Upgraded Buckle Up - Kotori, Pilot Prodigy
Buckle up folks! It's time to discuss upgrading the newly released Blue/White Vehicle precon aptly named: Buckle Up. It's been at least five years since the Vehicle-Artifact type was first introduced in Kaladesh and although we have gotten some Vehicles in the sets that followed, we haven't gotten a real push for them until Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Out of the box, this deck is already looking pretty sweet so let's see what upgrades we can make to run over the competition.
Upgrades
Two very important things we can't neglect in a Creature/Artifact based strategy is card draw and protection for our pieces. Four cards that will help us with drawing cards are: Esper Sentinel, Shimmer Dragon, Tezzeret, Artifice Master and Bident of Thassa. Esper Sentinel has been one of the stand out cards to be released in the last year, allowing us to draw cards just for having our opponents play the game. Repeatable card draw on an Artifact Creature will help keep us in the game. Tezzeret, Artifice Master is an excellent piece to draw us cards and make more Creatures to crew our Vehicles. Bident of Thassa will reward us for getting through with our Creatures and force our opponents to attack with theirs so that we can get even more card draw. Lastly, Shimmer Dragon is a flying threat that easily dodges removal with our strategy and eventually becomes a card draw engine for any extra artifacts we have of the field.
In terms of protecting our pieces, let's add Padeem, Consul of Innovation, Teferi's Protection, Darksteel Forge and Unwinding Clock. Padeem protects our Artifacts and will start drawing us cards once we have our larger Mana Value Artifacts in play. Teferi's Protection is the best protection spell in Commander at the moment, essentially saving us from anything that may lose us the game. Darksteel Forge is comparable to Padeem, in that it protects our Artifacts from being destroyed and Padeem will keep our Artifacts safe from any targeted removal. Unwinding Clock is a weird protection piece, but hear me out. A new card introduced in this preconstructed deck is Drumbellower. A piece that will untap our creatures during each of our opponent's Untap Steps. This is excellent for us, but we also need to untap our Vehicles in order to block any of our opponent's threats and Drumbellower will only untap the Creatures crewing our Vehicles. So the natural solution would be to add an Unwinding Clock, so that way all of our pieces untap every Upkeep and we can protect our Life Total.
Something else that we want to be in this deck is efficient. Being efficient in Commander means we need tutors and we need ramp. We'll be adding cards like Oswald Fiddlebender, Arcum Dagsson and Fabricate to make sure we are hitting our important Vehicles every game. Oswald and Arcum let us sacrifice our non-important Artifacts for our bigger more important pieces, while Fabricate is just a simple way to find whatever Artifact we want.
Besides Artifact ramp, making extra mana in a non-green deck can sometimes be challenging. Luckily we are adding two cards that will help us avoid being short on mana. Urza, Lord High Artificer will turn all of our Artifacts into Mox Sapphire and will start to take over the game once we have enough Artifacts to activate him every turn. The other way we can cheat on mana is by adding Master Transmuter. Being able to return a Thopter or other Artifact token to our hand and put in one of our important Artifact pieces for one Blue mana is the definition of efficiency.
A few other ways we can tune the deck are by adding some cards that will cover our bases in general. Adding a Supreme Verdict to the deck is a good choice, allowing us to have uncounterable removal for our opponent's while keeping our Vehicles safe. Let's also add a Phyrexian Metamorph to have some redundancy in our deck. Being able to copy our best Artifact or Creature will help move our strategy along nicely. Two cards to add to our Vehicle theme can be Cosima, God of the Voyage // The Omenkeel and Mechtitan Core. We are mostly playing Cosima here for The Omenkeel as it is a Vehicle and another source of ramp. Mechtitan Core is a fun Vehicle to add and is a surprisingly good threat if we are to ever activate its ability and make a 10/10 with Flying, Vigilance, Trample, Lifelink and Haste.
There are also three Lands we can add to the deck to make the mana base feel more efficient. Let's add Deserted Beach and Mech Hangar as two mana fixing options, and let's add Buried Ruin as a Land that will recur any of our Artifacts out of the Graveyard.
Cards to Cut
There are several cards in the preconstructed deck that we can take out and replace with the cards we just talked about.
Gold Myr & Silver Myr: We have better ways of making mana and any Creature we play we will want to be tapping it to crew our Vehicles and not make mana.
Vedalken Engineer: Narrow mana ramp and we also want to be tapping our Creatures for crewing.
Whirler Rogue: Makes a couple of bodies for us, but at four mana we want to be progressing our board with more than just two Thopters.
Thoughtcast: Let's ditch the one time draw spell with our recurring draw spells like Bident of Thassa and Esper Sentinel.
Raiders' Karve: The Omenkeel just does a better job at what this card wants to do.
Master of Etherium: A Lord for our Artifacts is nice but doesn't progress our strategy anymore than just pumping our Creatures.
Cataclysmic Gearhulk: A good way to remove our opponent's large board states, but leaves us with also very little to work with.
Kappa Canonneer: Six mana 4/4 that can get bigger and get through, but we can do better with six mana. Also we don't want to tap our Vehicles to cast this.
Research Thief: Bident of Thassa just does a better job at what this card wants to do.
Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage: Being able to cast our Artifacts and Legendaries at instant speed is nice but not completely necessary.
Riddlesmith: We've added much better recurring card draw than this card.
Myrsmith: Making a 1/1 is just ok but not spectacular. We can be using any extra mana after casting an artifact way more efficiently.
Universal Surveillance: If we don't have a lot of Creatures in play, then this card draw spell is usually dead in our hand.
Access Denied: We usually want to do more with our mana then holding up five of it to counter a spell.
Surgehacker Mech: We usually want these effects to do damage to all of our opponent's and not just one single Creature of Planeswalker.
Aeronaut Admiral: Giving our Vehicles evasion is just ok, but we can be playing cards like Urza at four mana.
Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle: The recursion we get from this card is very narrow and most of the time is just a four mana 2/2.
Here is a look at what the deck is with our upgrades out into it!
I have decided to remove one Plains and one Island and add the extra Buried Ruin to have our Land count be 38. This will hopefully assure that we always have at least three to four Lands in our starting hand. I'm glad that we are finally getting support for themes that were introduced fiver years ago and I hope Wizard's continues to support the themes and strategies Commander that don't usually get the spotlight. Let me know what you think of the upgrades and any possible other upgrades you may make yourself!
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