Nicol Bolas

Legendary Creature — Elder Dragon

Flying

At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice Nicol Bolas unless you pay {U}{B}{R}.

Whenever Nicol Bolas deals damage to an opponent, that player discards their hand.

Legality

Format	Legality
1v1 Commander	Legal
Archenemy	Legal
Big Apple Highlander	Legal
Block Constructed	Legal
Canadian Highlander	Legal
Casual	Legal
Commander / EDH	Legal
Commander: Rule 0	Legal
Custom	Legal
Duel Commander	Legal
Freeform	Legal
Highlander	Legal
Legacy	Legal
Leviathan	Legal
Limited	Legal
Modern	Legal
Modern Beyond Horizons	Legal
Oathbreaker	Legal
Oldschool 93/94	Legal
Planar Constructed	Legal
Planechase	Legal
PreDH	Legal
Premodern	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (47)

plakjekaas on What do you want more …

2 weeks ago

The commander ruleset is an attempt at immersion. Instead of being a planeswalker yourself, summoning the monsters from other planes and carrying the spells from your hand (which is the Vorthos interpretation of how magic is played), you choose a general to lead your deck. This general is a creature from a magic card. Its capabilities stem from colors of Magic. Only the colors that your general is well versed with (colors on the card, either in mana cost or in abilities from the text box) are the colors the deck has access to. Nicol Bolas has no access to green or white magic, so a deck with Bolas at the helm can only use grixis cards.

To say those flavorings don't mean anything to you is valid of course, nobody can tell you how you want to enjoy magic. However, Magic is created by the company that also makes Dungeons and Dragons, and the play-pretend part does matter to a lot of people. Building a commander deck is like creating a new D&D character, scrolling through the card pool like a rulebook, checking for the coolest thing to do while being tied and restricted to a color identity like a race/class combination. I'd say the overlap in audience is there for this to be a part of the fun. It's part of the reason we still have art and flavor text on the cards.

There's a lot of room for personal preferences, and the color restrictions contribute to increasing playability of a wider arrangement of cards. If al you can play is {W}, you've got to be more creative in your card choices to tackle opposing problems than you'd have to be if you could include other colors. It invited me to expand my search of cards to play, and the feeling of stumbling upon a forgotten card from 2001 that's perfect with this other card I opened at the prerelease last week, is very satisfying indeed.

That's more rewarding to me than building a Standard deck could ever be. There you work towards the same goal as the rest of the world with the same card pool, the results tend to get very similar, and you'll be rewarded for doing the same thing per archetype, ending up playing the same cards, doing the same thing. That's where merit is mostly skill based, leaning towards the competitive aspect of Magic.

EDH was not created as a competitive format though. The original EDH tables were judges who after refereeing a big tournament all day, wanted to entwine playing magic, but a lot less serious magic than the matches they've been dealing with all day. A way for their cool type 2 (Standard) cards to do cooler things than they ever got to do in their intended formats. Singleton, so every game should play out different than the last one you played. Where you get the time to build something that you can't in other formats. And they started out with just the Elder Dragons from Legends as commanders. They all have 7 power and they all cost 7 mana, if you took 3 hits from a commander it was legal because let's be fair, game's got to end. It was casual as in anti-competitive in its baby shoes.

Now that the format has both sped up immensely, and other legendary creatures can be your commander, I can imagine that rule makes less sense out of the blue. Commanders are engines or combo pieces, and not combat behemoths like they used to. But it's still a part of the identity of the ruleset, due to the "roleplay" aspect of how the format began.

Every commander is it's own archetype. That makes the cards performing well in your deck, vastly different from the cards performing well in your opponent's deck. Color identity makes it so that more cards are played in the format, diversifying play experience. Playing commander is a great way to expand your card knowlegde, because every card choice is influenced by all this weirdly-tacked-on red-tape to be a creative personal choice rewarded by a greater knowlegde of card interactions that you personally might not have thought of. Ripping off the red tape will turn commander into the form of Magic it was trying to escape from.

