Commander Focus: Stickers, Salt, & Symbiote Spider-Man

Sodium & chlorine are each, in their own right, dangerous elements. The former explodes violently upon contact with water, and the latter is a constituent atom in hundreds of deadly chemicals, yet together they assemble to form simple table salt, NaCl. I want to, in a similar fashion, combine today a couple of deeply-maligned facets of modern Magic. Ideally, in doing so, we'll not reach the same endpoint: Salt. Jokes aside, you do always run the risk of a negative social interaction when playing with mechanics or archetypes not generally thought fondly-of in the Magic community. Whether it's a single awkward aside, or being targeted for destruction from the starting line, relying on groanworthy play patterns can place strain on ones' enjoyment of the game. Moreover, thinking with empathy, maybe it's not going to make for a fun FNM to show up with Brago stax as your favorite deck. While winning is still a goal, the journey is more important than the destination a lot of the time, especially if you've got some fun interactions in mind. I've been tiptoeing around the actual aspects we're fusing today though, and for good reason. To me, this preamble was necessary, because the very mention of today's metaphorical Sodium & Chlorine would raise the hackles of even me if mentioned during a pregame conversation. I assure you though—there's a very good reason we're putting Stickers on our Symbiote Spider-Man. I promise.

"It Gains This Card's Other Abilities."

Symbiote Spider-Man is a fairly unremarkable card at its face, being a 2/4 for 3 mana that provided some filtering and reasonable advantage when he connects. This does of course incentivize you to pump up that meager 2 power (which is worth keeping in mind), but where the card gets interesting is in its activated ability while in the graveyard: Symbiote Spider-Man can foist its abilities, and a +1/+1 counter, onto some new host. Of course, you give up the potential for Commander damage, and need to get the card in your graveyard first, but given it changes zones by activating you do get the opportunity to chuck it back in the Command Zone to later recast for 5 mana. There's that word on the card though that's nagged at me: Abilities, plural. It takes only a cursory look to notice that the card has but a single other ability to inherit, its combat damage trigger, and it's not as though copiable values that grant abilities persist while a card changes zones, much less the graveyard. If Symbiote Spider-Man had extra text like Skullbriar, the Walking Grave this would be obvious.

While we lack design notes on Symbiote Spider-Man, I'd attribute the wording on the card, originally, to being a potential Arena consideration. Arena has a mechanic, Perpetual, which provides lingering effects that 'stick' onto individual cards no matter what happens to them. There, he's known as Skv'x the Augmenter, admittedly a way cooler name, and with way cooler potential applications (Imagine what can happen with cards like Monoist Gravliner). Paper Magic does have...one way to grant abilities to cards even while they're dancing between zones, however. It's time to talk about Stickers. Introduced in Unfinity, Sticker Sheets are a card type that exists in their own separate deck, and can only be accessed by the effects of other cards (all of which are from the set). At the start of the game, you're dealt 3 of the 10 Sheets to pull from, divided into Name, Art, Text, & Power/Toughness. We're using the latter two categories today, and those require a secondary resource: Tickets. Like Energy, Tickets are retained on a player as opposed to a permanent, but can be Proliferated and otherwise interacted with as you'd expect. That said, the levels of convolution at play here should be obvious. For this reason (among others), Wizards has done everything they can to excise any competitive merit from Stickers, and it's hard to blame them; being banned in Legacy, Vintage, and Pauper, the only format where they remain legal is in fact Commander. Even so, the only Sticker card you're likely familiar with in the format is _____ Goblin (affectionately referred to as 'Mind Goblin'), so it's hardly mattered anyway...and yet, Symbiote Spider-Man says abilities. How far can we take that mild quirk in syntax?

The Lester Hayes Rule

I read all your research on Stickers, really brilliant.

