MTG: Soundwave Superior

It’s weird given that I write about Magic: The Gathering and Transformers that I missed the official printing of Magic: The Gathering Transformers cards. Oh and they’re all legendary and weird and Commander cares about legendary cards that shape the deck they belong in and are also weird. Oh and they’re all illustrated to look like screenshots from G1 Transformers, except they’re not, because of subtle hints like how Flamewar didn’t exist and Megatron is a tank and also they’re illustrated to look really good, and G1? Did you get this? It looks like ass.

There are fifteen of these cards. I’m not going to run through all of them, because there are fifteen of them and I need to think about how much time I spend talking about a card game full of elves (and now hobbits and cyber squid) especially when it crosses over with broken toys I got from the Salvos up the street from Woolies except I didn’t really, I’m pretty sure a bunch of those were Go-Bots, anyway.

Each of these cards creates an example of a play pattern. For some, you want to cast them early, letting their value accumulate over time. For some, you don’t want to cast them until you’ve developed a board that can benefit from them. Soundwave, Sonic Spy, for example, wants you to have tokens on the battlefield that can evade opponents’ attacks, and also stocked graveyards to eat up. Once you have that set up, you can use his hard-to-block tokens to feed further graveyard plunging.

That’s a bunch of different competing wants: He’s going to want mill cards, cards that create tokens that can get through (or can go so wide it doesn’t matter), he wants spells with modal mana values so you can get Ravage or Laserbeak out of him. Oh, and he looks at all the damage dealt by your tokens, so if you have three 1/1s that all hit, you can exile a 3 mana card. Going wide’s not worthless.

Now, that said, what I’d look for to build a Soundwave deck is cards that meet two or more of those competing wants. Something that makes tokens that are hard to block, something that mills people, something that lets you cast spells with different mana values. I think that because Laserbeak has flying and hexproof, he’s the more desireable thing to get, meaning that you want the cheaper sides of cards to be the even ones.

Mana value trickery comes in a couple of forms; sure, there are X-spells, and there are some great ones there. Split cards have two mana values (potentially) too, though. Consider that while Depose/Deploy, a beloved card of mine, has two even card values, Discovery/Dispersal doesn’t, and that card’s a banger. Same with Far/Away and Profit/Loss. Hell, Profit/Loss is probably a really good card for a go-wide token strategy in Esper. And hey, Warrant/Warden is another example, where it can be even or odd and it provides a big fat token.

Buyback spells and kicker spells also change their mana value depending on how they’re cast. Consider Recruit The Worthy – mana value of 1 or 4. This gives you a cheap Ravage in a pinch and a reliable Laserbeaking if you want it. In Modal Double-Faced cards land, there are five that mismatch front and back that are also spells – Cosima, Alrund, Selfless Glyphweaver, Tergrid, and Wandering Archaic (don’t put Tergrid in a deck, she’s definitely something you should talk to people about ahead of time).

For cards that have variable costs and make tokens, I’m particularly tickled that Clown Car hits your needs (hypothetically). Multiple Choice is a very useful utility card that can have a variable mana value and make a token, and more. Occult Epiphany looks like it might be good, since a deck like this might run a lot of mixed types of cards. Blot Out The Sky is also a big spell for converting Soundwave that also can do duty as a board wipe if you need it.

That opens another point – because he convers into a noncreature artifact, you might imagine you can run Soundwave with Wraths, but nope! He doesn’t spend much time in converted form unless that’s something you’re actively trying to do. That looks like a build that cares about stax and channel effects, but also crucially, not going to have access to a lot of wraths that avoid triggering his conversion.

Finally, there are some permanents that work with the token theme and the milling one. Zellix, Sanity Flayer for example, presents a way to mill and make tokens while also holding the ground, and the Necromaster Dragon can mill and create more bodies for you. Lillia, Death's Majesty is kind of obvious, since she creates tokens and mills. Then there are recurrent token generators like Pride of the Clouds, Piper of the Swarm and Skycat Sovereign. Reservoir Kraken generates tokens that are really hard to block if people don’t let you have the great big beater, and Combat Calligrapher lets you build up tokens while discouraging attacks on you. Special mention goes to Obscura Ascendancy which also cares about variable mana values – you can probably power this one up pretty fast with all these X-spells.

But you’ll notice I’m listing spell after spell after spell – I don’t know what the creature base is like. If there are a lot of creatures that create tokens on entering the battlefield in this deck, you might find something like Altar of Bhaal works out really well – with a card like Marsh Flitter, Sengir Autocrat, Cloudgoat Ranger, or Whirler Rogue, you can generate more creatures than you started with in a loop. See also the Staff of the Storyteller, which gives you a token and rewards you for other tokens. Then there’s Tasha, the Witch Queen, who gives you a token when you cast other people’s spells, and let you do that while also drawing you cards over time.

And that’s… just brainstorming.

What I’d do for this kind of deck is make a list of my eight things I want in the deck, for an 8×8 plan.

  • Mana support
  • Card draw
  • Removal
  • Board sweepers
  • Token Creators (momentary)
  • Token Creators (permanents)
  • Token Support
  • Mill

Then, the task is to look at these eight categories, and see what cards belong where. When I’ve done that, I can start picking through them, and this is all fine tuning and nitty gritty. Do I put Tasha in as a card draw card, or is she a permanent token creator? I know where I’d rather her, but maybe you find she fits better on the other side.

A good sign of a commander card, in my opinion, is if it’s easy to describe what they should do or not. Some cards are boring to think about because oh yeah, you just do that, and then the deck builds itself. Not a complaint if you want simple cards, and I want more of those robust, basic, ‘do the thing your colours want to do’ cards, but for writing articles, what I want to do is look at cards that ask you questions in conflict with one another.

Weird that I started with a sycophant who asks no questions. He wasn’t even my first choice, it’s just how I got sunk into this project. I wanted to talk about Starscream, but we’ll get to that another time.

One final note about these cards: I am deeply fascinated by the idea that we might one day, somehow, get a Universes Within version of these cards, especially since those cards will probably not use ‘convert’ but will use ‘transform’ instead, and they’d have to re-keyword ‘more than meets the eye’ too and I’m just … just overwhelmed imagining the idea of what these mechanics could be used to represent when you don’t have the pre-existing theme of ‘they are robots that turn into machines and vehicles.’