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.

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