While playing strong cards can win lots of games in Commander, playing cards that make your opponents scratch their heads is sometimes even better. Cards like Doubling Season, that are well-known in the format, will rightfully earn a target on your back right away. Alternatively, dangerous but unknown cards like Sands of Time will generally go unnoticed.
MTG Sands of Time
Originally printed back in 1997, Sands of Time is a Reserved List artifact that, essentially, turns players’ untap steps into a chaotic mess. All artifacts, creatures, and lands that are tapped will still untap as normal, but any untapped cards of those card types will become tapped. Interestingly, this means all other card types, including enchantments, won’t be able to untap for as long as Sands of Time is in play. There are a lot of smaller benefits here, like making Treasure Tokens hard to use, but how Sands of Time changes untapping makes it so deadly.
Because this untap trigger is an ability, players can activate effects in response to it. While this lets players generally keep all their lands untapped, the floating mana is something that Yurlock of Scorch Trash can punish. Thanks to having a tap ability, you can also keep Yurlock untapped, potentially using its ability twice in one turn.
While this is interesting, turning untaps into an ability can have much more devastating applications. Sands of Time notably untaps during players’ Upkeeps, allowing cards like Paradox Haze and Obeka, Splitter of Seconds to essentially copy a bunch of untap triggers. Since your artifacts will untap as well, you can filter a ton of extra mana into cards like The Millennium Calendar for a massive finish.
Turning untaps into triggers goes both ways, however, allowing you to essentially prevent your opponents from untapping cards. Cards like Stifle that can counter triggers prevent your opponents from untapping at all. In extreme cases, Eon Hub can skip the Upkeep step for everyone, locking the table from untapping anything.
Going Infinite
As you may imagine, turning players’ untap into a trigger can easily lead to some infinite combo situations. Copying Sands of Time’s trigger with cards like Lithoform Engine or Strionic Resonator, in particular, can lead to infinite mana and infinite untaps. Since Sands of Time’s trigger will untap both artifacts and lands, each trigger will reset your copying artifact, while giving you the mana to activate it. So long as you have more than two lands, you’ll be able to create infinite mana. At its most efficient, this can create a two-card infinite combo with Tawnos, Urza’s Apprentice, which you can play in the Command Zone.
Making infinite mana from here is trivial, but because you’re doing this in your Upkeep, spending the mana you make can be a bit tricky. Fortunately, there are a ton of artifacts that Sands of Time enables, like Staff of Domination, that can easily win the game from here. Otherwise, Flash enablers like Vedalken Orrery can also help you cast your creatures using the infinite mana at your disposal.
A Bit Expensive
While your game plan needs to be a bit specific to use it, Sands of Time can create some serious game-warping situations in Commander. Really, any deck that wants to copy abilities can easily use a card like this, thanks to how easily it goes infinite with popular enablers like Strionic Resonator. Despite this, Sands of Time barely sees any play in Commander, registered in roughly 1420 decks according to EDHREC.
While this likely means that you’ll get the jump on your playgroup with Sands of Time, the card is, sadly, not quite a budget pick. Despite seeing no play, a near mint Sands of Time will still typically run you around $3.30. On the bright side, this is still rather cheap for a Reserved List card, making it reasonably accessible for a card that will never be reprinted.
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