Sami, Wildcat Captain Commander Deck Tech

Sami, Wildcat Captain | Art by Kieran Yanner

Affinity is a timeless archetype in Magic: the Gathering. In every format where Mirrodin is legal, I've had hundreds of Frogmites played against me over the course of my tournament career. What if creatures much more powerful than Frogmite or Myr Enforcer could be given affinity for artifacts? Sami, Wildcat Captain is here to answer that very question.

In this deck tech, I'm using Sami, Wildcat Captain to give huge Eldrazi, like Ulamog, the Defiler and Sire of Seven Deaths, affinity for artifacts.

What Does Sami, Wildcat Captain Do?

Sami, Wildcat Captain is a six-mana Human Artificer Rogue with double strike and vigilance that gives affinity for artifacts to all your spells. Sami's mana cost is the only part of the card that gives me pause. For a deck that's going to end up pretty commander focused, six mana is a huge investment.

However, just a couple turns with Sami in play should be sufficient to get a good return on that six mana investment with enough artifacts in play and enough big spells to power out.

The Sami deck I've built for this article is an aggressive ramp deck. My goal is for the turn I cast Sami, Wildcat Captain to feel like an apocalyptic event. Sami hits the board and suddenly all the expensive colorless spells that have been hiding in my hand for the first several turns of the game can be cast for little to no mana.

Cards like Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, Karn Liberated, and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger will come down and completely transform the dynamic of the game.

Key Cards for Sami, Wildcat Captain

The most critical engine pieces for this deck are cards that can put a lot of artifacts into play. It doesn't even really matter what those artifacts are. Retrofitter Foundry is likely never going to convert the Servos it produces into Thopters or Constructs. The Powerstone and Treasure tokens that Karn, Living Legacy and Collector's Vault produce are among the more useful trinkets this deck can put into play.

It's important to have engines that can keep the deck running smoothly in the games where Sami gets removed several times and decides to go on vacation, a risk that affects six-mana commanders more than most.

The Endstone is a new artifact from Edge of Eternities that's performed way above my expectations. In the later stages of the game, an artifact that effectively draws a million cards per turn and resets its controller's life total back up to 20 each turn is staggeringly powerful.

Chimil, the Inner Sun serves much the same purpose, providing an impressive card advantage engine that just happens to protect spells on the stack.

Tezzeret, Cruel Captain is a peculiar planeswalker that I'm still trying to evaluate. Tezzeret can untap artifacts to make a lot of mana, tutor out key artifacts like Mana Vault or Voltaic Key, and has an easy to achieve -7 that slowly weaponizes all the otherwise useless artifacts on the board. I don't think any of those modes by themselves would justify his inclusion, but all those features combined turn Tezzeret into a pretty impressive three-mana play.

Another approach this deck can take is slamming big stax pieces, like Void Winnower, to shut the door on the opponents as they scramble to answer your threats.

God-Pharaoh's Statue is one of my favorite cards to include in decks that are capable of making enough mana to cast it early in the game. Each opponent's spells costing two additional mana can render many decks totally inert, especially when cast in the early stages of the game. No one wants to pay three mana to cast their Sol Ring.

Portal to Phyrexia is an interesting case. I don't consider this artifact to be a stax piece in the traditional sense. However, the tempo swing of each opponent losing three of their creatures early in a game and then being forced to watch as their opponent resurrects their best creatures turn after turn can be both crippling and demoralizing.

That fits perfectly with that I'm trying to accomplish here.

How Does This Sami, Wildcat Captain Commander Deck Win?

This deck wins games very honestly. No combos, no tricks, just giant Eldrazi turning sideways and triggering annihilator!

This is both a strength and a weakness. On one hand, consistency isn't a huge issue as any seven-mana card is just as good as the next. On the other, this deck will struggle against interactive decks that have ways to keep the Eldrazi at bay. I think that's a fine trade-off!

My favorite aspect of this deck is how versatile all of its threats are. Each large threat doubles as a both a large body and some other type of spell the deck needs.

Many Eldrazi have card draw or removal spells stapled to their cast triggers. Ugin, Eye of the Storms staples a removal spell to every single colorless spell in the deck! This paradigm allows me to skimp on traditional staples, like Swords to Plowshares or Path to Exile.

That's an incredibly powerful option to have in a deck that needs to have abnormally high densities of artifacts and threats to function.

Sami, Wildcat Captain Commander Deck List

Conclusion

This is such a bizarre deck. I think there's a lot of room for further optimization that I'm excited to delve into once the set is out and I've had more opportunity to tinker with the deck's engine.

For instance, the number of huge creatures probably needs to come up from around 20 to possibly closer to 30 or even beyond. Similarly, I think the number of artifact token generators may need to come up by a wide margin to make the early game more consistent.

Players looking for a deck that produces explosive turns without creating a cumbersome amount of triggers will feel at home playing this deck. Sami takes short turns where flurries of ridiculously powerful spells hit the stack without creating particularly difficult to parse game states.

In the era of Commander decks that take lots of game actions using cards that have multiple paragraph long abilities, Sami, Wildcat Captain feels like a breath of fresh air.

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