Hey everyone! I’d like to shine a spotlight on one of the coolest use cases of our subscription that I’ve seen so far. Sherman Yee came up with the unique idea to request an entire Commander deck over the course of an entire year’s worth of Cardgarden packs! The commander of choice was Soundwave, Sonic Spy; a uniquely specific card in Esper colors from the Transformers ‘Universes Beyond’ expansion.
Soundwave has a *lot* of text on two sides, but it can be summarized by a few words. Tokens, spells, and graveyards. Depending on which mode you convert him to on cast, you’re looking to cast spells, make tokens, deal combat damage, then cast some more spells from the graveyard; for free! With so many cogs in the machine (ba dum tss), there’s a lot of angles we can work from.
So where do we start? Well, any Commander deck is going to start with its Commander. And most will be wearing their Sol Ring. From there, we brought in some low mana value card draw, and some ways to put flying tokens in the air. Dowsing Dagger is another card that encourages getting through for combat damage, while ramping up to cast our bigger threats.
Month two came with the good old building blocks of mana fixing, along with more card draw and ways to protect threats. I followed that up in March, with the logic Soundwave is a commander that wants to grind out value into the long game. Thankfully his uh…. briefcase… form gives us value on both odd and even spells, so we don’t have to spec too hard in one direction as if we’re playing an Ikoria companion.
In April, we got the chance to add a couple big staples. A borderless foil Smothering Tithe joined the mix, with some bigger six plus mana cards to ramp into. Maybe that Snow-covered land will be relevant on someone else’s Extraplanar lens! Speaking of lands, I picked May as another month to keep digging away at the mana-base. Some of us older Magic players might be surprised to see Celestial Colonnade sitting at such a low price, but making a Serra Angel on an empty board can still knock down planeswalkers and punch away at a life total.
After some wishing to the USPS, pack six arrived last week! Monastery Mentor felt like a no-brainer for this kind of synergistic list, with Syphon Mind being a potentially brutal flashback target for our Hasbro warrior’s front side to cast for free. Will we ever crack in with a nine power unblockable token to flashback In Garruk’s Wake? Maybe not, but that does remind me this list probably needs a Temmet, or some Living Weapons….
https://archidekt.com/decks/4084217#Soundwave_CardGarden
I’ll attach the current decklist as we go into month seven; I’ve intentionally avoided looking at it when building his packs. Let’s see how much longer I can go without sending a duplicate!
If you want to start your own Cardgarden Commander project, subscribe to one of the tier levels and get your first pack in the mail starting next month!