Must-Have Cards for Upgrading the Secrets of Strixhaven Precons
Reviewing the best of the best from our precon upgrade series
Here on the EDHLAB Blog, we published upgrade guides for each of the Secrets of Strixhaven precons last week. Our approach was based not only on our own format knowledge and experience, but also on full-table playtest games using our EDHLAB's free app.
Now that our whirlwind trip through each precon has wrapped up, I want to re-examine the upgraded decklists and use even more playtesting to determine how these decks perform against each other. I'll be brutally honest about what worked and what didn't in these five impressive precon decks that may have raised the bar for precons forever.
For each deck, I will highlight the best cards in the original lists that we kept in, the best cards from our list of upgrades, and any suggestions we made that missed the mark.
Silverquill Influence
Unquestionably the deck getting the most online attention of the bunch, Silverquill's stock decklist boasts some impressive reprints such as Land Tax and Songbirds' Blessing. Regarding its performance, this deck masters the opening arguments; the first four to five turns of most test games had Silverquill in the lead. Killian, Decisive Mentor starts to control who gets to attack whom while generating card advantage once you've enchanted any creature with an Aura.
In-Box All-Stars
Panned by most articles written about this precon, Scriv, the Obligator soars above the slings and arrows of reviewers and gets work done. His triggered ability works both on entering and attacking, and his evasion means you'll usually be able to keep creating Aura tokens every turn. What's not immediately apparent is the fact that Contract tokens work best when stacked together. One Contract doesn't do much to dissuade attacks, but burying your opponent's biggest attacker in four or more Contracts all but guarantees they won't come knocking at your door. The +2/+0 buff — or the 'carrot' — isn't the motivator here; it's the two points of life loss per Contract when they attack you which is the 'stick' that serves as an effective deterrent. The Contract tokens also trigger both of Killian's abilities — once on entering, and then every time the enchanted creature attacks.
It's an obvious pick, but Kor Spiritdancer makes sure we don't run out of gas. In most games where you don't draw Kor Spiritdancer, you tend to have trouble keeping your hand full. Even a well-timed sweeper like Promise of Loyalty won't leave you ahead if you have two cards in hand while your opponents have full grips with which to rebuild.
Speaking of board wipes, Winds of Rath will catch most decks off-guard as creature Auras are a rare card type to encounter, and for good reason. This deck attempts to contend with the weaknesses of Auras in Commander. Even though this decklist is packed with cards like Angelic Destiny that promise to not two-for-one you the moment your creature gets removed, the "return this card to its owner's hand" clause can be completely circumvented with instant-speed removal while the Aura itself is being cast. Unless you find another Auras deck in the wild, Winds of Rath will be as close to a one-sided board wipe as you see these days outside of powerful bombs like Winds of Abandon and Cyclonic Rift.
Our Upgrade Picks
What this section wants to say is, "Cards, please! More cards! We still need more cards!" This deck's main weakness is running out of gas. Lord Skitter's Blessing is a rare enchantment two-for-one in your favor, providing you with two enchantment enters triggers in one spell, and then triggering a Phyrexian Arena-style draw on each upkeep so long as you still control an enchanted creature.
Mesa Enchantress pales in comparison to Kor Spiritdancer, but the redundancy is absolutely a necessity.
Retether is nearly the same as Replenish in the context of this decklist. When one of your creatures wearing too many pairs of pants is taken off the battlefield, bring back all of those pairs of pants and more for just four mana and continue the go-tall strategy on a new creature.
Upgrade Mishaps
Guardian's Magemark ended up somewhat dead in-hand, and when there was any competition for what Aura to spend mana on, this card lost out.
Prismari Artistry
Always the distracted student in class, Rootha, Mastering the Moment has trouble keeping up with the curriculum. This deck needs a more thorough reconstruction to fit either Rootha herself or her Otter companion, Muddle, the Ever-Changing more comfortably. We stuck with Rootha.
In the early game, Rootha needs much more ramp in the form of mana rocks. She also needs to stop aiming for a chart-topper and accept a role-filler spell like a Ponder or Preordain as a way to smooth out her early draws, and keep her engine humming in the late game while triggering some instant and sorcery spell pay-offs.