That's what I want to see more of in Commander. Creative combinations of existing cards not necessarily designed to be played together, rather than an amalgamation of designed-for-strategy cards. Because Commander is the most popular format, precons are probably the best way to showcase card interactions to new players, but I subscribe to legendofa 's suggested way to start playing magic. Get the basics in Standard or Jumpstart, and when you're ready to dive deep, buy and upgrade a precon, start playing Commander to step up your learning curve. I don't think we need as many precons and printed-for-commander cards as we are getting. To me, the spirit of the format is scouring the entire pool of cards to discover and showcase impressive things other people might not have thought of, with a very personal touch of style. It makes me want to play my decks over and over again if I'm proud of what I found, and most games I lose, I did cool stuff that made my friends go "Oh wow!" anyway, leaving me fulfilled anyway.

Icbrgr on Will Valgavoth be the Next …

8 months ago

Good to know! I was always interested in Ashiok and was obsessed with trying to make Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver Mill deck when it was released... just thought he was cool so I'm glad hes still around...I used to follow the Lore pretty closely but I kinda fell off during the last phyrexian set... saw the Jace Reawakened card... got confused because I thought he died in March of the machines and thought it was a bs way to bring him back (as I said I fell off the lore and need to catch up)... the only character I'll stand for BS resurrection is Nicol Bolas lol.

m_tironi on Official missing/incorrect card/token thread

2 years ago

Friends, could we have a higher resolution on Nicol Bolas?

Low Resolution (we are using this): https://static.tappedout.net/mtg-cards-2/m-25/nicol-bolas/mtg-cards/_user-added/pieguy396-nicol-bolas-15209613610.jpg

High Resolution: https://cards.scryfall.io/large/front/8/e/8e92ba96-372c-418d-b271-45e1bf5c7af5.jpg?1562438472

TheoryCrafter on What Shall Happen to the …

3 years ago

TypicalTimmy, it's from the Mirrodin Besieged block. Melira, Sylvok Outcast has the ability to remove Glistening Oil from the infected. As you said, if it fully corrupts the heart its incurable. Venser, the Sojourner was suffering from Phthisis(powerstone radiation poisoning) and knew he didn't have much longer to live. So he gave his spark to Karn and the spark flushed the oil from his body. That's how Karn Liberated was cured.

As for Nicol Bolas, his memory isn't erased. Jace Beleren created an illusion where he showed Nicol exploding and then Ugin, the Spirit Dragon just took his name in such a way he cannot be summoned. Thus, his home is now a Prison Realm.

estoner on Doubling Cube instead of Mulligans

3 years ago

If you look at the Elder Dragons, for example, it is clear that the original vision of bomb creatures like the original Nicol Bolas was that even if you cheated them into play, you still had to pay mana. This wasn't just for flavor: it was intended as a form of balance. Once we stopped requiring upkeep costs, power creep clearly spiraled out of control, as you can see with Questing Beast .

I know people who have taken breaks from the game and still thought that you could scry after a mulligan, for example. I'm saying that instead of updating the current mulligan rules every few years, we should just ditch them entirely and switch to a scoring system with a doubling cube, so that even if you open a hand that's garbage, you have the option of doubling on a later hand that is actually strong and making up for it.

MTGBurgeoning on Scion of the Ur-Dragon: Every. Dragon. Ever.

3 years ago

He had a great run in this build when he resided in it! Nicol Bolas was in this deck for many, many moons, eventually yielding to more powerful options. When called upon, he emptied many blue mages' and control players' hands through a quick activation of Scion of the Ur-Dragon's ability before the combat damage step. Gone but not forgotten...

lcarl3035 on Scion of the Ur-Dragon: Every. Dragon. Ever.

3 years ago

Nicol Bolas would be a brutal addition to this deck.

Spisepinden on The archenemy

3 years ago

Given the Archenemy setting, I would definitely go with good 'ol Nicol Bolas, especially since many of the Archenemy scheme cards directly reference him. From there, I'd assemble a deck with some kind of long-winded game plan that culminates in a big play, supported and enabled by a thematic scheme deck on the side.

Of course, it ultimately comes down to how casual of a setting she'd be using the deck in. There's lots of cards like Nekusar, the Mindrazer and Sen Triplets which can be min-maxxed into becoming incredibly oppressive and competitive lock-down/solitair-style decks if that's more what you're after, but personally I'd avoid decks like that outside of a directly competitive environment.