Hail to The Queen: We Are The Borg Precon Upgrade Guide

Making a precon with a seven-cost commander actually work is a fun and interesting challenge. Bracket 2 might be slow enough to accommodate plenty of shenanigans, but seven mana is a long time to wait, especially for a deck not in favorable ramp colors. As a result, upgrading this deck is going to be an exercise in caution, as disturbing the balance and the shape of the mana curve can be disastrous. Let’s peek under the hood at this motherboard and do some engineering.

We Are The Borg

This preconstructed deck comes with the following items:

• 1 Ready-to-play 100-card Commander deck
  • 1 Traditional foil face commander with borderless art
  • 99 Non-foil cards, including 32 new-to-Magic cards
• 10 Non-foil double-sided tokens
• 1 Reference card
• 1 Deck box

The default face commander for We Are The Borg is the gross-looking The Borg Queen. Is her head a watermelon?

There are technically multiple potential backup commanders for this deck. Locutus of Borg, Hugh, First of Many, and One, Borg Evolved are all legal replacements for The Borg Queen.

One, Borg Evolved is a similarly-costed top end finisher for the deck, upgrading your artifact creatures with keyword soup poured right into their circuits. Hugh, First of Many is a cool commander, but it’s better-suited for a very different shell than this one. Locutus of Borg is the easy-mode commander for this deck, as he’s significantly cheaper to cast and has a more direct impact on the deck’s gameplan. That being said, The Borg Queen presents an engaging deckbuilding challenge, so submit to the queen I shall.

Unlike most popular commanders these days, The Borg Queen is not an integral piece to the core gameplay loop of this precon. The deck aims to assemble a wide board of enhanced artifact creatures through several different means. The Borg Queen steals creatures and converts them to artifact creatures, but at seven mana she’ll be coming out long after you’re hoping to have an established board. Your aim should be maximizing the effectiveness of her +2/+2 anthem, and treating the theft as secondary (but still delicious) gravy.

The Borg Collective is all about stealing the culture and technology of alien species to advance themselves. There are several spells in this deck that make use of the assimilate mechanic, in which you put the assimilated creature into play on your battlefield with a +1/+1 counter, and it becomes a Borg artifact creature while losing its other types. Assimilation Assessor, Gift of Perfection, and Assimilate the Wounded are all painful methods of extracting creatures from your opponents’ clutches, often resulting from an interactive effect like exiling a graveyard. There are also enhancers like Supplementation Node and Co-Option Adjutant that grant additional abilities to all of your artifact creatures, allowing you to upgrade your assimilated creatures with extra effects.

Since a deck full of only theft effects would make for a pretty miserable precon, though, there have to be other ways to acquire artifact creatures. Fortunately, this deck contains plenty of ways to fill your board with Borg creature tokens. Stratagem Emulator hints at some of the Aristocrats-esque effects the deck sometimes employs, while Jurati, Cordial Queen is another way for you to enhance the creatures you steal while also making them propagate your Borg army. Maturation Chamber, Type-03 Borg Vessel, and Collective Override are all different ways to make a bunch of Borgs, so you can adapt to different situations to make your minions. 

Hail to the Queen

The first thing to notice about the stock precon is its high mana curve. In a combination that lacks green, this is a difficult problem to manage, particularly in precons where the ramp packages are often wonkier. We’re going to need to get creative to pull that average mana cost down without dampening too much of the deck’s resilience or its threatening late-game presence.

Increased RAM

There’s only one real way to counteract the strains of expensive mana curves, and that’s to ramp aggressively and often. The deck comes with some tricksy ramp combos, like including Everflowing Chalice and Astral Cornucopia with charge counter enhancers, but the deck needs a stable foundation of reliable ramp. Etherium Sculptor and Foundry Inspector are both mainstay cost reducers in artifact decks, and they’ll serve the Borg Collective well here.

Steelswarm Operator is a somewhat restrictive mana dork, only being able to generate mana that can pay for artifacts, but the big plus is that it’s mana-neutral for activated abilities. That’s an extra activation of Skullclamp, an even payment for Darksteel Plate’s equip cost, or half of the activation cost of Maturation Chamber. This mana dork is too good to pass up.

To make the best use of this deck's various anthems and enhancer creatures, it’s best to make vast armies of artifact creature tokens. Hangarback Walker is a good early drop and durdle creature, giving you the option to sink a mana into it to get an extra counter, essentially investing in the Thopter stock market. Make sure to buy the NVIDIA-branded ones.

Stridehangar Automaton doesn’t make tokens by itself, but it does act as a force multiplier for the abilities in the deck that do. This is especially potent with effects like Conquest Mission or Type-03 Borg Vessel, which repeatedly create triggers that make tokens, each of which will bring an extra Thopter. As a bonus, Thopters come with flying, so the combat damage triggers added by Co-Option Adjutant and Hive Mind Coprocessor are even more valuable for them.

Mirrodin Besieged is a token generator with some flexibility. The first mode is another way to make more tokens when you cast artifacts, which is good straightforward value. The second mode has potential as both a hand-fixer and a win condition, and with over 40 artifacts in the deck it’s not out of the question for you to have 15 or more in your graveyard. Never count out the funky ways to win.

