The End of an Era

Do I still love MTG? Sure, I do.

MTG has been a big part of my life for more than 25 years. I've met friends, traveled, competed, stayed up way too late, collected cards, made trades, and agonized over how many lands is optimal in my deck list more times than I can count. I've spent hours organizing trade binders, cracking booster packs, and watching MTG matches late into the night. Heck, this blog has several hundred posts!

When Commander was new, it was a heck of a thing. It was a social format that opened up tons of deck building possibilities. I like big spells. The Commander format let me play almost all of them. And I did. I built tons of Commander decks, too many. I built Commander cubes. I went way down the rabbit hole on foils and foreign cards and signatures. I had a lot of fun.

But they broke it.

Well, they broke it for me. You may be having a great time with it and that's awesome. But for me, once they started designing cards for the format, a lot of what made it special went away. It got too good. Too focused. Too consistent.

I get it. It's business. They are in the business of selling cards. And if something is popular, it makes business sense to cater to it. And they did. Big time. It wasn't about digging up a suboptimal pile of jank rares anymore. Entire decks were available to buy right off the shelf. This made the format more accessible, which is great! But it took away some of what I thought made the format special. It was inevitable.

I stuck with it. I still built new decks. I still played. But the pandemic pushed it over the edge for me.

I was already not thrilled to play online games of MTG. I totally understand that online is the only option for some of you. That's certainly better than nothing, but I want to see and talk to the people I play with. That's my thing. MTG:Online doesn't scratch this itch. Arena doesn't even have a Commander option and feels even less like I'm playing with a real person. Webcam Commander games are unwieldy at best. And I no longer have the time or inclination to play long Commander games at my LGS, even if it was open.

That leads me to a rough conclusion.

I'm basically not playing Commander anymore.

Typing that hit me like a ton of bricks. The reality is that I wasn't really playing Commander anyway. I was just thinking about it a lot and that was giving me a vague sense of still being connected to the format. When I did play the occasional Commander game with friends, it was always 1vs1, which isn't really "my" Commander format anyway. That's just competitive MTG with more variance and the mini-game of trying to keep your opponent's Commander at bay.

Will I still collect and play MTG? Sure, I will.

I see more Old School cards and games in my future. No particular Old School format. Just trying to build something interesting. Trying to get a few weird synergies to work. I have cards in my binders I've never cast before going all the way back to Alpha. That's a great place to start. 

Old School MTG: Colorless Battlebots vs. Aisling Leprechaun

A short while back, I ran my mono-white Bottle of Suleiman deck into Ben's Aisling Leprechaun deck. It was fun! But I didn't really get to see the Leprechaun do it's thing. So, I went back to the drawing board, dusted off my Battlebots deck, made a few updates, and once again launched into the fray.

Behold!

Battlebots (2021)

Could the deck be better? Oh, yes. More Mishra's Factory is almost certainly better. But could the deck be cooler? I'm not sure, but I don't think so. Okay, maybe finding a slot for Sword of the Ages would be cooler. You've got me there.

Ben's Leprechaun deck uses the little guy to turn creatures green, then uses other cards like COP: Green and Lifelace(!) to deal with opposing threats. It's fantastic and weird and wonderful all at once.

Ben, excited about Leprechauns.

At one point in the game, I was in top deck mode. Things were looking dire for team robot. I ripped an Aeolipile off the top. It was enough to win me the game and get me out from unrelenting Ernham beats. But, then this happened.

As an aside: Look, I understand that this isn't really how the rules work. That's not the point. The point is that the way this played out was way more fun.

I cast the Aeolipile. Ben used Lifelace to turn it green. Then used his COP: Green to prevent the damage.

Hey, hey! Lifelace!

I reality, I could have responded by sacrificing the Aeolipile. Sacrificing it is part of the cost, so it wouldn't have been on the battlefield for Lifelace to change the color. But still. I feel like that was the originally intention of how Lifelace was supposed to work. It was an interrupt. I certainly wasn't expecting it. And it made my night (and the game).

It was rad.

 

 

Hope of Ghirapur: Colorless Proliferate Commander

 

Click here to see the current list on TappedOut.

I build colorless commander decks. I wanted a deck for Hope of Ghirapur, but I didn't want to go down the road of sticking equipment on it and swinging. My budget Traxos deck mostly goes in that direction. It's powerful (sometimes), but that box was already checked. For Hope, I wanted to try something different.

+1/+1 counters and proliferate.

