Dina's Newest Brew: Witherbloom Pestilence Precon Upgrade Guide

The Secrets of Strixhaven Witherbloom Pestilence precon deck comes with some powerful new cards for the fledgling black-green lifegain variant of Aristocrats. To add to the confusion — or to the endless possibilities — the face commander also gives out +1/+1 counters as an additional payoff for activating her sacrifice ability.

I'm getting ahead of myself. We need to cook.

Cooking by the Book

The Witherbloom Pestilence precon comes with:

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

Playtest this list now, or test it against other players in our Play Online lobbies! Be sure to add this deck to your Favorites list first.

Our Brave Brewmaster

Let's look at Dina, Essence Brewer's qualifications.

Her first ability is a static once-per-turn card draw trigger similar to Morbid Opportunist's, but limited to when you sacrifice a creature. This really prioritizes free instant-speed sacrifice outlets as well as token generators that create multiple tokens per turn cycle.

Her activated ability costs 2 mana and requires her to tap, and it sacrifices another creature to gain X life and put X +1/+1 counters on target creature you control, where X is the sacrificed creature's power.

These two abilities work together ... somewhat. Her activated ability can get one of those juicy card draw triggers, but the real payoff is the massive lifegain and transferring that creature's power in the form of counters to the next potential sacrifice target.

Then there's this little oddball:

Gorma, the Gullet offers us a totally new course for the deck, focusing on playing several nontoken creatures in the same turn that you had a lot of your own creatures die. Using Gorma as your commander would require a radically different decklist, but in the stock list, he ticks off a couple synergy boxes.

However, this is where we pick a main course.

Grub Salad with a Side of Beef

I'm going to narrow the deck's focus to token generation and sacrifice outlets. This is more in keeping with the standard Aristocrats credo: the more fodder to sacrifice, the better. I'll also include a few large lads that serve as an ideal sacrifice target for Dina's activated ability and can help us sacrifice other creatures, if such help is needed.

Token Generators

The deck comes with some old and new token generators that are a big part of our token package. Pest Rescuer is a green-shifted Ophiomancer (also present in the deck) who improves on the formula by adding a static ability that increases any instances of lifegain by one point, and creates Pest tokens instead of Snake tokens. The "each upkeep" clause is key, because we want the opportunity to trigger Dina's draw ability on everyone's turn, not just our own, and with just one instant-speed sacrifice outlet we can do that and live the Aristocrats dream. Just be sure you don't have other Pest creature tokens lying around, as her trigger is conditional on not controlling a Pest token on each upkeep.

Tendershoot Dryad is a more costly version of these two with the benefit of unconditional token generation — so your army of Saprolings start piling up — and giving all Saprolings you control +2/+2 once you have the City's Blessing (spoilers: only Tendershoot Dryad and Mycoloth make Saprolings in this decklist). Despite the extra cost, the redundancy is worth it, and the added buff to your Saproling tokens can make a difference, too.

Creakwood Liege provides just one Worm token each turn cycle, but so long as the Liege remains on the battlefield, it's a 3/3 Worm due to his static buff abilities. He buffs all your green or black creatures, making your swarm of Pests more than just a nuisance.

Ribtruss Roaster is a new take on Mycoloth, which is also included in the stock decklist. They both have the devour keyword, allowing you to sacrifice several tokens at once as they enter the battlefield to give themselves +1/+1 counters, and they both create tokens equal to the number of +1/+1 counters on them once per turn. Crucially, Ribtruss Roaster creates those tokens in your end step so there's no opportunity for sorcery-speed removal to ruin your investment, unlike Mycoloth which makes you wait until your next upkeep.

Both Ribtruss Roaster and Mycoloth synergize nicely with Dina's activated ability to bestow large quantities of +1/+1 counters on one creature. If you can cast Ribtruss Roaster and get a stack of counters on him, that will translate to a pile of tokens on your endstep — all eager volunteers for your sacrifice engines.

