Assembled Aggression: Avengers Assemble Precon Upgrade Guide

Welcome to EDHLAB’s Precon Upgrade series for Marvel Super Heroes Commander! While Marvel’s presence in our beloved game is a contentious topic, I couldn’t be more excited to finally assemble some of the most iconic Avengers characters of all time into a single deck to answer the call of battle and dive into combat. Avengers Assemble is a Hero Kindred deck with several interesting subthemes: counters-matter, playing at flash speed, and more.

Standard-Issue Utility Belt

While these Marvel precons aren't tuned and focused towards a single strategy, with just a few upgrades and tweaks they can be a real force to be reckoned with. First, let’s inspect what comes out of the box when you purchase the Avengers Assemble Commander deck:

• 1 Ready-to-play 100-card Commander deck
• 1 Traditional foil face commander with borderless art
• 99 Non-foil cards, including 29 new-to-Magic cards
• 10 Non-foil double-sided tokens
• 1 Reference card
• 1 Deck box

The face commander for this deck is Captain America, Team Leader. Steve Rogers may not be the strongest, smartest, or tech-savvy Avenger on the team, but he has several great qualities: determination, moxie in spades, and the uncanny, almost supernatural ability to enhance his team through inspiration and brilliant leadership. These characteristics are expressed succinctly on this creature card: not only does he give them a bump in power and toughness with a counter, but he enables them to swing quickly with haste and without fear of retribution with vigilance.

The other potential commander for this deck is Director Nick Fury. As is appropriate for the brain behind the Avengers Initiative, Nick Fury helps to get the ball rolling by making your Hero spells cost one mana less to cast and by helping you to draw more of them every time you attack. While you could certainly build a competent Hero deck with Nick Fury at the helm, he suits this deck much better as an enabler who helps the Avengers get off the ground — appropriate for his real role on the team.

The Big Three (And More)

In the archetypical post-MCU Avengers context, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor Odinson are “The Big Three,” the team’s heavy hitters and most popular characters. While that idea may not ring quite as true here, there are still some serious contenders for most powerful Avenger in the default decklist, at least in cardboard form.

Though Professor Hulk isn’t the classic mean, green, roided-out monster that best characterizes the Hulk — see Bruce Banner for a more appropriate portrayal — he is still a titan in this decklist. A six-mana 6/6 with trample is already literally unheard of in mono-blue, and his rider effect makes this card even crazier; drawing a number of cards equal to the amount of combat damage this beefcake deals is a hugely important ability. If you can find a mostly-open attack with this creature, you’re in for a full grip in no time.

In a surprising but pleasant turn of events, the Marvels — and Monica Rambeau in particular — received a lot of love in this set. Photon, Mighty Marvel is a workhorse in this deck, helping you cast more creatures by generating a ton of mana whenever she connects for combat damage. With Cap giving her haste and evasion from flying, you’ll easily smack someone for damage the turn she comes into play to give you that extra burst of mana needed to cast your next Hero.

Continuing to highlight powerful combat-centric creatures and Marvels-related characters, Captain Marvel, Apex Avenger is a strong top-end threat. Flying and double strike are already incredible keywords to have when your commander gives vigilance and haste, and indestructible is especially strong in Bracket 2 where removal spells see less play. Combine those elements with functional counter-doubling from her second ability, and this creature will carry you to victory.

Yet another powerful combat piece, War Machine, Avenging Arsenal amplifies the strength of your board of beefy Avengers even further with a double strike anthem. As long as you can find ways to grant trample or other methods of evasion to your board, War Machine practically guarantees that your sizable board will close out the game.

To round out this list, Black Widow, Agile Avenger is a supremely useful creature: a Faerie Mastermind that carries the relevant Hero creature type and the ability to buff itself while sporting an evasive keyword. Not only will Natasha help keep up with card advantage, but she’ll quickly present a strong attacker as well.

Brand New Super-Suit

Now that you know some of the best cards already in the deck, it’s time to take this precon to the next level with some well-deserved upgrades to the existing Avengers arsenal.

