Prerelease weekend for War of the Spark is in the books, and I hope everyone who wanted to go was able to play at least one tournament with some of the new cards. We went on Saturday and had a great time. I opened both Ugin, the Ineffable and big boss Liliana, Dreadhorde General in my card pool, so black was a given. None of my other colors were too deep, so I ended up with green and white with the black. I was actually a little surprised at how little mana fixing there was available and really missed Guildgates. I had a Guild Globe, a Prismite, and a New Horizons to help things along. It was loose and I got color screwed a few times, but it was good enough to go 3-1 and take home four extra booster packs for my troubles.

With the release of War of the Spark, we have the newest and possibly last incarnation of the multiverse’s greatest archvillain: Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God!

I thought now was the time to go ahead and brew up the definitive “every Nicol Bolas in existence” Commander deck—Bolas Tribal, if you will. I’ve done this before in recent years, but given that this is the culmination of the Bolas story arc, now is the time to do it right. I started out with every Nicol Bolas, searched for every card with Bolas in the title, expanded the search to Nicol Bolas quoted in flavor text, and finally checked all the various cards that depict various Nicol Bolas-related things. Turns out Nicol Bolas has showed up to one degree or another in a whole lot of sets over the history of Magic and there are actually way too many cards to fit into one Commander deck. So with some discernment, I picked the best of the best in terms of power, playability and fun and had the makings of a pretty potent and evil deck befitting the Multiverse’s Big Bad.

Of course, since we have an abundance of Nicol Bolas riches, we actually have two choices for our Commander, so which one should we run?

The original gangster Nicol Bolas has a ton of coolness cache, especially if you have the version from Legends. But there are plenty of other more affordable choices as well—from Chronicles, Time Spiral, Masters 25 or From the Vault: Dragons. The problem with that version of Nicol Bolas is that there are many incentives to take advantage of its special ability with things like Dragon Tempest or Psionic Gift when that’s your commander. I lean more towards Nicol Bolas, the Ravager, since you can turn it into a planeswalker and so many of your other Nicol Bolas cards are planeswalkers too. Any sort of planeswalker support will work with your commander and all the other planeswalker cards.

Okay, let’s get brewing!

First up are all the Nicol Bolas cards. The planeswalker deck version Nicol Bolas, the Deceiver is the only version of Bolas that looks a little on the weak side, but for the sake of completeness for Bolas tribal, I think it’s fine to take a slot for it. Plus, we get to make full use of Visage of Bolas.

Then of course there’s the brand-new card Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God. That static ability is unique and cool, but it’s also blunted just a little bit by the activated abilities which are great all on their own. However, there are a couple of other versions of Bolas with abilities that add loyalty much faster—God-Pharaoh and the Arisen (the back side of Nicol Bolas, the Ravager) are both +2, while Planeswalker and the Deceiver and both +3. Dragon-God only needs four extra loyalty to activate the ultimate.

Which leads me to Teferi, Temporal Archmage. If we could somehow get that emblem and start activating multiple Bolas planeswalkers during each opponent’s turn? Woosh, that’s living the dream right there! I was a little torn about adding non-Bolas planeswalkers to the deck before I remembered that we’re living through War of the Spark—this is all about Bolas luring a bunch of planeswalkers to battle so he can take advantage of their abilities and ultimately their planeswalker spark. So if the planeswalkers add useful effects to the mix, I think it’s fine flavor-wise.

Narset, Parter of Veils and Ashiok, Dream Render are new planeswalkers that are nice at shutting down some of the more egregious things your opponents can do in Commander. Saheeli, Sublime Artificer can churn out some Servo tokens as chump blockers that can sometimes be turned into threats. Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor makes it more difficult for your opponents to interact with your threats with pinpoint removal.

I wanted one of the Lilianas in here too, but with so many Nicol Bolas cards costing a lot of mana, I wanted one of the lower-cost versions and ended up going with Liliana, Heretical Healer. Her lifelink ability as a creature can help pad life totals a little bit, and when she transforms into Liliana, Defiant Necromancer, her abilities there are quite nice, especially the ultimate.

Mana Ramp

Nicol Bolas cards are quite expensive in general, so I wanted to ensure I had plenty of mana ramp. Chromatic Lantern was one of the first cards I added to my list because so many of the cards are highly color-intensive – especially Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God. The temporary mana you can get with both versions of Neheb and Mana Geyser can be a big help casting our more expensive planeswalkers ahead of curve.

Removal

The Grixis color combination has a ton of removal options and I’ve included a bunch of them here. I’ve added a fair number of artifact removal spells, since The Immortal Sun will be a huge thorn in our plans and it’s a fairly popular card in Commander. I cannot wait to see the sort of crazy things are possible when I cast The Elderspell in a long, drawn-out game of Commander with this deck—there is potential to add so much loyalty to fuel truly insane ultimate abilities.

I’m thinking I have enough ways to pay life in the deck to help fuel Font of Agonies despite my commander choice not really helping out. In particular I love it in combination with Slaughter’s buyback life loss.

Nevinyrral’s Disk is a classic, and it is doubly good here since it leaves all of your planeswalkers untouched while destroying every other non-land permanent.

And seriously, Dark Intimations has never been as good as it is in this deck!