One of my favorite things about new Magic sets is building EDH decks around random Legendary Creatures I pull out of my first few booster packs. I generally won't just build around anything, but I can usually find something good. This time around it didn't take me long to find a card and my decision was based in part on wanting to take another deck apart. This is how we landed on Beorn the Fierce for our Commander.

Last month I brewed up a deck for The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and after only a few games I realized, I wasn't going to enjoy playing it. The card just makes it too easy to win games. She's an "army in a can" without Krenko, Mob Boss's need to untap to double your army.

Making tons of mana is trivial in Green, and while she wasn't unbeatable, I always felt like I was gearing up to pub stomp a table. I'm confident there are players and metagames where Squirrel Girl will fit in just fine, but I don't think I'm that player, and I don't think the tables I play at are those tables.

Taking apart a Green deck to build another Green deck is something I've done a lot in the past few years, but this time around I had a choice to make. I opened up several copies of the Common Beorn, Reluctant Host alongside one copy of the Mythic Rare Beorn the Fierce. Going by rarity alone, this should be an easy choice, but it's worth looking at each of these cards.

Two Beorns to Choose From

Beorn, Reluctant Host is a five mana 5/5 Human Bear Shapeshifter with Trample and an Adventure tacked onto it. For two mana I can cast Till and Tend, a Sorcery that lets me play an additional Land this turn. Casting Beorn from exile after casting Till and Tend will always cost so it's a way to help get around Commander Tax. The tax of extra mana will apply whether I'm casting him out of the Command Zone as a Creature or using his Adventure mode.

Beorn the Fierce costs and is a 6/6 Bear Shapeshifter Warrior with Trample and some pretty sweet party tricks. He'll give an anthem effect of +2/+2 to any other Bears I control. At the beginning of combat on my turn, I'll put a Trample counter on up to one target Creature I control. It becomes a Bear in addition to its other types and if I control three or more Bears I'll draw two cards.

I get excited when I see a potential new Commander that just has "draw a card" on it, so you'd better believe that caught my eye. I also enjoy building Kindred decks, focused on a single Creature type, so the prospect of digging through my old cards for Bears pretty much made my decision for me. I'd be taking apart Squirrels to build Bears.

Leaning Into Beorn's Bear Theme

This is a deck I built in paper, so I didn't have every card that might have made sense to put into a Bear themed EDH deck. I did want to lean into the theme a lot, so I ended up running a bunch of cards that felt right even if they weren't actually bears.

Fade from History is a four mana Sorcery that will clear the field of Artifacts and Enchantments. I am running a few of each of those card types, but in the right situation it could have a huge impact on the game. The Bear tie-in has to do with the fact that each player who controls an Artifact or Enchantment will create a 2/2 Green Bear Creature token. If I've got a Heroic Intervention ready to protect my stuff, this could even leave my Artifacts and Enchantments untouched. The biggest reason this is in the list is the art. Look at those bears and tell me they aren't adorable.

Hibernation's End also has bears in the artwork, but these bears are not as cute and make less sense to run in a Beorn deck. This isn't The Golden Compass. This is The Hobbit, so while I put this Enchantment into my first draft, I could see eventually cutting it out. It costs five mana , and has a cumulative upkeep of , so I'll pay on my upkeep to keep it around. Those payments put age counters on it, and I'll get to tutor Creatures into play based upon the number of age counters it has.

The last card shown above might be the most obvious addition to this list. Bear Umbra is a four mana Enchantment that might not turn the enchanted Creature into a Bear, but it will give it +2/+2 and untap my Lands when it attacks. It also gives Totem Armor, so if the enchanted Creature would be destroyed, instead I'll remove all damage from it and the aura will be destroyed.

Radagast of Rhosgobel will make a lot of my Bears cost just one Green mana. He'll let me cast a Creature spell each turn as though it had flash, and at a discount of less mana. He also has what has to be Beorn, in bear form, right there next to him in the art box. If that sounds like a leap, the flavor text on the card is Gandalf having a chat with Beorn. Apparently Radagast is "not a bad fellow as Wizards go".