You can’t rely on your commander to create value until later in the game; you need additional ways to get extra cards and extra value to advance your game plan as early as possible. Losheel, Clockwork Scholar only draws one card each turn when an artifact creature enters, but his static ability is very helpful in opening up favorable avenues of attack to get those crucial combat damage triggers. Iron Spider, Stark Upgrade is both card advantage and stat advantage combined in one package; its first activated ability is a whole-board buff with +1/+1 counters, which feeds into its second ability to draw cards at the cost of those counters.

I’ll take just about any excuse I can get to add Spacecraft to a deck, and Uthros Research Craft is one of the strongest Spacecraft to come out of Edge of Eternities. It needs a few charge counters to get started, but once it has at least three, each artifact you cast feeds more charge counters to the Spacecraft with its own triggered ability, and more importantly, draws you a card. Once it hits 12 charge counters, this research ship becomes a potent attacker, especially with on-board buffs that are plentiful in the deck and its own static ability.

Wait a minute, that’s no Borg, that’s a Cyberman! Crossing streams with Doctor Who gives this deck access to another top end threat with a painful mill effect for your opponents. This card is a little too slow to see play in the higher tiers of Bracket 3, but for an upgraded precon, casting The Cyber-Controller late in the game with a high value for X pulls plenty of cards out of your opponents’ libraries. It also potentially creates a huge army of artifact creatures with plenty of artifact creature anthems. If you don’t want to spend that kind of mana, though, you can still cast it for three mana and get another +1/+1 anthem. 

Building a Gaming PC is Expensive

As a result of the rising price of RAM and GPUs, it’s financially difficult to get microchips painfully shoved into your skull. These upgrades only cost $17.94, which is a solid amount of value for an already-expensive Universes Beyond precon. With the wealth of resources available to the Borg Collective, though, adding your biological and technological distinctiveness to theirs is much more feasible.

Suggesting Roaming Throne for a deck that has a favored creature type and triggered abilities in it isn’t exactly rocket science, but naming Borg with this creature is especially devious since you’ll double all of the triggered abilities of the creatures you assimilate as well.

The more artifact creature anthems available, the better. Krang, Utrom Warlord is another bowl of keyword soup, and Cryptothrall gives blanket hexproof to your artifact creatures.

The artifact creature enhancers available in the pool are absolutely relentless. Cyberman Patrol makes it very painful for your opponents to block your Borgs, so whether you land those combat damage triggers or not, they’ll be suffering. Cybermen Squadron’s myriad-granting anthem is ridiculously strong, effectively multiplying each of your artifact creatures by three when you attack with them.

With Warhammer 40k, that’s a total of three sci-fi Universes Beyond properties you can have in one deck. Their Name Is Death is the signature boardwipe of the Necrons, and its asymmetric destruction doesn’t affect your Borged-out army. Losheel is the only non-artifact creature in the entire deck post-upgrade, so it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever lose much when you resolve this spell.

Obsoletion

Here’s the list of machines sent to the scrapyard to make room for the fancy new upgrades:

• The first cut is the card that’s probably making you look at your screen like I’ve just asked you to let the Borg assimilate your pet cat. Unwinding Clock is a fantastic card, don’t get me wrong, but it simply does not synergize enough here. It grants your artifact creatures pseudo-vigilance, but Command Subadjunct does that for a single mana. Additionally, there are four tap abilities on artifacts in the stock list that aren’t mana abilities, but Transwarp Hub’s tap ability doesn’t advance your game plan specifically if activated multiple times per rotation, Reconnaissance Partition has a limited number of activations because of its charge counter activation cost, and Maturation Chamber can only be activated at sorcery speed. The upgrades I added include two artifacts with tap abilities (not counting mana abilities), bringing the total number of impactful tap abilities back up to three after discounting those three. Even counting mana sinks, the minimal number of abilities meaningfully enhanced by a four-mana spell means it needs to go to the junk pile.  
• Bitter Triumph, Disallow, and Return to Dust are all interaction pieces that aren’t exactly bad in this deck, but they’re not entirely necessary. A deck with three boardwipes can get away with less targeted interaction, and cards like Anguished Unmaking are more flexible (and cheaper to cast) than Return to Dust anyway.
• Some of the mana rocks in the stock list are just not up to snuff. Queen’s Diamond is too narrow, since it can only generate mana to pay for your commander. Commander’s Sphere has been obsoleted by a lot of newer mana rocks, and while graveyard hate is a nice effect to have, Stonespeaker Crystal is simply too slow and expensive at six mana with no other impact or rider effect.
• Sagas are fun and enjoyable cards to play with, but they’re often too slow and predictable to be effective. The Best of Both Worlds is a six-mana theft and a telegraphed anthem, and you don’t even get to keep the creature you stole. It’s not worth the mana cost to cast this spell.
• Korok, Liberated Rage is an anthem constrained by the number of opponents you attack, and splitting forces to fight on multiple fronts is exactly how fascist armies always lose.
• Thirst for Knowledge is fine burst draw, but this deck needs consistent and repeatable card advantage as much as possible.

Fully Assimilated

Thus concludes the process of assimilating ten new beings to the Borg Collective. What’s your favorite new card from this precon that you’re excited to try? Report to the EDHLAB Discord or leave a comment to inform me. Remember, resistance is futile.

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