In-Box All-Stars
It's kind of telling that the best-performing card isn't synergistic with Rootha at all. Goldspan Dragon is a solid threat and Treasure generator. The only thing it has in common with Rootha's overall vibe is that it flies, and having even more evasive creatures puts extra pressure on opponents who don't have enough big fliers to block with.
Storm-Kiln Artist — known as 'SKA' for short in the cEDH community, which seems like a fitting moniker in this music and dance-themed decklist — puts in a ton of work as a ramp piece by generating a Treasure for each instant or sorcery cast or copied. As I mentioned earlier, this decklist is sorely lacking mana ramp, and SKA is doing his best impression of a mana rock in this list.
A card that actually synergizes with Rootha's ability is Rionya, Fire Dancer. If you cast her on-curve, there won't be any giant Elemental token to clone, and you'll only be generating one clone, but on later turns she enhances Rootha's token-making trigger by making additional hasted flying Elementals to fly into someone's unexpecting defenders on a one-way ticket.
Our Upgrade Picks
A criminally underappreciated card, Elminster's Simulacrum immediately gives you a copy of each opponent's best creature. Then when you move to your combat step, Rootha creates a 6/6 Elemental to join them. This card is an army in a can when combined with Rootha and is quite a thrill to cast.
Lórien Revealed smooths out your land draws, and in case you draw it late-game or when you have a hand full of lands, it's a five-mana spell that triggers any and all Opus abilities as well as Rootha's token-creating one.
Any extra combat spell is good with Rootha, but Full Throttle brings you closest to closing out the game in one turn unless your opponents have some creative way to stop you. The way that Full Throttle is worded makes it so you can cast it in your first main phase and get the full benefit; you will still untap all of your creatures that attacked this turn at the beginning of each additional combat step. Doing a little humanities-major math, when you cast Full Throttle and go to combat, Rootha will make a total of three 6/6 Elemental tokens; one attacks thrice (18 damage), one attacks twice (12 damage), and the last one attacks once (6 damage). That's 36 damage in one turn. Especially against decks like Witherbloom that like to make a wide and imposing board but lack fliers and reach, you can eliminate the biggest threat at the table with this one trick.
Upgrade Mishaps
This card was stuck in my hand a little too often for my liking. Everything needs to be going right for Champion of the Path to work. Rootha needs to be cast, then we need a combat step where she makes an Elemental token, at which point we finally have the fodder we need to cast Champion of the Path. Then we need to wait another turn cycle for a new Elemental token to enter the battlefield and Champion of the Path to slug the table. It's a long-term late-game plan that isn't quite worth the wait for the chorus to kick in.
Witherbloom Pestilence
Our upgrade guide for Dina, Essence Brewer had some of the pricier suggestions, but only one of those pricier cards was a significant improvement to the deck that would justify its inclusion, even on a tight budget.
In-Box All-Stars
While cards like Pest Rescuer and Ophiomancer are cheap ways to create tokens on each upkeep, they cap themselves at having just one of their designated tokens in play. If you don't have an instant-speed sacrifice outlet in play yet, you won't be getting the full advantage from these cards and Dina's once-per-turn draw trigger. Tendershoot Dryad, on the other hand, not only keeps producing Saprolings on each upkeep regardless of how many are in play, but gives them a meaty +2/+2 buff once you easily cross the city's blessing threshold.
Ribtruss Roaster is one of the few cards to have some synergy with Dina's gift of +1/+1 counters from her activated ability. Even without Dina, swallowing up all of your tokens to trigger Zulaport Cutthroat's drain ability equal to the number of tokens sacrificed, only to immediately recreate all of them in Pest form on your end step, is a fantastic sequence of game actions.
A slow-burn overrun effect that has more in common with Cathars' Crusade than Craterhoof Behemoth, Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest steadily grows your on-board power, and if you manage to assemble the combo of an instant-speed sacrifice outlet plus an "each upkeep" token generator, you'll soon have some gigantic creatures to swing around. Mazirek also has flying, which is a rare quality in the stock list, and helps with pushing some damage through or defending against flying threats.
