Old School Commander MTG: A First Look at Sindbad

 

It's taken a while, but I finally have a working Sindbad list for Old School Commander. I'm probably  missing some key cards, but I'm not yet sure what to cut.

I have my eye on adding Knowledge Vault, Skull of Orm, Old Man of the Sea, Power Artifact, and Sword of the Ages to name a few. What cards will end up not pulling their weight in this list? I'm excited to find out.

I'm looking for an opportunity to play some games with it. Goldfishing has demonstrated to me that it will be slow, possibility terminally so. There are some neat synergies already, though. Sindbad+Library of Leng is neat. Sindbad+Field of Dreams is a no-brainer. Sindbad ends up pitching a lot of good cards into the graveyard, so cards like Recall, Triassic Egg, Drafna's Restoration, and Reconstruction all act like mini-tutors mid-to-late-game. Sindbad technically dodges the tap down from Arena of the Ancients, but it only seems fair that if I use him as a commander I treat him as a legendary creature for those purposes. Still, sometimes you just need to tie things up and hope to draw answers.

I love Old School deck selfies, but it can be difficult to see what's going on with a list this big. Here's a link to the deck:

https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/sindbad-old-school-commander/

As of this post, I haven't put in the card editions to match up with what I have in paper. I'll do that at some point!

Old School Commander MTG: Unreasonably Excited About Sindbad

 

I've been kicking around the idea of building an Old School Commander deck for a couple of years now, but I couldn't figure out how I wanted to approach it.

The Beasts of the Bay created some Old School Commander rules. That was a good start. They have a list of single-color creatures that they consider legal to use as a commander. The problem is that legendary wasn't a thing until the Legends set. So, named creatures from before Legends are not technically legendary for use as a commander.

I wanted to use a single color commander because I like the way those types of decks look. It's as simple as that. Sindbad looks the most interesting to me, so I'm starting there.

The thing is, it's not like people are lining up to play OS Commander where I live. So, I decided that I would follow the normal Commander ban list for my first draft. Most of the cards that are both OS legal AND Commander legal AND follow the color identity of Sindbad are awful. I'm anticipating the deck will be a 2 out of 10 power level.

The good news is that most of the people I play against are casual. The decks are 5 out of 10, not finely tuned killing machines. I'm hoping to put up a fight, even if it doesn't mean winning most of the time. The other option, which I may end up going to, is to drop the Commander ban list and go with all available cards in the OS legal sets. This would give me access to a few more cards than I have access to now. Still nothing crazy. It would probably bump me up to 3 out of 10.

Ramp and Card Draw in the early sets is not great and few and far between. I'll write up more about the deck once I get a chance to play a few games with it. Stay tuned.

Average Commander: Karn, Silver Golem (July 2020)

Correction: Meteor Golem was the card that swapped places with Wurmcoil Engine last month, not Myr Battlesphere. Myr Battlesphere continues to be on the list and has not dropped off all year.

The database increased to 284 decks this month. The price for TCGPlayer Direct has not come down as expected. I'm assuming there are still issues with the supply chain due to the pandemic. I will be using the best price going forward, even if it is a large number of individual packages. The price for the deck this month is $778.98 including an expensive and surprising swap for the average deck.

Meteor Golem again traded places with Wurmcoil Engine. Mana Crypt replaced Empowered Autogenerator. This is surprising, given the dollar value of Mana Crypt and the fact that this is the average deck in the database. The only other change was that a Wastes came out for Scavenger Grounds, a card we've seen earlier this year in the deck but that dropped out of the list.

OUT                                                            IN

Old School MTG: Colorless Colossus

Here's a version of my colorless Old School deck that includes a wider variety of cards I like. It's way less consistent like this, but also way more fun! Besides, every once in a while I get to punch someone's Angel out of the sky with a Ring.

I was playing with this deck when the crazy opener finally happened. Here's a pic.

Turn 1: Workshop --> Forcefield

Turn 2: Second Workshop, Lotus --> Colossus of Sardia!

If that's not one of the best uses for Black Lotus, I don't know what is. I mean, I had no way of untapping the Colossus after that. But I dodged removal and got a big swing in with it. Worth it. :)

I ended up drawing Arena (and some actual lands) a little later and used the tapped Colossus as terrible creature removal. Killer combo.

Solving the Crystalline Giant Problem With Token Creatures

When Crystalline Giant was spoiled, I knew I wanted it for my Commander deck. The theme of the deck is: "Creatures that are clearly Robots except that Magic is a fantasy game so there are no Robots."

Crystalline Giant is clearly a giant robot.

Okay, maybe not. Maybe it's a giant crystal being that is not a Robot. Except!

Thanks to the Godzilla crossover promotion, we got this beautiful version of Crystalline Giant to play with: Mechagodzilla! (Clearly a Robot. It's got lasers and rockets and stuff.)

There's a problem with Crystalline Giant / Mechagodzilla, though. It's a pain to handle the random abilities that get assigned to it every turn. Rosewater suggested using the punch out cards and putting all the abilities in a bag and drawing them out at random. I'm not going to do that. Instead, I came up with this.

I looked through all of my token creatures and grabbed the ones that had the abilities that need to be chosen at random for the Robot. I didn't have a token creature for every ability, so I also used some regular Magic cards. The Servo token is the +1/+1 counter. I'm pretty sure tokens exist for every ability. I just didn't have them in my collection. Here's the full list.

This makes it easy to randomly select the ability without any overlap. No dice rolling. No bags. No punch out cards. Easy.

It ends up looking something like this.

This Mechagodzilla has Flying, Vigilance, and Deathtouch. Watch out.

Lasers!

Average Commander: Karn, Silver Golem (June 2020)

Karn, Silver Golem

The number of decks in the database increased from 259 last month to 276 this month. Myr Battlesphere came out for the first time this year and was replaced by Wurmcoil Engine, a card that has been on the bubble, costs one less mana to cast, and leaves bodies behind after a board wipe. Thought Vessel replaced Tamiyo's Journal. I've never been impressed by Tamiyo's Journal and seeing some additional acceleration is a welcome change.

The cost of the average deck increased considerably, from $732.56 last month to $831.46. This price is for the TCGPlayer Direct package. If you are willing to accept around 75 individual shipments, the price is closer to $730. TCGPlayer is shipping again, so I expect prices will begin to migrate back down due to the aggregation competition.

Myr Battlesphere Out

Wurmcoil Engine In

Tamiyo's Journal Out

Thought Vessel In

Old School MTG: Colorless Reanimator?!

Do you know what card I don't see played? Triassic Egg. Why? Well, because it's not great. But! But, that didn't stop me from putting together this sweet brew.

Triassic Egg is a bad and slow reanimation spell. But you can cheat creatures out from your hand at instant speed. So, it's kind of like a terrible Animate Dead and a terrible Eureka put together. Sort of. Well, not really.

Oh, and Rocket Launcher. If only it didn't take a turn to "load" it would be almost playable. Almost. Well, not really.

And how could I leave Arena out of a deck like this? The answer: I couldn't. So, it's there. It's like a weird removal spell on a land. Uncounterable removal, baby. Is it good? Well, not really.

Jalum Tome helps to filter through these awful, awful cards. Bonus! It throws away an early uncastable Colossus of Sardia to bring back with the Egg later. Sometimes.

After playing a few games with this, I would make these changes:

-1 Rocket Launcher

-2 Triassic Egg

-1 Jalum Tome

+4 Howing Mine

I played a game with my family. Here's some cool stuff that happened.

Count 'em. Two Eggs. Plus, Tawnos's Coffin as removal. That's fun. It's difficult to see, but she dropped a Blood Sun on me early. Oof.

Look at that! An Egg with a magical two counters on it. Plus a bonus Egg waiting for even more mana to be pumped into it over two turns. Flavor win!

The Egg brought back a Colossus of Sardia. Thunder. I used a Rocket Launcher for the win. Lightning.

It's a fun deck. I enjoyed running these less-used colorless cards. Triassic Egg is super-vulnerable to artifact removal, of course. Rocket Launcher is slow. Arena is questionable. But hey, this deck lights me up. If I can make those swaps and cram in more card draw, I think we're in business. I don't expect a deck like this to take down any tournaments, but if you're planning on friendly games this could be the ticket.