The Hobbit releases August 14th, and previews continue to roll out some enticing new cards to brew around. One such card is a new Elf Typal card: Thranduil, the Elvenking. The father of Legolas, Thranduil rules over the realm of Mirkwood during The Hobbit. His card is pretty strong – and can be broken in more ways than one.
THRANDUIL, THE ELVENKING
Thranduil is a 5/6 Elf Noble for five mana, and is a blue-black-green elf (Sultai). This means you can run all of your favorite black-green (Golgari) Elves, and all of the blue-green (Simic) Elves from Tales of Middle-earth or even Ravnica.
He has two main abilities. The first gives him the activated abilities of all Elf cards in your graveyard, which if you know anything about the history of these effects, can be pretty strong. The second is some nice card draw that sets up reanimation plays, a mainstay of the Sultai color identity.
But how best can you use Thranduil’s text to build a killer Elf kindred deck?
9. USE HIM AS BACKUP FOR REMOVAL AND WRATHS
The most obvious way is to use him as a failsafe for your best mana dorks. Priest of Titania, Marwyn, Selvala, Heart of the Wilds – they’re all prime removal targets, and unless they’re exiled, you’ll get to double dip on them with Thranduil. Whether you’ve already got him in play and you lose a dork, or you’re dropping him post-wrath, you get the chance to make a bunch of mana once more.
8. MAKE ALL OF YOUR DECK LEGENDARY
That card draw is limited to the Elronds and Legolas’s and Selvalas of the world, but what if you could also draw off of the rest of your deck? Check out Leyline of Singularity, a card you can actually start the game with in play if it’s in your opening hand. It turns every permanent in play into a Legendary permanent, giving you a trigger off of every creature when Thranduil is in play. Oh, and also nerfs opponents having token armies.
7. TUTOR ELVES INTO YOUR GRAVEYARD
If you’re banking on using your yard as a resource, then you should be stacking it full of goodies as soon as possible. For that, we want to be using tutors. Entomb and Buried Alive are mainstays, but because we’re in blue, we also get to use Gifts Ungiven, which can be even stronger depending on what you grab with it. Even Unmarked Grave gets us a combo piece.
6. COMBINE SELF-MILL WITH REANIMATOR
Tutors are one thing, but when you’re in Sultai, and using the graveyard, you also want to just lean into that anyways. Two of the best ways to do that are with self-mill that also reanimates. Incarnation Technique is one of the best cards you can put in a graveyard deck, as it gets around single-target graveyard hate (and even graveyard nukes!) by milling as part of the resolution of the spell. If you want to go more extra, Breach the Multiverse mills everyone ten cards, and you get to dip into everyone else’s yard too.
5. GET MULTIPLE USES OUT OF THAT CARD DRAW ABILITY
Getting to draw two cards and discard one whenever a Legendary Elf enters is sweet, but what if you could do it a lot more often? Well, for starters, there’s Elrond, Moon-Reader, a great way to sink excess mana from your mana dorks into value. You can use it to reset your Elves, but also Sagas, for instance, which is pretty cool. Ghostly Flicker remains a fantastic value-based protection spell in blue, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about Living Death. We love Living Death. If Thranduil enters from the graveyard with other Elves, they will all trigger.
4. PROTECT THRANDUIL
A more niche type of Elf to get in the yard for Thranduil is the protection-elf. Both Tyvar the Pummeler and Underrealm Lich offer indestructibility at the drop of a hat, and are otherwise fantastic Elves to fit into your Elf typal deck anyways.
3. USE LATHRIL AS A “SECRET” COMMANDER
Lathril is the most popular Elf Commander, and for good reason. She offers a gameplan and a win condition in one card, and lets you play multiple colors. Playing Thranduil doesn’t mean you have to miss out, though. You have cards like Entomb at your fingertips, and so you can drop a surprise Lathril out of nowhere to take out the table. Playing Entomb on an end step, draining for ten, and then untapping to do it again is hella powerful, and way less telegraphed than Lathril in the command zone.
2. MAKE INFINITE MANA… AND AN INFINITELY BIG THRANDUIL
And now we get to the meat of the deck, and the reason many folks will be interested in Thranduil – the combos. Beyond using Intruder Alarm and tap effects to make tokens, your most reliable combo is going to feature Devoted Druid every time.
By having at least one other elf in play, you can tap Thranduil for mana, untap him with Devoted Druid’s untap ability, then tap again to put two +1/+1 counters on him, then untap him again, and you’re net zero on counters, but positive on green mana.
Immaculate Magistrate and Timberwatch Elf can also make Thranduil arbitrarily large if you have more Elves in play, ready for a commander damage kill, or a cheeky Rite of Consumption to the face.
1. FIND AN OUTLET FOR ALL OF THAT MANA
If you want an even more sure way to use that Devoted Druid for a kill, than just slap a Walking Ballista into your deck. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it is tried and tested, and if your deck is aimed at Bracket 3 or higher, it’s a perfectly reasonable combo card to include.
END STEP
Thranduil the Elvenking is a sweet Sultai Elf Commander, and offers another Sultai option after the popular Maralen we got in Lorywn Eclipsed. With plenty of utility and combo potential, he looks to be a pretty strong candidate for popular Elf commanders to try and break.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.