What’s better than one Captain America? A whole squad of them! Each of the Captain Americas — Steve Rogers or Sam Wilson — is another powerful effect for a combat-focused deck like this one. Captain America, Super-Soldier protects your board from targeted interaction as long as you can keep the shield counter affixed to him, and first strike is a great way to make sure you can do so. Captain America, Wings of Freedom is a solid buff for your board of Hero attackers that further compounds the anthem effects you’ll find in this deck. Lastly, Captain America, Steve Rogers helps protect your most important Avengers by making one of them indestructible when they attack and simultaneously buffing them with a counter.

All good combat decks need board-wide buffs to keep the damage numbers increasing at a steady rate, and these cards are well-suited for the task. Agent Phil Coulson supplies all of the Avengers with a repeatable counter-based buff, as does the back half of Monica Rambeau. While this deck doesn’t have a high number of noncreature spells, Photon, Living Light allows you to maintain momentum by buffing your entire board while casting those noncreature spells, and is a solid evasive body to boot. Lastly, Heroes’ Podium is a classic compounding buff for the massive amount of legendary creatures in this decklist that will occasionally dig up another Hero to cast if needed.

Avengers Assemble comes kitted out with plenty of card advantage, but it never hurts to have even more. Araña, Heart of the Spider not only grants counters to an Avenger with each of your attacks, but also gives card advantage in the form of impulse-style draw — exiled cards from the top of your library that you can cast until the end of the turn. Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain draws a card whenever you cast a historic spell, and luckily almost every single creature in this deck is legendary — and therefore historic. Cadric, Soul Kindler might not be card advantage in the traditional sense, but copying some of your Hero creatures for a measly one mana is a great way to stretch out each one you cast just a little more.

Continuing to answer the call to assemble are some creatures that fill a variety of roles. Wraith, Vicious Vigilante is a powerful double-striking attacker that can’t be blocked, which will quickly prove lethal once you’ve amassed additional buff abilities. Matt Murdock, Justice Seeker does double duty of providing additional counters for your creatures and giving them an additional layer of protection with a ward cost of one mana, and Silver Sable, Mercenary Leader helps pad your life total by giving a big attacker lifelink.

Filling out the rest of the upgrade slots on this deck are some final utility pieces. Spectacular Spider-Man and Captain America, Skybound both provide you with ways to give your creatures indestructible, though this version of Sam Wilson only provides indestructible to two specific attackers, so make sure to be judicious with this ability. Similar to Jhoira, Desynchronization is a card that cares about historic permanents. Specifically, it’ll leave your massive board of buffed beaters alone while sweeping away your opponent’s non-historic nonland permanents.

Heading to Hero Retirement

While 100 cards is a lot of room to play with, you still need to cut down some of the original cards from this deck to make room for the powerful new contenders. These cards didn’t make get past Avengers bootcamp:

These three spells, while filling useful roles in the deck, are overcosted or inefficient at what they do. Tome of Legends and Avengers Monitoring Station are too slow or too mana-inefficient at generating additional cards, and Gift of Immortality is a slow, awkward, and telegraphed way to reanimate creatures.

Though super-speed is a really useful superpower, Quicksilver, Speedster and Speed, Young Avenger are just not right for the theme of this deck. Vision, Synthezoid Avenger is meant to be played in conjunction with the flash-speed enablers this deck has (like the Quicksilver we’re cutting), which is neat, but it doesn’t play well with a deck that wants to cast creatures and immediately swing with them. 

These characters might be integral Avengers, but their effects just aren’t very useful for this deck. Thor, Asgard’s Avenger is a fun way to stretch out damage numbers, but he’s more useful in a pinger-centric strategy, as is Hawkeye, Avenging Archer. Scarlet Witch, Chaotic Avenger is just too much of a gamble when there are much better ways to generate consistent advantage. It’s too bad, I love her classic costume. Meow.

Removal is an important part of any deck, but bad removal is worse than running higher-quality threats that demand answers themselves. Destroy Evil, Make Your Move, and Avenge are all slow, inefficient, or inflexible removal spells that will do more harm than good in your quest to vanquish evil.

These various buff-and-protection pieces are simply outclassed by some of the upgrades we put into the deck.

Answer the Call

And there you have it — a fully-upgraded and battle-ready Avengers Assemble deck with most of the best the Avengers have to offer.

If you think you have some other great ideas for upgrades to this deck, check out our Discord community and let us know! Thanks for reading, and happy Avenging! 

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