Here are some new additions to the token package:

In playtesting the full precon list several times against a full table using EDHLAB's Playtester, it became clear how over-stocked the deck was with sacrifice synergies waiting to pop-off. I had sacrifice payoffs with nothing to sacrifice besides each other. Adding early token generation solves this basic problem.

Bitterblossom is a little more resilient than its new twin, Bitterbloom Bearer, since it can only be removed by enchantment removal which is far less common than creature removal. As always, redundancy is worth it. The evasive tokens also serve as great blockers for big fliers so long as they don't have trample.

Dreadhorde Invasion is normally a weaker version of Bitterblossom, but its 'flavor text' of granting lifelink to attacking Zombies with power 6 or greater actually becomes relevant when Dina can give the Zombie token four or more +1/+1 counters in one go (since it can't attack on its first turn and will be a 2/2 due to the amass mechanic on its second turn). It then becomes a solid way to gain some life and trigger lifegain synergies.

Sacrifice Engines

The stock decklist comes with three of the best instant-speed repeatable sacrifice engines. The scry or surveil that they provide is great pseudo-card advantage to layer with Dina's real card advantage. Remember, Dina's trigger will go on the stack before the scry or surveil gets a chance to resolve, so you must draw first and then fix the top card of your deck, unfortunately.

This sacrifice package could use some more redundancy:

We only need to add a couple of sacrifice engines since our commander is one herself. Warren Soultrader's creature sacrifice ability costs one life and creates a Treasure token that can be saved for future turns, which makes it a much better alternative in this deck to the classic sac outlets, Phyrexian Altar and Ashnod's Altar.

Fiend Artisan is a slow and telegraphed way to tutor out key synergy pieces or win conditions. That said, if no one can remove him, he turns your board into a perfect blend of token generation, sacrifice outlets, and sacrifice payoffs that will take over the game in a few turns.

Prime Meats

Dina's activated ability pays us off for sacrificing creatures with high power. Here are a couple of the cheapest and most synergistic cards to add to the list to meet the challenge:

The most flexible of these brutes is Bebop & Rocksteady. Not only do they provide 7 power for three mana, they are also a sacrifice outlet whenever they attack or block. If you don't have a creature to sacrifice but really need to attack or block, you can discard a card instead.

Coming in a little lighter is Rot-Curse Rakshasa, a two-mana 5/5 with decayed, which gives it a trigger to sacrifice itself at the end of combat. Once it's in the graveyard, it has a sneaky single-use from-the-graveyard ability to put decayed counters on other creatures — most likely your opponents' — at sorcery speed. If Dina is out, remember that you can always respond to the decayed trigger that forces Rakshasa to sacrifice itself by activating Dina, gaining 5 life and stacking five +1/+1 counters on some little Pest's head.

Phyrexian Soulgorger's cumulative upkeep cost will quickly become unmanageable, but until the time comes to sacrifice him to his own upkeep trigger (or have Dina cook him into a stew in response to said trigger), he swings for a hefty 8 power. More importantly, his 8 power would look great as eight +1/+1 counters on a Mycoloth.

Sacrifice Payoffs

This deck has a lot of payoffs for sacrificing your own creatures already, from card draw like Morbid Opportunist, to buffing your board with Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest, to pinging the table with Zulaport Cutthroat, so I'll just highlight the new ones I'm adding:

Visiting from Ravnica to see what her color combination has been up to on Arcavios, Savra, Queen of the Golgari does a great impression of Grave Pact on a body. Most of the tokens we make are black, and many are both black and green, so the option to pay 2 life to force a sacrifice from your opponents will frequently be on the table.

Pitiless Plunderer's extra mana payoff will be helpful when our deck starts to achieve velocity and draws lots of cards, generates lots of mana — you know, when it does the thing.