Our Upgrade Picks
This first card actually represents all three of the cheap-but-huge creatures I included in my upgrade guide. Rot-Curse Rakshasa happens to be the cheapest of the bunch, and has extra utility once in your graveyard through its Renew ability, which can distribute decayed counters to opposing creatures you're tired of seeing attack each turn. Sacrificing one of these big, cheap creatures to Dina stabilizes your life total and passes all of its power onto another creature, preserving your total on-board power.
Once one of your token engines is online, Chatterfang, Squirrel General supercharges it. Every time you make a token of any kind, he adds a Squirrel to the mix. Doubling your token generation for just three mana is a significant bonus, and unlike cards like Parallel Lives he's a creature and can attack, block, or get thrown into the next stew prepared by Chef Dina.
Life drain is this deck's main strategy and Twilight Prophet is a great way to top it off. Adding a little bit of card advantage as well, the ability to drain the table and simultaneously stabilize your own life total puts you right where you want to be in an Aristocrats strategy. And to top it all off, she also has flying and serves as one of your precious few flying blockers and attackers.
Upgrade Mishaps
An actual overrun effect for your army of tokens seems like a good idea, but Pathbreaker Ibex without some way to give it haste is an exceptionally slow and telegraphed way to do it. Blossoming Bogbeast is already serving a similar role and gives you some lifegain as a bonus (and a condition that determines the size of the overrun), and it costs one colored pip of mana less than the Ibex.
Gwenom, Remorseless was a speculative spicy addition, and she could still work well enough if you happen to own a copy and she needs a deck to live in. However, she doesn't synergize enough with the deck's gameplan. Lifelink seems useful, but gaining life does surprisingly little for us unless you have Trudge Garden or Defiling Daemogoth in play.
Lorehold Spirit
Wizards' attempt to rewrite what white-red is all about came with a lot of blemishes. Quintorius, History Chaser asks us to care about the Spirit creature type, to care about cards leaving your graveyard, and to care about what you discard. Finding cards to tie all of these themes together is a challenge. Yet, given enough time, the sheer card advantage that the commander generates turn after turn can put you in a strong position late game. Part of the challenge is staying alive that long and closing the door on your opponents once you've pulled ahead before they can wipe away your board advantage.
In-Box All-Stars
The best ways to trigger Quintorius's Spirit-generation ability are cards that do it on their own. Containment Construct, as well as Currency Converter, allow you to immediately exile a card that you discard — which Quintorius's +1 loyalty ability has you do — and generate value off of it. In Containment Construct's case, that value is the ability to cast that card this turn, potentially removing the "cost" of discarding to draw entirely.
This deck is very efficient at self-mill but has precious few ways to reanimate large and powerful threats. That's why Karmic Guide is such an important lynchpin of this deck. If you mill over your Moonshaker Cavalry in early turns, a late-game Karmic Guide will bring it back into play and allow you to end the game in one big Craterhoof-style alpha strike.
Skyclave Apparition is one of the best removal-on-a-stick creatures ever printed. For the downside of giving your opponent, at most, a 4/4 Illusion token with no abilities when it leaves the battlefield, you can exile any nonland, nontoken permanent an opponent controls with mana value four or less. Skyclave Apparition's mana value is three, and three is the magic number for a variety of reasons, but in this case it's because most of the graveyard recursion abilities such as Sun Titan and Primary Research require that the reanimation target have a mana value of three or less.
Our Upgrade Picks
Another frequent recursion target, Kami of False Hope is a Spirit creature that does a great job of keeping you and your planeswalker commander safe from attacks. Once you have a repeatable recursion engine set up and Kami in play, the game gets incredibly bogged down and tilted in your favor. Kami can even dodge exile effects by sacrificing itself in response and going straight to the graveyard where it will eagerly await Sun Titan's warm embrace to return it to the light of day again.
Storm of Souls is a terrific late-game bomb. Even though it shrinks all the returned creatures to 1/1s, you get all of their enters triggers, they all have flying, and they all become Spirits so they can benefit from all the Spirit-centric anthem effects in the deck. Best of all, there's no finality counter strings attached as with Excava, the Risen Past or Serra Paragon, so if they die they're fair game to reanimate yet again.
A rather surprising result of testing was seeing that Gau, Feral Youth can be a real threat when his trigger goes off on basically all of your turns. He doesn't start out strong and can only slug the table for two damage to start, but it adds up over time. A reliable clock is something this deck was sorely missing.
Upgrade Mishaps
Although I found the flicker card Daydream to be a dream scenario of flickering a creature you control, giving it a +1/+1 counter, then doing it again from the graveyard to give us a 3/2 Spirit token if one of our Quintorii are on the battlefield, Teleportation Circle was a little too costly and slow. The idea of washing off those nasty finality counters while retriggering enters effects is certainly appealing, but there were lots of creatures that its flicker effect didn't help very much or at all. Quintorius also fills our hand so fast that it's hard to justify spending four precious mana on a once-per-turn flicker effect in a deck that can't better abuse it.
Quandrix Unlimited
Without reservation, I can say every game with these precons, before and after upgrades, was about Zimone, Infinite Analyst. Her steady power/toughness growth makes her a commander damage threat in her own right, but besides that, she's discounting our bevy of X spells heavily. A single X spell that draws us cards can catch us up in card advantage on any turn. If she's not removed early and often enough, she can grow to an absurd size and cast her partner-in-crime, Primo, the Unbounded, for X=20 and make a 40/40 with trample — and it's not even particularly difficult. It's just math, and it's deadly.
In-Box All-Stars
The "draw X cards" spell I just made reference to, Commander's Insight, is a fantastic instant-speed card draw spell. After casting your commander, it will always be X=1 as a baseline. Whether you cast it on turn five when Zimone has four +1/+1 counters on her, or turn 10 when she could have 14 +1/+1 counters, you're drawing a significant amount of cards for whatever turn you decide to cast it on. And in case Zimone has been rightly targeted over and over by removal spells, its bonus for how many times you've cast her actually becomes relevant and you get a rebate for all the commander taxes you've been paying.
Mana Bloom is an unassuming card, and if you're reading it for the first time, you might feel deflated by the time you read the dreaded line, "Activate only once each turn." In this deck, however, Mana Bloom becomes key for creating a Zimone trigger on each of your turns and giving you a little mana as a treat. With Zimone out, you actually want to cast it for a low X value so it runs out of counters and returns to your hand on your upkeep so you can cast it again and buff Zimone again.
Goldvein Hydra is simply the best of the Hydras in the deck, especially when you might be casting it for X=20 or more. Vigilance, trample, and haste are all very valuable keywords for this precious-metal-packed multi-headed monstrosity.
Our Upgrade Picks
An incredibly relevant but obscure card, Runadi, Behemoth Caller effectively grants all of our Hydras and other +1/+1 counter-based creatures haste. At three mana he's very fairly priced, especially since he taps for a green mana.
Geometer's Arthropod is a cute little fractal crab that provides a different kind of card advantage. Whenever you cast an X spell, you get to look at the top X cards of your library, choose one, and put it into your hand. Card selection this good, and this repeatable, is hard to find.
To no one's surprise, Doppelgang is an all-star that will effectively end the game once X=4, but especially once X=6 or more. Even though you can't copy your own Hydras and other creatures with base power and toughness of 0/0, you can create a ton of land tokens so that you'll never lack for mana again, copy your opponents' best threats, and basically do whatever the table is doing but X=N times better than they are.
Upgrade Mishaps
A rare Hydra who doesn't have X in his casting cost, Kalonian Hydra's attack trigger is a win-more effect on an expensive body that needs to patiently wait a whole turn to bless your board with counter-doubling.
An Exercise in Utility
What works in theory doesn't always work in practice. Iteration is the key to improving your decks, and when something doesn't work, try to examine why and make needed adjustments.
Its important to circle back and test how new cards feel in a playtest, and to find those moments when you realize you're holding onto a dead card in hand because the elaborate setup it needs hasn't presented itself yet.
We hope you found our precon upgrade guides useful and we'll meet again in ... wait, there are how many more sets coming out this year? In the meantime, check back for more deck techs, Magic news and analysis, format philosophy thinkpieces, and guides for both beginner and intermediate-level players alike.
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