How Aragorn completely took over Duel commander
Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth is one of the most popular mtg sets of all time. It printed many powerful or even broken cards for modern, EDH, legacy, vintage and also duel commander. Aragorn was one of those cards and apart of being a strong commander for EDH he has also taken the metagame by storm. In this article I want to talk about the evolution of the deck and how we ended up here...
Prerelease hype
LotR: Tales of Middle Earth was looking as a really powerful set, some people even calling "Modern Horizons 3" after it was revealed that the cards would be legal in modern. Cards like Orcish Bowmasters, Delighted Halfling immediately took people's attention and for a good reason. All of these have been seeing play in many formats for the past few months and warped modern around them ( looking at you The One Ring...).
Aragorn, King of Gondor was one of the cards printed in the set but was revealed quite late. He was a part of the new commander preconstructed deck and also isn't breaking modern so that's why he probably didn't get that much attention. Some clever deckbuilders saw potential in him though and started thinking about how to actually build the deck for duel commander.
A new meta tyrant?!
Just a few days after the prerelease of the set, people already started bringing the deck to local tournaments. Most players build it like a control deck and even managed to finish in the top 8s of a few tournaments during the first couple of days. Players now knew that Aragorn had a lot of potential but there was a major debate over which version of the deck was better. Some players trusted their beloved control version of the deck with a ton of removal to make sure the opponent didn't take the monarch but others believed in the more tempo oriented variant with creatures so you could actually take the monarch back when needed.
The deck quickly skyrocketed in popularity and was among the most popular decks at the time. People brought it to both smaller local tournaments and big, more competitive tournaments. People loved the card a lot and quickly optimised the decklist realising that the tempo route was probably the better one, though some still stayed loyal to their control version.
The other version of the card, Aragorn, the Uniter wasn't as popular because it was a lot weaker compared to the other one. The deck was (and still is) full of good cards from all of the colours that you had access to. The commander provides a ton of value and rewards playing multicolor cards meaning that the deck played a ton of those. Aragorn, King of Gondor was still by far the more popular one from among them though.
Current situation
It's been about 5 months since Aragorn was unleashed upon the duel commander metagame and he is still remains as one of the most popular decks. He has recently fallen off a bit thanks to Slimefoot and Squee being the hottest deck on the radar right now. Even with that, players are still bringing the deck to tournaments and getting good results with it so I doubt that he will dissapear that soon.
As for Aragorn, the Uniter, his situation has also remained quite the same. Some people like to bring it to smaller local tournaments and the deck can take them down if piloted well. This version of Aragorn is still much weaker so I don't expect it to be on top of the metagame any time soon, especially with Slimefoot and Squee running around...
Author: Tomas Solovic
Date: November 21st, 2023