What Has He Got In His Pocketses? A Guide to Frodo Baggins for EDH

Posted on February 10, 2025

One of the most memorable things for any young person is the first time they crack open the legendary Lord of the Rings books. The set saw some pretty epic Historic builds, but I wanted to fiddle with Commander a bit. As a fan of Tolkien, I was over the moon when this Universes Beyond set was released, leading me to start brewing with Frodo Baggins.

The Commander

Frodo Baggins is an unassuming commander. He's two mana and thrives on The Ring Tempts You mechanic. He's also kind of unblockable unless opponents are playing small creatures.

I'd consider Frodo Baggins one of the most underrated commanders of 2023. Frodo causes The Ring to tempt you, but he also triggers on each legendary creature entry. That's pretty insane, and the way this deck is built, you should be able to consistently get to The Ring Tempts You level 4 within the first 3-4 turns. Why's that important?

Well, the deck hinges on riding Frodo to victory, using legendary creatures to get incremental advantage. Instead of the typical blinking shenanigans that White is famous for, I decided to build it with a bit of a reanimator shell. Using cards that were originally designed for White/Black decks, I've turned this Selesnya (White/Green) pile into a reanimator deck.

And the card advantage is simply insane. Cards like Reki, the History of Kamigawa trigger each time you cast a legendary creature (and there are A LOT of legendary creatures in here). Combine that with artifacts that get Frodo through for damage or make it less viable for your opponent to block him (or both) and you get a deck that snowballs pretty hard. The best part? Most opponents don't even see it coming.

Card Choices and Strategy

While Frodo won't break into the top five Selesnya commanders of all time, there's a lot going on here. This deck accelerates out early and builds a board for your opponents to deal with. While there are a few token synergies, the bulk of the pressure will come from your legendary creatures. Once you get Frodo up to level 2 of The Ring Tempts You, you'll have card selection through the looting effect. The idea is to get one of the other artifacts that either gets Frodo in for unblocked damage, or more legendary creatures to add to your board state. The deck breakdown has these major considerations:

8 Reanimation spells or permanents

12 Card draw or filtering spells or permanents

24 Legendary Creatures

5 sweepers

1 (potentially) Infinite Combo

More flavor than Samwise Gamgee's Potatoes and Coney

This deck wants to start applying pressure with Frodo as early as possible and get into a winning position while your opponents try to figure out how to deal with your board...which just keeps coming back. All hail budget reanimation!

Reanimation Spells or Permanents

While it's nice to have other targets to reanimate, your primary target has to be Frodo. The only time you ought to be casting him from the command zone is when they exile him (or your graveyard, with him in it).

Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle - is a repeatable reanimation engine, with every legendary creature potentially getting Frodo back from the graveyard.

Court of Ardenvale - is another source of repeatable reanimation, and if you can manage to stick or take the monarch role, your stuff comes back to the battlefield instead.

Sevinne's Reclamation - gives you potentially two reanimation spells, with the flashback mode returning two things from the graveyard to the battlefield.

Card Draw and Filtering

Harmonize - was one of the best draw spells Green had access to for a while, and it's still great value netting you three cards for 4 mana.

Infiltration Lens - might seem counterintuitive to the plan, but it plays well with Frodo's ability, allowing us to turn our blocked swings into card advantage.

Reki, the History of Kamigawa - turns every single legendary creature we have into card draw.

Peregrin Took - turns that food into card draw.

Legendary Creatures

Boromir, Warden of the Tower - plays double duty in this deck. He's low-cost enough to be reanimated through our reanimation engines, and sacrificing him makes our board indestructible. He also stops cascade and other free-spell shenanigans as a bonus.

Senu, Keen-Eyed Protector - is simply repeatable value. When he's in play, we can tap and exile him for a peek at the top of our deck and to gain some life, then when we swing with an unblockable Frodo, it pops back in tapped and attacking.

Trostani, Three Whispers - allows us to give our unblockable Frodo double-strike, and if we get up to the final level of The Ring Tempts You, we make ALL our opponents lose six life per attack. That will whittle down life totals really quickly.

Sweepers

The Battle of Bywater - will hit some of our bigger things, but since we can just bring those back, it won't affect us as much as our opponents.

Urza's Ruinous Blast - exiles all non-legendary, nonland permanents. Sure, our sol ring will take a hit from this, but it'll decimate our opponents a lot more than it'll decimate us.

Dusk // Dawn - is a free-roll for us. Not only do we get a sweeper that doesn't destroy our entire board, but we get a reanimation spell on the back end that brings back most of our creatures.

Infinite Combo

I'm running Rosie Cotton of South Lane/Scurry Oak as a combo in here because we have so many ways to reanimate those two that they become a nuisance for our opponents to deal with. If they don't have exile-based removal, that combo will eat their lunch, and that means one (or two) fewer exile-based removal spells coming at Frodo.

Flavor

The One Ring is, by and large the best (and most busted) card-advantage engine in the deck. It's expensive, but it's sooo flavorful, I just couldn't exclude it from the build.

We have almost every member of the Fellowship here, with the notable exception of Gimli, Counter of Kills, who was only ever printed outside of our colors.

Our artifacts include The One Ring, Bilbo's Ring, Mithril Coat, and the Mirror of Galadriel giving a full The Lord of the Rings experience.

And that's the deck. I put a lot of my experience as a deck-builder into this one. If you'd prefer a budget option, simply replace The One Ring with Toski, Bearer of Secrets, and Mithril Coat with Darksteel Plate. The deck's still playable, but it loses some of the flavor of the original build with slightly less efficient cards. I hope you enjoy playing this build of Frodo Baggins as much as I do!