Best MTG Cards to Buy For Old Stickfingers in Commander

Old Stickfingers may seem like it would make a cool, casual, graveyard-shenanigans deck. And it can! But, if you build around Stickfingers in just the right way, it can end up being competitive too. In fact, Old Stickfingers is probably the most powerful, combo-enabling Commander to come out of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt. Let’s take a look at what legendary horror does:

It may seem like you’d want to load up an Old Stickfingers deck with a ton of creatures. Right? That way you can cast Stickfingers for a bunch of mana and mill as many creatures as you can into your graveyard. But what if I told you it is actually optimal to include only three creatures in your deck?

Old Stickfingers doesn’t just randomly mill cards from the top of our deck. It specifically puts the top X creatures from the top of our deck into our graveyard. So, if we only have three creatures in our deck and we cast Old Stick fingers for X=3, we put every single creature in our library into our graveyard.

Some of you may see where I’m going with this: combos. We can essentially tutor a 3-piece combo directly from our deck to our graveyard which we can then reanimate in a variety of ways.

Also, Old Stickfingers’ ability is a cast trigger! That means even if Old Stickfingers gets countered by an opponent, its ability still goes on the stack, making it really hard to interact with. Now, let’s take a look at some of the best cards to include in an Old Stickfingers deck!

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Reanimation Spells

Before we get into any specific combos, there are some cards you’ll want to include in any Old Stickfingers deck whether you’re building casually or competitively. As our game plan is to put creatures into our graveyards with Old Stickfingers, we’ll definitely want a way to bring them back to the battlefield.

There are a ton of reanimation spells in Magic: the Gathering, but Reanimate, Life//Death, and Dance of the Dead are some of the most mana-efficient ones. These cards will be crucial in enabling our combos.

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The Necrotic Ooze Combo

This is a pretty well-known combo, but it works perfectly in an Old Stickfingers deck as our Commander can find all of the necessary pieces and put them into our graveyard. The combo works like this:

1. Cast Old Stickfingers for X=3
2. Put Necrotic Ooze, Phrexian Devourer, and Teskelion (or Walking Ballista) into your graveyard with Stickfinger’s ability
3. Cast a reanimation spell targeting Necrotic Ooze. Ooze now has the abilities of both Phyrexian Devourer and Triskelion
4. Activate Necrotic Ooze’s ability (copying Devourer) to remove the top card of your library from the game and put +1/+1 counters on Ooze
5. Activate Necrotic Ooze’s ability (copying Triskelion) to remove the +1/+1 counters from Ooze to deal damage to target player
6. Repeat, exiling your entire library and dealing damage equal to the total mana value of cards exiled this way

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cEDH – The Rot Hulk Combo

This is a slightly more convoluted combo, but also a very powerful one. (Remember: this combo is run instead of the Necrotic Ooze combo, not alongside; each of these combos works best in an Old Stickfingers deck if we only run 3 creatures).

The way this combo essentially works, is after casting Old Stickfingers for X=3 and putting the above creatures into the graveyard, we reanimate Rot Hulk which will, in turn, reanimate both Sidisi and Mikaeus. Then, using Sidisi’s ability, we sacrifice her to tutor our library for any one card. Because Sidisi has undying via Mikaeus, she returns to the battlefield and we use her ability to tutor for an additional card. From here we can use the specific cards we tutor to loop this combo.

Rather than list out all the different lines of this combo, I’ve included footage of the combo actually being played out in a game. This clip starts at the exact moment of the combo:

If you want to check out the exact decklist seen in this video, I’ve included it below. And if you want to learn more about this deck with all of the steps to this combo, you can check out Jason’s primer here.

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