Eladamri's Vineyard felt like a really good fit, and the new Enchantment Beorn's Hospitality felt like it had to go in. Kindred Summons is also in the list and will probably be able to put four or five additional Bears into play if I ever get it to resolve. Slate of Ancestry should reliably draw me a few cards at the cost of discarding what's left of my hand.

Bears Not Included

With more time and maybe some research, I could build a list that was even more closely tied to the depiction of Beorn and his entourage in The Hobbit. I left out Long-Bodied Grey Dog, Dancing from Dark to Dawn, and Gigantic Big Bear from my list. I don't yet have copies of those last two, and I also wanted to really focus on running a ton of Bears.

Missing from my list is Bearscape, a three mana Green Enchantment that lets me pay and remove two cards from my graveyard to put a 2/2 Green Bear Creature token into play. It's only missing because I don't own a copy of either the old Odyssey version or the Secret Lair reprint. My desire to have this deck feel like it makes sense thematically for the character Beorn meant that I also left out the post-apocalyptic Rampaging Yao Guai from Fallout.

Surrak and Goreclaw, Lumra, Bellow of the Woods, and Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma were also not included. I don't love mixing Legendary Creatures across multiverses, though if I had a spare copy of Goreclaw I'd have thrown it in. I generally end up finding a middle ground between my "principles" of building a thematic low powered deck, and the need to actually build in synergy and functionality so the deck has a chance at doing something in a game.

Bears Old and New

I did end up with a plan to run as many Bears as possible to maximize the chances that I'd be able to trigger Beorn's card draw ability. Beorn the Fierce can turn another creature into a Bear but that has no basis in the story of The Hobbit. Wizards of the Coast just made it up. I am running a few non-Bear creatures but my list is chock full of genuine, bona fide Bears.

Werebear might simultaneously be my favorite Bear and my favorite Druid of all time. He's just a two mana 1/1 that taps to make a Green mana, but the older versions of this card have the best flavor text ever. He exercises his right to bear arms. Of course he does. I can't imagine building this deck without him and his hilarious bear arms.

The term Bear became shorthand for a two mana 2/2 with no abilities thanks to the card Grizzly Bears so it had to be included. My list also has Runeclaw Bear, which is a functional reprint of Grizzly Bears. Alpine Grizzly is another Bear with no abilities, but it costs one more mana and has a 4/2 body.

Spectral Bears is a two mana 3/3 with an interesting restriction. If they are declared as an attacker, and the defending player controls no black cards, it won't untap on your next untap step. My initial draft didn't include some of those older cards but I dug around in my collection, and managed to come across the ones in today's list.

Owlbear Cub is a three mana Bird Bear with a neat attack trigger. Whenever it attacks a player who controls 8 or more lands, I'll look at the top eight cards of my library. I may put a creature card from among them into the battlefield tapped and attacking that player. The rest go on the bottom of my library.

In the mid and late game if I'm able to keep three mana up, I might be able to bounce back from a boardwipe with Caller of the Claw. This three mana 2/2 Elf has Flash and when it enters the battlefield I'll put a 2/2 green Bear Creature token onto the battlefield for each nontoken Creature put into my graveyard from the battlefield this turn. Most of my Creatures won't be tokens so this is a great Bear-themed way to bounce back from a wrath.

If you ever wondered if power creep was a thing, you need to look no further than Little Bear and Ordinary Bear from The Hobbit. The former is a 3 mana 3/2 with Flash which will untap another creature I control when it enters. If that creature is a bear, I'll put a +1/+1 counter on it. Ordinary Bear is a four power, five toughness vanilla (no abilities) Bear. He costs four mana, but he could attack, get double-blocked by an old Grizzly Bear and a Runeclaw Bear, survive the combat and kill them both.

Winning With Bears

One of the biggest questions for a deck like this is how it actually wins. That generally boils down to the power level of the tables you play at. This is a Bracket 2 deck and makes no apologies about it. We're here to have fun, play the fairest of Magic, and smash creatures together with our friends. We'll lose a lot of games, but that isn't as big a concern for this deck as it might be for some of my other decks. It's very possible to win lower powered games of EDH with a low budget deck full of Bears, and one key is in how much focus you put into amplifying your combat damage output.

