Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be looking at Oswald Fiddlebender!

Oswald is a two mana 2/2 that for one white mana, tap, and sacrifice an artifact you may search your library for an artifact card with mana value equal to 1 plus the mana value of the sacrificed artifact and then you put that artifact onto the battlefield then shuffle, using the ability only at sorcery speed.

Game Plan

Tutoring your library for artifacts is always an interesting line of play because there are a ton of artifacts that you can choose from and then operate interesting lines in order to get to the artifact that you want.

Ideally you would want an artifact that puts you into a solid position early on by making it harder for your opponents to interact with you or make it so that you play into a much more aggressive game plan by getting artifact creatures that can potentially cause a lot of damage.

This allows for quite a number of avenues for Oswald to explore, though I think Oswald works well in a slower, more control aspect that allows you to set things up as you would like and then go for a big swing.

Support

Oswald is very effective with low mana value artifacts because there are plenty of cheap artifacts that we can cast early enough in the game that we can start getting artifacts from our library onto the battlefield pretty quickly.

Vexing Bauble is a great artifact to get early on because it prevents your opponents from casting a spell without paying it’s mana cost that we can sacrifice later to either draw a card or get an artifact with Oswald into play without triggering it’s abilities because we aren’t casting the artifacts.

Pithing Needle can stymy cheap Commanders activated abilities, Grafdigger’s Cage can handle graveyard decks, Damping Sphere can slow down big mana decks as well as spell slinger decks, and Servo Schematic can make some Servo artifact creature tokens that we can sacrifice to start getting some of these cheap artifacts.

Climbing up the artifact chain we have several route to go through. If you want big value artifacts the Thousand Moon Smithy actually works pretty well because it enters with a Gnome Soldier artifact creature token whose power and toughness are equal to the number of artifacts and/or creatures you control that can become Barracks of the Thousand, a land that can make another one of those tokens when you use it’s mana to cast a creature or artifact spell.

If we make a bunch of tokens, like say with a Illustrious Wanderglyph which makes 1/1 Gnome artifact creature token each upkeep, then you can also make use of Forsaken Monument, which gives other colorless creatures +2/+2, let’s any mana source we control that taps for colorless to add another colorless mana, and whenever we cast a colorless spell we gain 2 life.

It’s also important to note that Illustrious Wanderglyph also gives +2/+2 to our artifact creatures once we have the city’s blessing, which should not be that hard to accomplish.

You can also lean more into the control aspect by using artifacts like Torpor Orb to prevent creatures from having their enter effects, Trinisphere to make it so that all spells must pay at least three mana to be cast, Defense Grid to make it so that everyone pays three more mana to cast spells on other players turns, Winter Moon to make it so all players can only untap one nonbasic land during their untap steps.

You can also use Unwinding Clock to great effect because you can untap all artifacts you control during each other player’s untap steps, which has plenty of potential to be broken using some of the Game Changer mana accelerators like Mana Vault or Grim Monolith.

Setbacks

As you would expect for a deck like this, the whole plan hinges on Oswald being in play in order to get the most value from him.

Since we are in white we do have some access to protection via on battlefield effects like Mother of Runes or more appropriately Skrelv, Defector Mite so we can avoid the taxes that we are imposing onto everyone, but of course board wipes also exist.

That also means that the artifacts you have in play also are affected by removal, more so than Oswald because if you only have so many cheap artifacts that lead up to bigger artifacts, then you lose the line to get to those big artifacts in the first place.

What Oswald really has trouble with is more of a player aspect and that is decision paralysis. If you want to execute some infinite mana combo, which is possible in Oswald, you need to know absolutely for sure that you know how to execute that combo.

If you are playing Oswald more casually, then there is a chance that you may get caught up in trying to decide what you want the deck to do. Since Oswald’s ability is at sorcery speed, you can’t be reactive in getting the artifact that you want into play, instead needing to wait for it to be your turn in order make a choice.

When there are three other players involved, that choice changes turn by turn because you need to assess what you need at the moment. This is mitigated a bit if you lean more into a control plan where the game plan is tax everyone into oblivion, but if you want to be more proactive, then it can be a bit of a struggle.

Bracket Rating: Mid 4, maybe low 5

Oswald can be a devastating control deck in the hands of the right pilot, and while I do know that Oswald has seen some fringe cEDH play in the past and occasionally in the present, there is too much interaction for me to definitively say that he can hang in bracket 5.

Tutoring up whatever artifacts you want is a very strong ability, especially with him being a two mana Commander that you can get active fairly quickly, even in higher bracket tables. The struggle is making sure you have enough ways to keep Oswald and your artifact ladder in tact, or have more than one plan to get where you want to go if your first plan goes up in smoke.

Oswald can be strong with some interesting decision points, which is why I am considering making a higher bracket deck with him. I’m not the best pilot by any means, but I do think that Oswald is an neat enough Commander to build some interesting lines of play.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual