can be a lot of fun when you're jamming the cartoonish-looking Liberator, Urza's Battle Thopter into your Baggins family values deck. Since we're talking about the deck, time to show it off.

Welcome to Sacville | Commander | Jason Alt

• Creatures (16)
• 1 Canoptek Scarab Swarm
• 1 Canoptek Spyder
• 1 Circuit Mender
• 1 Clay Revenant
• 1 Cryptothrall
• 1 Filigree Familiar
• 1 Foundry Inspector
• 1 Hangarback Walker
• 1 Junk Diver
• 1 Karn, Legacy Reforged
• 1 Kuldotha Forgemaster
• 1 Myr Battlesphere
• 1 Myr Retriever
• 1 Scrap Trawler
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Workshop Assistant

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Ugin, the Ineffable

• Instants (8)
• 1 Deadly Dispute
• 1 Fake Your Own Death
• 1 Feign Death
• 1 Hostile Negotiations
• 1 Malakir Rebirth
• 1 Supernatural Stamina
• 1 Undying Evil
• 1 Undying Malice

• Sorceries (8)
• 1 Agadeem's Awakening // Agadeem, the Undercrypt
• 1 Beacon of Unrest
• 1 Feed the Swarm
• 1 Reanimate
• 1 Ritual of the Machine
• 1 Shadow of the Enemy
• 1 Unearth
• 1 Victimize

• Enchantments (5)
• 1 Animate Dead
• 1 Biotransference
• 1 Black Market Connections
• 1 Kaya's Ghostform
• 1 Phyrexian Scriptures

• Artifacts (24)
• 1 Altar of Bhaal
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Cloudstone Curio
• 1 Conjurer's Closet
• 1 Helm of Possession
• 1 Ichor Wellspring
• 1 Illusionist's Bracers
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Liquimetal Torque
• 1 Magewright's Stone
• 1 Mycosynth Wellspring
• 1 Nim Deathmantle
• 1 Nimblewright Schematic
• 1 Noble's Purse
• 1 Panharmonicon
• 1 Patriar's Seal
• 1 Prized Statue
• 1 Semblance Anvil
• 1 Servo Schematic
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Thousand-Year Elixir
• 1 Ugin's Nexus
• 1 Vat of Rebirth
• 1 Voyager Staff

• Lands (37)
• 30 Swamp
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Cabal Coffers
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Hall of the Bandit Lord
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1 Vault of Whispers

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This looks like a ton of fun to play, honestly. I wasn't sure how much I would like it if I nerfed most of the blink and bounce shenanigans and most of the Reanimator shenanigans and just stuck to Artifacts. It turns out that those shenanigans are side quests - the main quest is basically on rails as you just get a ton of advantage either sacrificing artifacts like Mycosynth Wellspring or playing spells like Victimize. The artifact stuff works all day so you can take its paycheck and blow it on frivolous side pursuits like using Ritual of the Machine on someone and them reading it twice. Ice Age was weird; that used to happen a lot. I think if someone builds this deck, they'll have fun a lot. Getting a ton of Lobelia triggers is our most fun win condition and a lot of the deck is set up to either support her blinking as she gets sacced so she can come back with something like Undying Malice or just having her come back because someone wiped the board. Paying commander tax is no fun so see that you don't have to do it too often.

It occurred to me that I am putting these decks on my public archidekt profile but I haven't been linking to it. Take a look at my decks, including the ones I have made for this series in the last few months. Or don't, I'm not your Dad. I am proud of you, though.

Thanks for reading. Until next time!