How To Play The Tinybones, Bauble Burglar Commander Deck In Magic: The Gathering

Tinybones, Bauble Burglar is a mono black commander introduced in Magic: The Gathering’s Foundations set. Despite its restriction to just one color, the card can do a whole lot, playing a mixture of a theft strategy mixed with forced discard.

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A Tinybones, Bauble Burglar Commander deck is great if you want to be playing cards your opponents own, and winning with their win conditions rather than relying just on your own deck. It’s a unique take on a theft deck, letting you choose the cards (in most cases) that you’re stealing by taking them straight out of your opponents’ hands to cast them later.

Decklist

The decklist contains one planeswalker, 25 creatures, 15 sorceries, three instants, 12 artifacts, nine enchantments, and 34 lands. Most of the cards in the deck are either cards that force your opponents to discard or cards that benefit from cards being discarded.

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Key Cards

Tinybones, Bauble Burglar

The commander of the deck, Tinybones, Bauble Burglar is the main way you’re turning discarded cards into castable cards later. Tinybones needs to be on the battlefield for the cards to be exiled with a stash counter on it. Otherwise, they will simply go to the graveyard if Tinybones is ever removed.

Tinybones, Bauble Burglar allows you to cast any spells exiled with stash counters using any color. Since Tinybones has weak stats, you don’t want to be attacking with it and want to be using its effect for all opponents to discard a card instead.

Waste Not

Waste Not is the primary way you can push your advantage as your opponents’ hands are rapidly diminishing. Waste Not can provide card draw, board presence in the way of 2/2 tokens, or ramp with mana generation. All of this depends on what cards your opponents discard when they have to (or in some cases can be chosen by you).

The biggest strength of Waste Not is that it triggers for every card that gets discarded. So if an opponent has to discard two cards, Waste Not triggers twice. There are a handful of ways to force all opponents to discard multiple cards, which will make Waste Not give you a ton of extra value.

Chain Of Smog

Chain of Smog is a card that in theory, could cause everyone to lose their hands. The target of Chain of Smog can choose to copy it themselves, letting them force another player to discard two cards. This can lead to a chain of events of everyone constantly changing Chain of Smog copies until no one has a hand.

The one downside is that whoever you target can target you with the copy. However, this allows you to target someone else to force more discard and get more cards exiled with stash counters. You don’t need to worry about your hand since you can cast the exiled cards instead. So not having a hand is not a big deal for Tinybones decks.

Bandit’s Talent

A lot of the ways to force discard also make you discard as well. While you can work without a hand thanks to Tinybones, Bandit’s Talent turns your opponents not having hands into extra cards in yours. It draws you an extra card for each opponent with one or less cards in their hand. So if all three opponents only have one or no cards, you will draw three extra cards at your draw step.

Bandit’s Talent forces a minimum of one discard for each opponent, but if they don’t have a nonland to discard, they have to discard two instead. At level two, you can start gaining life you might have lost since there aren’t a ton of defenses in the deck.

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How To Play The Deck

A Tinybones, Bauble Burglar Commander deck is all about discarding your opponents’ cards and playing them for yourself. Since you can spend mana of any color, the deck plays more mana rocks than usual to always have an excess of mana. Thieving Varmint also can tap itself to add two mana of any color so long as that mana is used to cast spells you don’t own.

The best cards for discarding are ones that force everyone to discard. Dark Deal, Delirium Skeins, and Rankle’s Prank all force everyone to discard, while Let’s Play A Game, Syphon Mind, and Tasigur’s Cruelty all make only your opponents discard.

Since you’ll wind up discarding too, ways to draw cards are appreciated in the deck (albeit not required). Waste Not and Bandit’s Talent is a situational draw, Hostile Investigator turns discard into Clue tokens, and Tergrid, God of Fright can put discarded permanents directly onto your battlefield.

The primary win condition of the deck is winning by out-valuing your opponents. You want to cut off access to their game-winning cards and combos through forced discard and keep them on little to no hands. Meanwhile, you’re casting the cards exiled with stash counters to push your advantage further. Tinybones, Bauble Burglar Commander decks are grindy, and can be slow to win, but very effective at what they want to be doing.

The biggest weakness of the deck is its low defenses. While you can force your opponents to discard a ton of cards, if creatures hit the battlefield, you won’t have much to defend with. Your defenses rely on what you steal from your opponents, so if they’re weak creatures, you’ll have a weak board presence and become a prime target for attacks.

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