One 23-year-old Magic Card Protects a Popular Hobbit Commander From Total Annihilation

Imagine this: Your Commander is a skin-changer from Middle-earth who’s assumed the form of a massive black bear. He leads an army of lesser bears — infusing them with extra bear power so they grow stronger — into battle. But then one of your opponents drops a Blasphemous Act or Toxic Deluge, wiping out your entire board of creatures. There’s one Magic: The Gathering card you want in your hand if this happens to your Beorn the Fierce deck. This 23-year-old card has always been decent, but with Beorn as your Commander, it sets you up for the ultimate comeback.

Beorn the Fierce is one of the most popular Commanders from Magic’s latest The Hobbit crossover set, with 4,410 decks registered on EDHREC as of this writing. The five-mana 6/6 has trample and gives every other bear you control +2/+2. At the beginning of combat, he gives a trample counter that also gives them the bear type. If you control at least three bears after that, you draw two cards.

Commanders with both inherent combat tricks and a draw engine often become hugely popular, and Beorn is no exception. He’s arguably one of the very best Commanders ever for a bear typal or kindred deck that focuses on bear-typed creatures. Where he’s lacking, however, is in protection, especially because filling up your board with a ton of bears makes you vulnerable to board wipes. That’s where Caller of the Claw comes in.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Originally released in 2003’s Legions, Caller of the Claw is a three-mana 2/2 elf with flash. (You know it’s old because the original printing describes the flash effect before it became a named ability.) When it enters the battlefield, you create a 2/2 green bear creature token for every nontoken creature put into your graveyard from the battlefield that turn.

Let’s say you control Beorn and five other nontoken creatures, bear or otherwise, when an opponent casts Blasphemous Act, dealing 13 damage to every creature. Your entire army dies, but you can cast Caller of the Claw after the board wipe resolves and create six 2/2 Bears. Even Beorn counts, since Commanders technically enter the graveyard before you move them back to the Command Zone.

You’ll finish the turn with Caller and six Bear tokens, while everyone else probably has an empty battlefield. Once you recast Beorn, those six tokens become 4/4s, and then he can make Caller into another bear at the beginning of combat, giving it the same +2/+2 bonus and trample. Because you control at least three bears, you’ll also draw two cards. Suddenly, you’ve got seven 4/4 bears with trample and one king bear that’s a 6/6. What if you have Doubling Season out? That’s a dozen bears ready to maul the opponent that just wiped out the previous bear troupe. What if you have Yedora, Grave Gardener out when those creatures die? Every single other nontoken creature returns to the battlefield as a forest.

The one major drawback when it comes to Caller of the Claw is that it only replaces nontoken creatures, so any bear tokens you had won’t count. You also need Caller in your hand and three untapped mana available when the board wipe happens. And, if an opponent exiles your creatures rather than destroying them, Caller becomes useless.

Cards like Heroic Intervention can make your permanents indestructible and protect them from targeted damage or destroy effects. But Caller of the Claw wants your creatures to die first, so you can convert those losses into an entirely new army. That distinction makes Caller especially useful against Toxic Deluge, which gives creatures negative power and toughness rather than destroying them. Neither indestructible nor hexproof can save creatures reduced to zero toughness with a blanket effect like this, but Caller of the Claw can still replace those nontoken creatures since Deluge sends them to the graveyard.

It’s worth noting that quite a few bear creatures are just generic bodies, but as nontoken creatures with no abilities, they take on additional value when Caller of the Claw is in the mix. Alpine Grizzly, Balduvian Bears, Bear Cub, Forest Bear, Golden Bear, Grizzly Bears, Ordinary Bear, and Runeclaw Bear all pick up +2/+2 from Beorn — and they essentially come back from the dead as 2/2s with Caller of the Claw, whereas bear tokens do not. Ruxa, Patient Professor, also becomes much more intriguing with this build, since he gives creatures with no abilities +1/+1 (that includes generic tokens) and the ability to assign combat damage as though they weren’t blocked. Best of all? Ruxa himself is a bear. The enchantment Muraganda Petroglyphs can also stack here, giving creatures with no abilities +2/+2 (keep in mind that this one buffs opponents’ creatures as well). In theory, you could make those 2/2s into 7/7s with the right setup.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

29% of all Beorn decks registered on EDHREC include Caller of the Claw. Every printing of the card has drastically increased in price since the release of The Hobbit back in August. For years, its market price had sat under the $1.50 mark, but it began inching upward in recent months. According to TCG Player data, its price jumped from $6 two weeks ago to $15 or more today. The Commander 2015 printing climbed from approximately $3.22 to $9.88, an increase of more than 200%. Beorn frenzy has also driven up prices for other bear staples like Bearscape or Ayula, Queen Among Bears.

That doesn’t necessarily mean hundreds of thousands of players are suddenly buying Caller of the Claw. As an older card with relatively limited supply, it doesn’t take an enormous number of sales to move its price. Around 80 copies of the Commander 2015 printing reportedly sold over three months as demand increased.

Still, the card’s sudden rise makes perfect sense. Caller of the Claw has always offered creature-heavy green decks a way to recover from disaster. Beorn just turns that replacement army into something much more dangerous. A well-timed board wipe can destroy so many strategies. With three untapped mana and Caller of the Claw waiting in your hand, it just gives Beorn decks a new opportunity to growl, smash, and hibernate after they win.