Stickers fundamentally solve two of the main issues that face Symbiote Spider-Man, core reasons why he's been written-off by most Commander players. First, and most obvious, they provide additional upside that are transferred when using his activated ability. It's not the easiest thing to place a Sticker onto a permanent—but we'll get into that—so spreading their effects without the use of Tickets is greatly appreciated. Of course, this neither duplicates the Sticker itself, nor adds/removes it from Symbiote Spider-Man; it simply takes the text, and tacks it (and the original combat damage trigger) onto the ability's target. These additional abilities can be quite something, from Protection & Hexproof, to allowing for access to cards in the yard, and even turning the affected permanent into a 13/13 Eldrazi! On the whole, both the low and high-Ticket ability Stickers are worthwhile to tack onto other cards, and handily justify our choice of Commander. That said, Stickers aren’t exactly like Perpetual—much like Skullbriar they cease to be the moment a Stickered card enters a hidden information zone, per Comprehensive Rule 123.5. That means returning Symbiote Spider-Man from your Command Zone to the hand isn’t as effective as you might hope, as much as I’d love to extol the power of Netherbone Altar in decks that aim to cycle through their Commander. In that sense, it makes overtures to Henzie, as while the cost of our Symbiote will inevitably grow, the payoff (and ideally, Sticker count) will likewise grow each time as well. To make the most of each instance, it’s therefore wise to try and copy the activated ability by any means necessary.

Before that, let's talk about getting the first Sticker on, though, and that means we need Tickets. That resource serves as the bottleneck for this strategy, as there's a mere eight Ticket generators in Dimir, and we're on seven of them. That's not a ton to base an entire archetype off of, but the good news is that we're also in among the strongest colors for tutoring them out. First and foremost, the one-offs: Glitterflitter, Scampire, & Command Performance. While these are strong due to how free their effects are, unless repeated it's essentially impossible to get the stickers you'd want on on Symbiote Spider-Man without blinking or repeating their effects. The only legal Ticket producer we're not playing also falls here, being the 6 mana Carnival Carnivore. We're down horrendous for Tickets, but 6 mana? Yeesh. Better for us are the repeatable suite, being Bioluminary, Prize Wall, Ticket Turboturbines, and the holy grail, Wicker Picker. Bioluminary is a house, given we're already on a number of effects to make our Commander largely unblockable, but nothing compares to the Scarecrow: Wicker Picker is ludicrously repeatable, and at over 30 Creatures in our 99 we can almost always chuck enough bodies out there to accrue the necessary Tickets. Notably, unlike most of these effects, you have to place the Sticker when you do so onto the last card played with Sticker Kicker, so it's often best to reserve the Commander until then. I felt it important to cover all of these though, because they're cards you—for good reason—likely haven't heard of. Some get Tickets without placing Stickers, others have weird targeting restrictions (though Scampire is arguably better for us than most lists he's ever appeared in); the whole mechanic's a mess, and its persisting legality is somehow its most confusing feature.

Host Activation

He's saying it nicely, it's arguably an optimal gameplay path.

One facet of Commander that tends to quietly be the format's core philosophical difference compared to its 60-card peers is a core gameplay which revolves more around setting up engines. Engines are ways to ensure there's something for you to do every turn, ideally multiple times per turn cycle. To some extent, this makes sense, as in a game with four players you're incentivized to play a proactive game that centers on the self, to 'build your sandcastle'. It's hard to fight three players at once, so cold war intermingled with an assembly line of cascading value just makes sense. Few things do that better than repeatable activated abilities. I've talked much about decks centering on these in the past, because I take ample pleasure in simply taking more game actions than my opponents. In general, the player who does more (really, no matter what you do) is in the running to win that game of Commander. Repeatable activated abilities put you in that position.

