The Power of Infinity: Quandrix Unlimited Precon Upgrade Guide

In the Commander format, +1/+1 counters are one of the more broadly-supported archetypes. One of the most power-level-agnostic mechanics available, if you plug your ears and pretend cEDH isn’t a real format, there is at least a bare minimum of support now for +1/+1 counters in each of the five colors, and they span a huge spectrum of strength. On the low end, you’ll see many a card like Agent Bishop, Man in Black, which barely interacts with the concept of those counters for any reason other than giving a permanent buff to justify itself as a rare. On the high end, you’ll see Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, famously powerful enough (or maybe it was just that bastard Vivi) to stay relevant in the Standard meta for a while. 

Let's tie this in with the issues of the blue-green color pairing, which has long been the scourge of Commander design philosophy and the +1/+1 counter color-based meta. While many players get tired of seeing the same counter synergy/proliferate-adjacent mechanic printed on cards a dozen times over, the volume at which Wizards prints this strategy has yielded positive results. Namely, the subject of today’s precon upgrade guide: Quandrix Unlimited. Quandrix College’s first outing in the Commander format five years ago was heavily focused on token creation in Quantum Quandrix, where there were several cute cards across both the main set and the Commander deck related to Fractals, tokens which enter as 0/0 creatures with some number of +1/+1 counters on them. In 2026, the giganerds at Quandrix have reached a new level of math-based degeneracy: marrying +1/+1 counters and X-cost spells in a disgusting union of counting and more counting. I love it to pieces. Let’s get studying.

Lesson 1: If You Have the Will, Do It

The Quandrix Unlimited precon product comes packaged with the following:

• 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

Leave the scratch pad and pencils in your desk and do all of your +1/+1 counter accounting for Quandrix Unlimited in the Playtester mode or multiplayer on EDHLAB. Just navigate to the Precon Decks section and favorite the deck so you can play it yourself.

The face commander for this deck is Zimone, Infinite Analyst:

The featured "backup" commander is Primo, the Unbounded:

Before I begin with the complex equations and scientific notation, I have to air my personal feelings. Zimone is a great commander for many reasons, and she’ll be leading the charge for this upgrade guide, but my heart belongs to the big blue canine. The design space of caring about creatures that start at 0/0 for any reason is so unique and intriguing to me that I almost forgot that Zimone was the face commander for the deck as I read through the rest of the list. If it didn’t require a more comprehensive rework of the deck, I’d be telling you to show Zimone the door. That being said, if the angle-y math dog interests you too, keep your eyes peeled on our EDHLAB Blog homepage for my Primo deck tech, coming Soon™. For the purposes of an in-and-out precon upgrade, though, it’s just not as practical as I’d like.

That being said, Zimone has a lot going for her. Two +1/+1 counters per turn doesn’t seem like very much, but you need to reframe how you’re thinking about it. Each counter on Zimone is essentially another colorless mana, similar to Vadrik, Astral Archmage or Agatha of the Vile Cauldron but different in a pretty meaningful way. You want to buff Zimone but exclusively with counters, and the quicker you can load her up with them, the faster your game-winning X spells can, ah, win the game.

One of the keys to abusing Zimone’s +1/+1 counter production is that it triggers each turn, not just each of your turns. With a little bit of instant speed trickery and some mana available, Zimone can place up to eight counters on herself a cycle, and each spell you cast in that cycle gets progressively more valuable. Even just getting one extra trigger per cycle is a huge amount of value that will push your spells further and further along, so you want to try and find ways to make it happen however you can.

One downside of Zimone is that she very rapidly grows to a huge statline that doesn’t just represent a five-finger discount on some of the highest-impact X spells, but a rather huge statline. Why is this bad? Your opponents quite literally cannot ignore Zimone as she begins to roll down the hill, and they’re going to be trying to stop your snowball at all costs before it gets too big to fail. Let’s make them work for it, then.

Lesson 2: Work Those Muscles

The first thing to recognize about Zimone is that you need to start a little slow. Your early X-cost spells should still be effective, but you need the ability to comfortably cast them even without a huge X value, so you should aim to keep hands with early ways to get that first bit of snow packed into a ball.