Spicy Synergies

Who doesn't love squirrels? Every time a trigger or ability would create a token under your control, Chatterfang, Squirrel General is there to make sure a Squirrel token comes in alongside it. When you have enough Squirrels, he becomes a control piece, able to sacrifice X Squirrels to give target creature +X/-X until end of turn. Both halves of that ability are important for us; we may want to buff a creature before sacrificing it to make our Mycoloth even more gigantic, or kill off a threat on someone else's board. Counting our new additions, there are 16 cards in our deck that generate tokens, and with Chatterfang in play, they each create that token plus a friendly Squirrel every time they trigger!

Gwenom, Remorseless is a more fair version of Bolas's Citadel, but has a couple of advantages; you can tutor for her with Fiend Artisan, you can bring her back from the graveyard with reanimation spells and effects, and she's a sizable body with lifelink. She works incredibly well with our sacrifice outlets; three of them offer top-of-the-library manipulation, so you can get a pesky second land out of the way by sacrificing a Pest, gaining a life from its dying trigger, and scrying that land to the bottom to take a look at the next card. There's no Aetherflux Reservoir and Sensei's Diving Top combo in this list, but if you're looking for a combo finish it would be a great addition. She can still power out synergistic cards and put you far ahead on-board and maybe hit a game-winning card.

Finishers

Pathbreaker Ibex is a slower but repeatable Craterhoof Behemoth-style effect. All you need is one large creature in play and all the little Pests, Faeries, and Worms get a huge buff to their power and toughness and gain trample whenever the Ibex attacks.

We already have Exsanguinate on a stick, so we may as well include Exsanguinate à la carte. With Pitiless Plunderer and Warren Soultrader banking us extra mana over time, either the real Exsanguinate or Stensian Sanguinist's imitation version will hit really hard and gain us lots of life. Which leads us to...

Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose is both a payoff for lifegain and a way to gain life. He's a Lifegain archetype mainstay and half of the Exquisite Blood combo loop (not included in this decklist but it's playable in Bracket 3 and above). In this deck, any time we gain life we can aim the same amount of life loss at one opponent in particular, but when Exsanguinate resolves, you'll likely get back enough life to take one player out of the game on the spot. Use that power wisely. Even without Exsanguinate, you can activate his ability to give all your creatures lifelink and swing wide, and each creature that attacked and did damage will generate a separate damage trigger with Vito to spread some life loss around to your opponents as you see fit.

Staple Upgrades

These are staple cards that I thought fit better than roughly equivalent, or strictly weaker, versions that come in the precon:

I added some extra ramp with the ever-growing Gyre Sage to power up your two Exsanguinates, or to pay your ever-more-costly commander tax if she becomes a frequent target of removal.

The city's blessing is easy to achieve in a deck bursting with tokens. Twilight Prophet makes great use of the city's blessing, combining card advantage with bursts of life drain (depending on your luck).

Expired Ingredients

Finally, here's the list of cards I cut. Some cuts were easier than others. I'll list them from easiest to hardest:

What's that saying about Too Many Cooks in the kitchen?

These three cards all added something towards the deck's core synergy but didn't focus on sacrifice value, and I had to make room for the bread and butter of creature tokens to sacrifice and things to sacrifice them to.

Since I moved to a token-focused strategy, these two payoffs for sacrificing nontoken creatures became nearly irrelevant.

These three creature recursion cards are less efficient at generating sacrifice fodder than the cards I added, limited by your available mana or once-per-turn events like making your land drop, or finding a creature in someone's graveyard to exile.

Removal is important but these were overkill and less efficient than the ones that remain.

These sacrifice options are great in some strategies but overlapped with what other cards already do better.

These cuts were difficult and you may decide to keep these in some cases. Culling Ritual is one of the most powerful sweepers in the game because it ramps you for everything it destroys, but unfortunately that would include all of our collected tokens plus token generators like Bitterblossom and Bitterbloom Bearer.

Witherbloom Command is a highly versatile card but I only found a few of the modes really relevant to this deck; two of them are just forms of removal, which is a category I already trimmed down.

Eat Up!

Try this upgraded Witherbloom Pestilence precon, Grub Salad with a Side of Beef, right now in our full-table Playtester or in a game with others in our Play Online lobbies!

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