First, let's talk about a card we're not playing though, Training Grounds. This is normally a slam dunk for decks like ours, but one of the most important abilities is sadly not from a Creature we control, but one in our Graveyard. For that reason, we've pivoted instead to playing an absolute wealth of ways to produce mana to pay for these abilities, rather than reduce some of their base costs. Cards like Omen Hawker & Vhal, Candlekeep Researcher are fantastic avenues to pay for our abilities, and one of my pet cards, Cryptic Trilobite, is perhaps even best in slot for this role. I've said it before, but if I can justify the Trilobite and things like Pit Automaton in a list, it's almost guaranteed to be a deck I'll personally enjoy. That's all production though, what's the core avenue to spend it? Surely we're not using it all on Symbiote Spider-Man? In a manner of speaking, we often are, but the way that manifests is in the form of ability copiers like (appropriately) Peter Parker's Camera, Adric, Mathematical Genius, & Lithoform Engine. During the course of a game, it can be tough to get more than 2 total Graveyard activations off for our Commander, so when we do, that effect needs to spread as best it can. You could, if the Stickers justified it, double up on a single target (providing two instances of Symbiote Spider-Man's damage trigger, plus double the Stickered effects), but more often than not we're spreading those tools out. In half my test games, from a sample size larger than I'm keen to admit just yet, the multiplicative application of just the damage trigger caused me to mill out, and that's not to say of multiple instances of Proliferating on attack, or generating 7 Tickets on death. These are powerful effects, and playing into activated abilities relieves some of the cost issues on both the effect itself, and getting the most out of it.

Sticker Ticker Bickering

We want to win with Stickers, and while that's a lofty goal given everything else going on, it's far from impossible. In an ideal world, we need at least 8/10 of our Sticker sheets to have coherent paths to victory on them, whether that's in the form of a massive Power/Toughness Sticker to boost our unblockable damage, a mana outlet to combo off with alongside a few more banal cards, or something...silly. Crucially, the P/T Stickers aren't applied when you activate in the yard, so there's a necessity to be more even-handed with their use, but even so there's a very real world where Commander Damage is your path to victory. What's going to happen the other chunk of the time, though, comes down to some form of combo or Laboratory Maniac line. We're of course on the premier activated ability 2-card of Basalt Monolith & Rings of Brighthearth, both phenomenal cards beyond their combined context, and if we roll Notorious Sliver War as a sheet, there's an outlet. Once we have infinite mana, we can also usually cast, sacrifice, and activate our Commander enough times to lead to a great enough density of dig+mill triggers to empty our Library; once there, all it takes is something like Dread Return on Maniac, or similar, to push us to a win.

And people say the trilogy's final movie was sloppy.

That being said, most of the time our endgames are decided by the Sticker Sheets provided at the outset of a game. What if you rolled Unassuming Gelatinous Serpent, though, allowing you to push for a win via milling your opponents out? Elemental Time Flamingo opens the door for aristocrat loops as a win condition, and don't forget that Agatha's Soul Cauldron also allows you to pay mana of any color for activated abilities. Things like Scampire get a lot spookier when they're an outlet. Part of what keeps this list compelling is that, on top of our Commander digging through the Library for important pieces, games can shift radically based on knowledge provided before you see your opening hand. It gives you something to steer towards, to make seem that it was your plan all along. To that end, it provides a rush of dopamine that only feeling clever can. Still, what a shame it is that I have to say card names like 'Elemental Time Flamingo' and not have it be a Bird with Suspend. For shame, Wizards. As much as I loathe the Sticker mechanic at times, here it's...genuinely really fun to change your win condition based on the available Sheets. It's approaching a Rogue-lite, and given Symbiote Spider-Man is both a vector for spreading abilities and a way to find Ticket producers, we can usually assemble some sort of contraption that results in a goofy combo. Not Unstable Contraptions, though, those still aren't legal.

Example Decklist: Symbiote Sticker-Man

Part of how you need to evaluate Symbiote Spider-Man as a whole is by seeing any path to unblockability as fundamentally worth an extra card in hand. I see something like Slip Through Space as "Surveil 1, draw two cards", and those similar like Enter the Enigma & Aphotic Wisps in similar lights. This lets us employ cards I normally wrote off, as well, like Waterbender's Talent: Not only is it a highly-accessible activated ability to grant unblockable, but we don't need to wait to start gaining advantage in hand when we connect. That payoff from the Quest Counters is just gravy. Speaking of those counters though, I employ far fewer Proliferate pieces than most other lists I've seen. Tickets, surprisingly, are counters, so once you have at least one it's fairly easy to stack more up—the issue stems from actually getting them before your Proliferate payoffs. Due to the lower overall density, I found that packing them (or blink, for that matter) into the list over draw smoothing would put the cart before the horse. Your results may vary, but what I'll guarantee is that Dreamtide Whale is a house here, with 7 power and a consistent trigger. Frankly Knull should Venomize more cetaceans.