Hope is a 1/1 flyer for 1 mana. The deck has a low curve. There isn't an unlimited budget, but it's not a low-cost deck, either. I'm trying to keep the cost it in the range of a typical EDHRec deck. For the first draft, I stuck in as many cards that have counters or care about counters as I could find to make the theme more obvious. The deck is lousy with cards that either get counters, give counters, or add counters. Modular creatures are everywhere.

I've only had the chance to play a few games with the deck. It's fine. It sometimes does things. It needs more testing, for sure. And card draw. It doesn't recover from a board wipe. I hesitate to think about going up against multiple opponents. There are some great colorless cards that didn't make it into the deck. But it's tough to start cutting "on theme" cards to fit in cards that are objectively better. At some point, the theme goes away.

Old School MTG: Mono-White Bottle of Suleiman

 

It's genie time.

Over the years, I've built a mono-colored artifact-focused deck for each color (and colorless). The white deck was always a prison deck, but I wanted something more aggressive. Behold! Bottle of Suleiman.

There's a lot of words on that card, but basically 50% of the time it does 5 damage to you and the other 50% of the time you get a 5/5 flyer. At 4 mana to cast and 1 mana to activate, the rate is good if you can figure out a way to avoid the damage. It gets better if you can figure out a way to reuse it. That's where the other cards come in.

Before I go on, I want to be clear that I've tried a lot of different configurations of this deck. It's not good. It's not even remotely good. It's super casual. You could probably start splashing colors and make it "better," but the underlying combination of cards is weak. There are better combos and synergies in the format. It is fun, though. Well, fun when it works.

This guy. This guy along with COP: Artifacts is how I avoid taking damage from the Bottle. This creature is also reasonable at stalling creatures on the ground, but doesn't show up early enough in the game to really set an aggro deck back.

Then there's this guy. This guy is how I reuse the Bottle to keep trying again to get a genie.

There's a couple of cutesy things going on with the deck as well. This card transmografies a creature into an artifact, which is handy if you have a COP: Artifacts out. Should it simply be another Swords to Plowshares in this slot? Of course it should! But this is more fun.

This deck suffers from the classic problem of needing a lot of things to go right. There are combinations of cards that can become... not powerful. But better. If they show up together. Your opponent will be actively trying to kill you and disrupting your plan. It's common to draw the wrong combinations of cards. I frequently die to desperate Bottle flips with no way to avoid the damage, for example. Most of the cards are not great on their own, so it's a catch-22 to put more of them in.

I'm 100% open to a different way to approach this deck (still in mono-white). Maybe someone has a good setup out there. Maybe I've forgotten a key card. But if you're looking for something fun and casual to bring to an Old School event, take this for a spin!

Here I am losing to my own Bottle flip (twice). One flip failed and I took 5 damage. Then I brought the Bottle back, recast it, then failed the flip again taking another 5 damage. It was that or die to the threat on the other side of the table. This is one of those scenarios where if I had a way to mitigate the damage, I might have been able to pull ahead with an endless stream of genies.

Here it is working. Combo assembled. Bottle+Archaeologist+COP:Artifacts. Plus, I had a Chaos Orb in the graveyard for shenanigans with the Archaeologist! My daughter doesn't play Old School decks, but she is a good sport. And she wins most of the time!

Update: August 1, 2021

The stars aligned and I was able to play some Old School with Ben. It was my Mono-White Bottle of Suleiman deck vs his Aisling Leprechaun Ward deck. It was a blast. It was the perfect match of weird decks!

The deck he was playing words on this great synergy. The Leprechaun makes any creature it blocks or that blocks it become green. As long as he's got a Green Ward enchanting the Leprechaun, it has protection from that "green" creature. :) He also runs Circle of Protection: Green so that he can prevent the damage from all of the creatures the Leprechaun is turning green.

Here I am getting smashed to pieces by Ben's Force of Nature.

Here I am with the "combo" in full effect. The candy is a 5/5 Genie token!

Here's Ben getting hit by the Copper Tablet while my Bodyguard blocks for me.

Ben thinking about his next move. Does he play the fearsome Leprechaun?

All in all, it was the kind of fun I've come to expect from janky Old School duels. I lost a bunch of coin flips, as expected. I mostly took the damage from the Leprechaun rather than let Ben turn all of my creatures green. Bottles were flying in and out of the graveyard at one point.

Old School MTG: Revisiting Yawgmoth Reanimator (Again!)

 I've played this deck a few times over the years, but it was time to make a few small changes.

