Old School MTG: Colorless Vise Orb Control

 

This idea has been kicking around in my head for a while. I finally got around to putting a first draft together. I wanted to build (yet another) colorless deck, but this time I wanted to mimic a parfait control deck. The deck is trying to sit back in a pure defensive posture, tie up the opponent, and win with Black Vise.

This is a colorless deck, so I get to run the full compliment of Urza lands without worry. This works especially well under a Winter Orb. The Workshops and fast mana can result in a fast setup for control components. Mishra's Factory can be used mostly for defense here. And I have trouble justifying running less than 4 Strip Mine in a format that allows it. Stripping away early lands fits in nicely with what this deck is trying to do.

The deck is trying to land a combination of Howling Mine, Winter Orb, and Black Vise. This combo gets even better if I have a way to tap things down with Icy Manipulator or Relic Barrier. The tappers can be used to turn off Howling Mine and/or Winter Orb if the situation calls for it, or more aggressively to keep the opponent off mana.

Chaos Orb is good all-around removal. The three Maze of Ith are there to hold off opposing creatures or for pump tricks with the Factories. I'm not as solid on Forcefield and Meekstone, but I wanted to test both cards. Ivory Tower can add a buffer to my life total once the card draw starts rolling in. This can help against burn and other aggressive decks. Mirror Universe can also buy time against aggressive decks. Feldon's Cane is the back-up plan for if the game goes long and Vise isn't enough to get there.

Copper Tablet may be another good win condition for once the game is locked up. Vise feels better at this point because I can occasionally get silly hands with multiple Vise on turn 1. It also does more damage as the opponent (hopefully) gets stuck with cards in hand. And it's naturally great against control decks that want to draw/hold cards anyway.

I haven't had a chance to test this deck out yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing how long I can stay alive!

Average Commander: Karn, Silver Golem (August 2020)

 

The database increased to 307 decks this month. The price for the deck this month decreased to $743.26.

The creature package did not change this month, but there were a few changes in other areas. Mana Crypt, which was the surprising swap last month, is out this month after being replaced by the new card Chromatic Orrery. This makes more sense for an average deck due to the disparity in expense between the two cards, but I'm not sold on Chromatic Orrery. Without access to the second mode (card drawing), it's a 7 mana artifact that taps for 5 mana. I would rather have a 2 mana artifact that taps for 1 in most situations. Vedalken Orrery comes out for the first time in months, replaced by Oblivion Stone. Another full board wipe can be potent, especially if your board is indestructible. As for lands, Urza's Factory is replaced by Ghost Quarter. I can count the number of times I've created an Assembly-Worker with Urza's Factory on zero hands despite running the card for months.

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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.

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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.