The number of incidental ways we can help our Creatures be harder to block is a lovely aspect of the list, epitomized by one of the most underrated tutors printed for Dimir: Ringsight. To avoid another long-winded gameplay explanation, this is in essence a tutor that gives a Creature of ours Skulk, and if it's our Commander, that allows him to sneak in against opponents with reasonable boards. Likewise, Manifold Key both enables cards like Monolith to go further into the mana-positive, but also can just make something unblockable; this comes in the form of two activated abilities, and as you've likely gathered, paying for those is something we're quite keen to do. One last shoutout to Araumi of the Dead Tide, for not only giving us a great spend for activated-ability-only mana, but for tripling up on the Enters effects of some Ticket producers. A stand-out card for the 99.

Decklists are kept updated, and may change with set releases.

Do I think you could take Symbiote Spider-Man to Bracket 3? No, not especially. Oddly enough the biggest problem with doing so is a lack of cheap Double Strikers, who could double-dip and do a decent Yuriko impression with his inherited ability. That being said, what you could do, for the first time in Commander Focus history, is drop him down to Bracket 1, and play Acorn-Stamped Unfinity cards. This would greatly increase the density of Sticker cards and reduce the need for tutors, but at the same time it might be too good for the Bracket. An alarming thought, to be sure, but given we have a 0% chance of ever receiving any more Ticket/Sticker cards, that's really the only other way to get access to a higher quantity in your 99. Ouch.

Ten Hail Maries

Igor Grechanyi's piece manages to be silly and a little creepy, in the ways a Scarecrow needs to be.

Forgive me reader, for I have sinned. It's been a while since my last confessional, but I must say this time I've gone perhaps a mile too far...I've played nearly a dozen games of Symbiote Sticker Man. Yes, inflicted upon both unwary Commander players and my core playgroup alike, this beautiful monstrosity has seen more testing than nearly any other deck I've covered here on Commander Focus, that I wasn't actively planning to build in paper. Stepping away from the sizzling embers of my childhood Catholic guilt, for a moment, the above statement is both true and unfortunate. Now, the folks that experienced sitting across from this deck were great sports by and large, but they were also entirely online; if someone built this in paper, they'd need a more human-friendly solution to managing both Stickers & the various lingering abilities this list requires one to manage. Fortunately, as someone who's pioneered Princess Yue (which you can read about here), explaining headache-inducing mechanics and jotting information on sticky notes mid-game is one of my specialties.

This list isn't just fun, it's fun in a nuanced way that niggles at the mind, that writhes in giddy jitters of feeling clever. It's undiluted Johnny opium. Counting myself among that psychographic profile, naturally I've been itching to refine Symbiote Spider-Man in my free time, to get that rush of dopamine that comes with Magic's great 'Aha!'s. I say this with all candor, you should play this list, and I fully expect to see the EDHREC page for Symbiote Spider-Man become overrun slowly but surely with Sticker-matters pieces, because it's truly the first compelling way to play this Commander. To circle back to the initial metaphor though, that arrives with a need for temperance, because people are honestly right to get salty upon hearing this is what you've brought to the pod. Peeling away all the cool things it does, it's still Stickers, and still Spider-Man, and respecting folks' weariness surrounding either subject (much less both) is a good lesson in conflict de-escalation. Still, if they do show interest, you're all in for a riotous time. Happy Stickering, dear reader.

Until next time, should the plural of Symbiote be...Symbiyeet?

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don't forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website, and subscriber-only content covering competitive Warhammer 40K!