Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Nicol Bolas!

Nicol Bolas is an eight mana 7/7 with flying and whenever an opponent is damaged by Nicol Bolas that player discards their hand and you need to pay blue, black, and red at the beginning of your upkeep or sacrifice Nicol Bolas.

To end the talking about Legends Commanders, we are talking about one of the original Elder Dragons and possibly the best of the five Elder Dragons.

Now the hardest part about Nicol Bolas is that you need to get to eight mana to cast him and then wait until it gets to your turn again to attack and deal damage, where if Nicol Bolas isn’t targeted by any removal, will be blocked if at all possible.

There are ways around these problems.

One of the first problems I want to solve is getting damage through. If your opponents aren’t playing creatures with flying or reach it won’t be an issue to just attack with Nicol Bolas, but there are times when that is not an opportune strategy.

So we need to look at cards like Burning Anger, which has the creature it is enchanting tap and deal damage equal to its power to any target. Nicol Bolas states that when he deals damage to the opponent, not just combat damage.

Even something like Hermetic Study, which the creatures just deals one damage to any target can do the job because you just need Nicol Bolas to deal some sort of damage. Quicksilver Dagger does this as well, but it also draws you a card.

Be careful of which cards you have that do this, because several of them say that the enchantment does the damage and not the creature, this can be easily overlooked.

The next thing to look at is doing what we can to ramp out to Nicol Bolas and be able to protect him so that we can get to our win condition.

In regards to ramp, we have access to a lot of rituals in black and red, Dark Ritual being one of the primary ones because of how efficient it is.

There is also the packages of Desperate Ritual, Seething Song, and Pyretic Ritual for red, Burnt Offering, Culling the Weak, and Dark Petition for black, and you even have access to High Tide for blue if you play enough Islands.

As far as the protection suite goes, blue has most of our answers here in giving Nicol Bolas hexproof.

Curator’s Ward acts as protection in giving Nicol Bolas hexproof, but also if they manage to wipe the board then you can draw two cards because Nicol Bolas is a legendary creature.

Lazotep Plating also works as a one turn option for cheap, Mizzium Skin can focus on one creature or multiple if we Overload it, and Shore Up can protect Nicol Bolas while also untapping it so we can tap to deal damage of an enchanted Nicol Bolas.

Now as to how we win, we need to take advantage of the fact that our opponents are discarding cards.

Fell Specter is one way to deal with this because it causes an opponent to discard when it enters the battlefield, but also has an opponent lose life whenever a card is discarded, meaning that multiple discarded cards will deal a lot of damage.

There is of course Waste Not, which has a variety of effects depending on the discarded card, Liliana’s Caress and Megrim which are enchantment versions of Fell Specter, and Sangromancer to maintain a very high life total whenever your opponents discard their hands.

You can also use Tergrid, God of Fright if you want to steal your opponents things or Tinybones, Trinket Thief to help refuel your hand or close out the game when your opponents have no cards in hand.

Nicol Bolas, while expensive to cast, can still have a solid enough strategy with modern cards. While still not the best Commander to win every game, he is still a Commander that can get a few wins if built correctly.

It has been a fun time looking at creatures from Legends, but starting tomorrow we’ll be back looking at Commanders from everywhere.

Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow for the next Daily Commander!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual