Broken Magic: The Citadel

It’s 4 AM, I’m tired as hell, and I can’t think of a time I’d rather be in bed than this very moment, but I can’t sleep so instead, I’m gonna write. Cool? Cool. You all know who I am but in case you don’t, My name is Blue, and today I’m talking about a broken magic card to pop up in recent months. Having only been printed in War of the Spark, it hasn’t popped out at any tournaments or anything, but it’s a strong card overall that has potential. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about Bolas’s Citadel.

First of all, let’s cover standard. In current Throne of Eldraine standard, I don’t anticipate Citadel to do much other than be a strong card advantage engine in a black-based control deck, but in previous standard, it had a pretty decent combo shell with the Wildgrowth Walker/Explorer package. It didn’t do much to make waves, but it certainly made it presense felt for at least a couple weeks. I expected more out of such a powerful card, but in a “fair” format like standard, even broken cards are hard to truly break. I know this isn’t much of a breakdown, but there’s more to talk about in modern, I promise. Speaking of modern…

With access to older, more powerful cards, modern has a lot of potential with a card like this. Firstly, you have acccess to some very fast ramp, like Utopia Sprawl, Arbor Elf, and Birds of Paradise. It’s possible to play Citadel as early as T3 and win immediately, or wait until T4 and decrease your fizzle rate drastically. Next, our life gain package in modern is so much better and more consistent that standard. The two biggest are Weather the Storm and Children of Korlis, both of which gain huge chunks of life to let us keep going. The final piece of the puzzle is our way of ending the game. Getting to ten nonland permanents, twice, then sacrificing them all doesn’t sound realistic, so instead we use Aetherflux Reservoir to finish things off. Not only does it also gain a ton of life if we play it early enough in the combo, but it has a built-in “you win” button and it makes winning that much easier. That’s all the easy part. The real difficult part is making sure we don’t fizzle.

Like a lot of modern combos, fizzling is a real problem, so we need to mitigate it, but how? Simple; Codex Shredder and Ghoulcaller’s Bell serve a very similar purpose in our deck, letting us mill the top card to get rid of excess lands or spells that cost too much life to let us keep going. We also reduce our fizzle rate by playing as few as 15 lands, most of which are fetches. Once we start comboing, we don’t want to stop. I think with the right build, Bolas’s Citadel can be a powerful combo card in the modern format, but I’m not here to really focus on modern. I want to talk about the impact Citadel has the commander format.

Since it was printed, my regular playgroup and I have been playing Citadel in every black deck we build. Through our experience, even with artifact hate, it seems whoever plays Citadel wins either that turn or the next turn with next to no deck building. It’s one of those cards that gets slotted into almost any black deck with minimal thought. The card advantage it provides in a format like commander is comparable to Yawgmoth’s Bargain. They’re both six mana in black that can see a lot of cards for paying life. The difference here is that you don’t need mana to cast the cards you see with Citadel, so in some way, it might be better than the Bargain. That’s just talking about slotting it in as a generically good card. The implications of when you fully build around it are through the roof!

Looking at decks that are going to naturally gain a lot of life to fuel the Citadel, there’s a lot of options. Oloro,Ageless Ascetic gains 2 life at your upkeep every single turn so it’s possible you’ll still be above your starting life total by the time citadel comes down just from Oloro alone. Kambal, Consul of Allocation gains life when your opponent’s cast noncreature spells, so especially in a spell-based meta, Kambal is good for fueling the Citadel. Kalitas, traitor of Ghet doubles as graveyard hate and efficient lifegain since he has lifelink and can grow himself. Similarly, K’rrik, Son of Yawgmoth works pretty well for the same reason. He naturally has lifelink and can grow himself by playing black spells. With so many efficient commander options for gaining life, Citadel is a centerpiece of many black-based decks. Of course, we can’t forget Aetherflux Reservoir mentioned eariler. In a deck built with Citadel in mind, it’s wrong not to include it.

Until you’ve played with Bolas’s Citadel in commander, you may not truly grasp just how powerful it is. I personally expect it to live a life similar to Paradox Engine; it’ll be legal for a couple years and making it’s presence known, then eventually it’ll get banned . Even though this doesn’t have the potential to go in every deck like the Engine did, it can easily go in any black deck with minimal deckbuilding and immediately be a target or end the game. It is a broken card and, at least to some extent, a one-card combo like Engine was considered in it’s banning announcement.

If I missed anything you think I should’ve covered or I said something you don’t agree with, let me know in the comments! That’s it from me for now, but before I go, don’t forget to follow me and the site on twitter @TwoBlueUntapped and @MTGOracle. Anyway, that’s all for now. This is Blue, Signing out!