One simple way is to pump up a Creature with cards that make a Creature much, much bigger. Staff of Titania will give the equipped Creature +X/+X where X is the number of Forests I control. This list has 33 Forests, so I should be able to regularly get that up to +6/+6 and higher as the game goes on. I'm also running Blanchwood Armor and Crystalline Armor, two auras that give a similar boost. The former will count my Forests and the latter counts my Lands. Beorn provides Trample, so if I've got a big enough Creature I should be able to get some damage in.

If I've got any of those cards attached to my Commander, I can push for the 21 Commander damage needed to kill a player. Berserk is an Instant that can only be cast before the combat damage step. It gives target Creature Trample and +X/+0 where X is its power. It also destroys that creature at the beginning of the next end step if it attacked this turn.

Pumping up a Creature can turn from a threat to a wincon when paired with a card like Overwhelming Stampede. This five mana Sorcery gives my Creatures +X/+X where X is the greatest power among Creatures I control. I can't pair it with Berserk, as it will need to be cast before combat, but it should still give me the potential for a game-winning alpha strike - especially if a player or two have already been eliminated.

Drawing cards is important to winning games of Commander, so Return of the Wildspeaker joins Shamanic Revelation and Rishkar's Expertise in my list as ways to help keep my hand full. This five mana Instant can also be cast as a pump spell to give my Non-HumanCcreatures +3/+3 until end of turn. Since I can use this after blocks have been declared, there's always a chance that I can catch an opponent off guard. If they were planning on barely surviving an attack and killing me on the crackback, Return of the Wildspeaker can sometimes push a big attack up into lethal territory. Regal Force is also in the list as another way to draw a bunch of cards, and if I need to, Beorn might just turn it into a Bear.

Turning Creatures into Bears might be a flavor fail when comparing these cards to the source material, but I'm building around a card, not a book, so I decided to include a few Creatures that weren't already Bears. My first draft briefly had Gigantosaurus until I decided having a Dinosaur on the field in a Beorn deck would just be embarrassing. Archetype of Endurance looks like a Creature that might fit in with Beorn. It gives my Creatures Hexproof and prevents my opponents' Creatures from having or gaining Hexproof. It's also a 6/5 Boar that Beorn can turn into an 8/7 Bear Boar.

Hydra Omnivore was a real choice for this list. I'm not aware of any Hydras in The Hobbit, but the prospect of pumping one up with an aura like Blanchwood Armor, giving it Trample, turning it into a Bear, attacking, doubling its power with Berzerk, was just too tempting to pass up. This 8/8 Hydra doesn't come with Trample, but when it deals combat damage to an opponent it will deal that much damage to each other opponent. That could kill the table in the right situation.

My decision to mostly lean into Bear-themed cards led to some surprising omissions. I could have run Gigantosaursus, Ghalta, Primal Hunger, or even some big Colossi or Eldrazi Titans for Beorn to turn into Bears, but that felt wrong. I even left out cards based upon the artwork.. Beastmaster Ascension is the kind of Enchantment that would be an auto-include in a casual Green deck that goes even a little wide. I didn't run it because the artwork depicts a bunch of Tigers. Beorn may not have had polar bears at his humble abode on the way to Mirkwood Forest, but at least those are bears. He certainly didn't have tigers in his company of animal friends, much less Dinosaurs, giant robots or Eldrazi Titans.

Tuning Our Beorn EDH Decklist

I put this list together before I even had all of the product I ordered, so there's a good chance it will change in the coming weeks. The good news is that you don't need to open a ton of packs of The Hobbit in order to build a Bear typal EDH deck. Lots of Bear cards can be found in what's available at any decent LGS, especially if it has a collection that dates back to early Magic. You don't have to run older cards like Grizzly Bears and Spectral Bears but I'm glad to be running them in my list.

Beorn the Fierce | Commander | Stephen Johnson

• Commander (1)
• 1 Beorn the Fierce

• Creatures (29)
• 1 Alpine Grizzly
• 1 Archetype of Endurance
• 1 Caller of the Claw
• 1 Chameleon Colossus
• 1 Chomping Changeling
• 1 Dragon-Scarred Bear
• 1 Drover Grizzly
• 1 Druid's Familiar
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Grizzly Bears
• 1 Hydra Omnivore
• 1 Keeper of Fables
• 1 Little Bear
• 1 Mother Bear
• 1 Ordinary Bear
• 1 Owlbear Cub
• 1 Professor of Zoomancy
• 1 Radagast of Rhosgobel
• 1 Regal Force
• 1 Runeclaw Bear
• 1 Ruxa, Patient Professor
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Spectral Bears
• 1 Ulvenwald Bear
• 1 Ulvenwald Observer
• 1 Vigor
• 1 Vivien's Grizzly
• 1 Voracious Varmint
• 1 Werebear

• Instants (7)
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Berserk
• 1 Harrow
• 1 Heroic Intervention
• 1 Kindred Summons
• 1 Return of the Wildspeaker
• 1 Return to Nature

• Sorceries (12)
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Fade from History
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Nature's Lore
• 1 Overwhelming Stampede
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Rishkar's Expertise
• 1 Shamanic Revelation
• 1 Shared Roots
• 1 Skyshroud Claim
• 1 Three Visits
• 1 Titania's Command

• Enchantments (8)
• 1 Bear Umbra
• 1 Beorn's Hospitality
• 1 Blanchwood Armor
• 1 Crystalline Armor
• 1 Eladamri's Vineyard
• 1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
• 1 Hibernation's End
• 1 Unnatural Growth

• Artifacts (6)
• 1 Banner of Kinship
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Nyx Lotus
• 1 Slate of Ancestry
• 1 Staff of Titania
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots

• Lands (37)
• 33 Forest
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
• 1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
• 1 Three Tree City

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Lowering the Power Level

While you might look at this list and consider it a Bracket 1 deck, I'd play it at Bracket 2 tables without any hesitation. I've got a cogent strategy, interaction, card draw, and ways to turn an army of Bears into a real threat. If I were to try to drop this list down even further I would probably lean heavily into making the list feel as close as possible to the depiction of Beorn in The Hobbit. There are plenty of cards you could throw in to get a nice rustic sensibility, and you could even go through Chapter VII of The Hobbit, Queer Lodgings, and find cards to match the animals and the feel of that part of the story. Your deck would probably be a bit weaker, but it might be a lot of fun.

Increasing the Power Level

I don't think Beorn the Fierce is going to have much of an impact on the higher power levels of Commander. If you were willing to leave behind any concerns about theme, you could make a more powerful deck than I've shared with you today. To start, having Creatures that are very strong but lacking in evasion might make sense. The aforementioned Gigantosaurus is a five mana 10/10 Dinosaur with no abilities whatsoever. It costs so it's not likely to show up anywhere but in a mono-Green deck and it would just love to be turned into a Dinosaur Bear, given Trample, and sent after your tablemates. Green stompy decks can be surprisingly powerful. If you don't care about theme, Beorn is a decent Trample enabler for a deck willing to run a very silly combination of big beaters.

Final Thoughts

I should reiterate that there's nothing wrong with playing Commanders as powerful as The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl but I'm pretty sure I'm going to enjoy playing Beorn the Fierce a lot more. Wins are just more satisfying if you're not already coming into the game with the advantage of an obviously broken Commander. It's why I used to build different Goblin decks, going from Squee, Goblin Nabob to Muxus, Goblin Grandee, to Smellerbee, Rebel Fighter for my Goblin deck instead of just settling into yet another tired old optimized Krenko, Mob Boss list.

My viewpoint might have to do with having played Commander for over a decade. Once you win enough games, it can be fun to play around with powerful Commanders, but it's a lot more interesting to see if you can win with something that's a little obscure or underpowered. Beorn might surprise me, but I'm expecting it to be a fun but low powered deck that I can play when I'm up against precons and newer players, or if I've run off a couple of wins and want to take my foot off the gas pedal, so to speak.

My inability to actually stay with a theme showed up again in today's list. Eternal Witness, Regal Force, Sakura-Tribe Elder, and Keeper of Fables aren't Bears and I wanted to focus on Bears. In the end I try to find that middle ground between building the deck of my dreams and building a deck that will function reasonably well. Triumph of the Hordes could have gone into the list, but Overwhelming Stampede felt better for Beorn. Not all of my decks care so much about theme, but if I'm building around a lower powered Commander or I'm just trying to tone down a list it's an easy way to keep from creeping up into higher brackets.

That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!