Old School Yawgmoth Demon Reanimator

I included the Coffin combo, Hell's Caretaker, Fallen Angel, and the Su-Chi / Priest dynamic duo. This deck is fun because it has so many lines of play.

This is me losing despite having a board like that!

The deck still lacks real card drawing. Ideally, reanimating creatures would create enough virtual card advantage to make up for raw card drawing, but in practice it doesn't always work out that way. Even though the Jalum Tomes can throw cards in the graveyard to get the undead party started, those should probably just be Jayemdae Tomes or split with Greed if I want to get fancy. I'd also swap out a Swamp for a Diamond Valley for those times when I just need the life boost or have an Animate Dead stranded.

Old School MTG: Colorless Parfait

 

Old School Colorless Parfait

This is a deck I blogged about months ago, but never got a chance to try out. Well, I tried it out.

It's working!

It works when it works. It's one of those decks. You know the kind.

There's a few problems. It's threat-light. There are 4x Vise and 4x Factories to deal damage. But! There's no good way in this configuration to permanently deal with opposing creatures. What happens in my experience is that the board gets gummed up with creatures I am forced to untap with the Mazes, so it's nearly impossible to push damage through with the Factories. And even with 4x Icy and 2x Relic Barrier, it's pretty easy to get "locked" under my own Orb. In a couple of my test games, the Vises didn't show up on time and I got overwhelmed.

The deck can manage fewer Orbs and doesn't need the Cane. Any game where the Cane matters is not a game I want to play to the end. That frees up two slots for 2x Copper Tablet, which might help move things along.

Meekstone and Forcefield are both fine... in the sideboard. The deck wants the Tabernacle to force the creatures off the board under the Orb and then swing with Factories. A couple of Candelabra would also open up possibilities. Disk seems like an auto-include and might be worth testing again, but in an earlier version of the deck I ended up bombing myself back to the stone age with it and it didn't work out to my advantage.

I'm not sure how a mirror match would go. That would be a heck of a thing.

The deck doesn't have much to do with Tron mana after dragging the game out. A Rocket Launcher might actually be the thing to close out games with this list. One Workshop could be cut.

Ultimately, this strategy works better in White. Moat, Armageddon, Balance, Swords, Disenchant. You know the drill. Wrath of God would be good too.

Old School Commander MTG: A More Aggressive Sindbad

I had the opportunity to play the Sindbad Old School Commander list a few times over the past few months. When I originally built the list, it was too defensive. I didn't play how it played out. It felt weak.

After testing it out a few times, I swapped out some of the defensive cards for creatures! That did the trick. Putting some creatures out there made the deck more interactive on the board and created more opportunities to move the game along.

The deck is stronger in this configuration.

My current list is at TappedOut. Click here to see it. Remember, this list is Old School AND Commander legal except that Sindbad is not officially a legendary creature.

Here is the list of swaps from my original test list. This will give you an idea of how the deck moved into a more aggressive posture.

• Living Wall --> Clay Statue
• Meekstone --> Dragon Engine
• Drain Power --> Phantasmal Forces
• Flood --> Urza's Avenger
• Relic Barrier --> Clockwork Beast
• Aeolipile --> Prodigal Sorcerer
• Aladdin's Ring --> Sword of the Ages
• Winter Orb --> Obsianus Golem
• Howling Mine --> Juggernaut
• Book of Rass --> Ring of Renewal
• Ivory Tower --> Su-Chi

Winter Orb is a helluva Magic card. It probably deserves a slot. Drain Power never seemed to give my the type of swingy turn I was hoping for when I planned the deck out. The higher creature count makes Sword of the Ages work well for closing out games when things get stuck on the board. I'm not sure Ring of Renewal is better than Book of Rass. It depends when it shows up. The right answer might be to run both.

I keep meaning to update my list on TappedOut with the actual versions of the cards I've collected, but haven't gotten around to it.

The trick for using Sindbad's ability to is evaluate if you already have a land drop to make. I made the mistake when I first started playing of activating Sindbad's ability whenever I could. It seems obvious now, but what ends up happening is you have a handful of lands and a graveyard full of the stuff you needed to win the game. Instead, now I only active Sindbad if I am going to miss a land drop. This makes a world of difference.

If you have a card out like Field of Dreams or Library of Leng, you can do all kinds of tricks with Sindbad because you have more information over what's on top. That's when things get really fun because you can use his ability to clear bad draws (for example) or to strategically stock your graveyard depending on what's happening in the game.