Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be talking about Captain Benjamin Sisko!

Captain Sisko is a two mana 2/2 that at the beginning of your end step you create a 1/1 red Officer creature token for each dilemma you’ve faced this turn. For two generic mana and one mana of all five colors and tap, you exile the top five cards of your library and you may cast any number of spells with mana value less that or equal to the number of Officers you control from among those cards without paying their mana costs.

Game Plan

We are going to end our focus on Star Trek by taking a look at Captain Sisko, and while I haven’t seen a lot of Star Trek, I am familiar with Captain Sisko. While facing dilemmas is something all leaders in Star Trek need to face, Captain Sisko does make some important ones.

Speaking to the mechanic of facing a dilemma, having a Commander that is focused on modal spells and abilities is very interesting, especially with an ability that enables you to potentially cast more modal spells to get more Officers at the end of the turn.

Support

We have a wide variety of modal spells and abilities to choose from, which makes the deck very flexible in what it can do.

For example, all of the Charms are modal and if we cast them from our library via Captain Sisko’s ability then we have whatever options that are available without necessarily whiffing on one. For example Izzet Charm can counter a noncreature spell unless its controller pays two mana, deal 2 damage to target creature, or draw two cards and then discard two cards.

Rakdos Charm is also a great card to consider since we can use it to either exile a player’s graveyard, destroy an artifact, or have each creature deal 1 damage to its controller. Very flexible in what it can do and isn’t bad to use if all the modes happen to be low or medium at the time.

The Commands are also solid options because they give us two options out of four to choose from. Lorehold Command for example let’s choose two from either making a 3/2 Spirit creature token, give creatures we control +1/+0 and gain indestructible and haste until end of turn, deal 3 damage and then have target player gain 3 life, and sacrifice a permanent to then draw two cards.

Since facing a dilemma also triggers from modal abilities, we expand our options a bit more with something like Riku of Many Paths who also cares about modal abilities because when we cast a modal spell we choose up to X options where X is the number of times you chose a mode for that spell with the options being exile the top card of our library and we can play that until the end of our next turn, put a =1/=1 counter on Riku and also give them trample, or create a 1/1 Bird token with flying.

With how I understand how dilemma works, if you have a way to trigger a modal ability multiple times per turn then you would have faced an additional dilemma for Captain Sisko. For example, if you trigger Felidar Retreat to either make 2/2 Cat Beast creature token or put a +1/+1 counter on each creature we control while also giving them vigilance multiple times, that would count as facing multiple dilemmas.

Even something like Umezawa’s Jitte counts towards facing a dilemma because we have the option to remove a charge counter from it that we got two from the equipped creature dealing combat damage to give the equipped creature +2/+2 until end of turn, give a target creature -1/-1 until end of turn, or gain 2 life.

We don’t even need a lot of Officers in play to also help getting the most use out of Sisko, with us needing only two or three Officers on average and five to max it all out. Since we are casting a good number of noncreature spells, Academy Instructor works really well because whenever we do cast a noncreature spell we make a 1/1 Officer creature token while also gaining a +1/+0 boost for each Officer token we control.

Setbacks

Captain Sisko works as a decently solid toolbox Commander, but there are some downsides.

Captain Sisko needs to be on the battlefield, and while it would be tempting to cast him as soon as possible since he is two mana, it would be better to hold off for a bit to make sure that you have the mana to protect him if necessary.

What’s more, since we are in five colors we do need to have all five colors of mana available to us in order to not inly cast the modal spells that we want to cast, but to also make sure that we can use Captain Sisko’s ability.

A seven mana activated ability that we ideally want to do as often as we can in order to trigger him multiple times would be the best for us. We also are subtly limited to only using his ability during our turn since while we can activate it at any time and have no issue, we are still limited to the fact that we only make the Officer tokens on our turn.

We are also only looking at five cards whenever we activate Captain Sisko’s ability, and there is a non-zero chance that we hit a good number of lands or we don’t have a lot of Officers in play to cast more than one or two spells if we do hit the five spells from Captain Sisko.

The fact that Captain Sisko needs some Officers in play in order to cast the most number of spells makes the deck much more susceptible to removal, especially considering we need a very specific creature type and not just a number of creatures we control.

We are also much more of a toolbox deck, using the modal spells to generate us a good amount of advantage, but we don’t necessarily have a way to win the game. We can attack with Officers or use some modal spell to buff our creatures during combat, and Farewell is a modal board wipe that we can tailor to our needs, but if we don’t need a spell at the moment, then the cards we exile remain in exile.

Bracket Rating: High 2, Low 3

Captain Sisko is a pretty good toolbox Commander who can make a lot of use out of modal spells.

Where Captain Sisko struggles is speed and consistency, as do a lot of toolbox decks. However, we can still make a decent board of creatures while we can cast a wide variety of spells if the conditions are right. Not the best for higher brackets, but solid in the lower brackets and I can live with that. I can live with that.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual