Old School Commander MTG: Sindbad's First Games

Sindbad's First Appearance

The Old School Sindbad Commander deck is incredibly fun to play! It leans towards a defensive posture, but that's to be expected with a bunch of blue spells and prison artifacts. I typically like a more aggressive deck, but it was fun to try to figure out how to not die.

I had the opportunity to play three games today against 75% decks. These were not tuned, competitive Commander decks, but they also weren't Old School decks. I ended up winning all three games. Here's how it went.

The First Game was against a red deck full of burn, artifact removal, and aggressive creatures.

I pulled a Library of Leng off the top early, which helps quite a bit with manipulating draws in combination with Sindbad. If I draw with Sindbad and it's not a land, instead of discarding the card I can choose to put it back on top of my library.

After playing out a few defensive creatures, including Azure Drake and Dancing Scimitar, I was able to use Steal Artifact to take control of a Construct creature buffed with an enchantment. Things are looking good!

I ended up winning this one through aggressive play and with a fistful of cards from a Braingeyser fueled by a Mana Vault.

For the Second Game, I was up against a green deck with large aggressive creatures and a commander that comes out early and can create construct tokens every turn. Controlling the commander was the key to making this work.

I had to lock down my own Sindbad with Arena of the Ancients to make sure that my opponent's commander couldn't keep creating larger and larger tokens every turn. I realize that Sindbad is not actually a legendary creature, but if I'm going to use it as my Commander it seems only fair that I treat it as such. The Meekstone was locking down a few large attackers on the other side of the board, but my life total was dwindling.

I kept drawing more and more defensive cards. Living Wall joined the team. The attacks were coming in, but I was able to deal with the largest creatures and take only one or two damage at a time. The clock was ticking and time was running out.

This is where things went sideways. Naturalize for my Meekstone meant that a squad of large attackers was going to come online next turn. When in doubt, draw more cards!

Icy Manipulator to the rescue! There's a Maze of Ith off to the side (out of frame), too. I continued to hold off most of the attackers, taking a few damage per turn, while drawing furiously for a way to turn things around.

Behold! Colossus of Sardia. With this guy in play, I could finally start taking the fight to my opponent.

What's better than one Colossus of Sardia? Two. Game over.

Game Three was against the same green deck. I knew I needed to control my opponent's commander or I was toast. This was a long game. Here's how it went.

I played out Sindbad early and followed up with defensive magic and card draw. But I couldn't find anything to deal with my opponent's commander directly. More and more tokens were filling up the board and threatening to smash through my defenses.

What's better than one Horn of Deafening? Two.

This card did a lot of work. Combined with Meekstone, it meant that if my opponent did attack, I could nullify the damage and the creature would not untap. Compare this to Maze of Ith, which by untapping the creature meant that Meekstone wasn't able to do its thing.

Many, many turns later I was able to play Aladdin's Ring to start the long process of punching my opponent's commander every turn until it was cost prohibitive to replay. This also stopped her from using the commander's ability to generate more tokens.

Flood was the nail in the coffin. I could use Flood to tap everything down while Meekstone kept everything from untapping. I had blockers for the small creatures. And I had a Counterspell in hand for anything that threatened my commanding position. Ring beats for the win. The game was over.

Overall, I'm looking forward to playing more games with this Sindbad deck. No cards seemed to underperform in first couple of tests, but I'm on the lookout to make some swaps. There are a surprising number of options in the Old School card pool. Having a larger life total and longer game allows for more development of combos and synergies.