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.