Astral Cornucopia is a perfectly acceptable card to cast for three mana, even if it’s often better run in proliferate-style decks or with enough of a discount that you’re able to cast for X>1. Stonecoil Serpent may seem like a bit of an odd inclusion in this category, but reach and protection from multicolored make it a potent blocker in some situations. Lastly, while not an X-cost spell itself, Forgotten Ancient can get more counters from your opponents’ spells and can even outpace Zimone’s rate of growth, possibly drawing removal away from your commander as you set up.

Once Zimone is sufficiently sizable, you’re going to want some real ammunition for your discount. Big draw spells like Pull from Tomorrow massively refill your hand, which is especially effective to do at instant speed as the opponent before you ends their turn, netting you another Zimone trigger and giving you plenty of chances to see another impactful spell. Animist’s Awakening is a bit of a gamble, but it’s a ridiculous ramp spell with a pretty meager condition of two instant and/or sorcery spells in your graveyard to allow you to essentially translate Zimone’s discount into actionable mana for any spell. Biomass Mutation pumps your board up so high that even without a wide board you can make anyone without enough blockers ride the train to Stompsville, population: flat.   

Cards like this are why modern precon design is such a pleasure to experience. Mana Bloom is one of the many forgotten chaff rares from the days of Return to Ravnica, and its use case in this deck is very interesting. Even if Zimone has a massive counter count, you can declare the value of X as whatever you wish. Casting this enchantment for X=4 grants you one free mana per turn for yours and each of your opponents’ turns, once again translating Zimone’s X-exclusive discount into real mana. Then, you can cast instant-speed spells on your opponents’ turns, especially once you upgrade the deck with single-pip X-cost counterspells that you’ll see in a little bit. When it comes to your turn again, Bloom bounces back to your hand so you can reload it if you’re still trying to slow-roll your threats.

There isn’t much ground to break when discussing Unbound Flourishing. Newsflash: doubling and copying things is good. Need I say more?

Getting a little extra mileage out of Zimone’s self-aggrandizing trigger is hugely important, almost better than flat-out doubling her counters with one-off effects. Counter steroids like Hardened Scales increase the effectiveness of Zimone’s triggers by 50%, and if I was a smarter man (or willing to ask the almighty machine gods to do it for me), I could crunch out a percentage increase on your X spells too. Too bad for you I’m dumb as hell.

Lesson 3: Believe in The Spin

If you haven’t caught on to the section titles, I am a gigantic Steel Ball Run fan connoisseur of well-planned pedagogy. I even studied to be a teacher in college. I like to teach by providing information that I feel will help people come to their own conclusions about how to improve something. Hopefully, you’ve started to notice the pattern of the Quandrix Unlimited precon. The Golden Ratio is everywhere in nature, so much so that the greatest practitioners of art created some of the most beautiful works in human history by studying its existence; but a balanced ratio is something that this deck is lacking.

Zimone is a commander with high velocity. She hits the board, accumulates counters as quickly as possible, and races opponents to the top by dropping threat after threat before someone can find a boardwipe or a way to lock down the battlefield to prevent the big fatties from stomping all over the place. The main deck has ramp, card draw, and threatening game actions in spades that, when fueled by a huge discount from Zimone’s counters, are everything you need to end the game. One vital question remains without a satisfying answer, however: how do you actually get to the late game?

Setting aside for a moment the fact that Zimone rapidly becomes a lightning rod for every disruption spell imaginable, this deck has precious few ways to plant its roots. While its mana curve appears to be within acceptable ranges and has several cards in the 1-3 mana value slots, several of these are X-spells with little or no impact when cast for a low value, and a few more are interactive or instant-speed spells better held for later. Zimone only costs three mana, but there is a disturbing lack of spells to cast that both increase her counters and are worth casting in their own right. 

If you want to have better success in evading the dangers of the multiverse as you plumb the universal depths of math and science (slapping big X-cost Hydras on the board sounds less glamorous), you’ll need to aim for the Golden Spiral of deckbuilding — a balanced distribution of early plays, midgame protection and evolution of your boardstate, and a late-game transition to discounts and creatures that hasten your opponents’ demises.

Lesson 4: Pay Your Respects

The goal of these upgrade articles is not just to hand you an upgraded precon for free. I want each reader to come away having learned something. So, no, I will not be telling you to aim for the old-school 8x8 Commander template just to have a nice, perfect number or give you some meme ratio of how many of each card category to include. What I want to provide you with is the tools you need to start, expand, and finish your studies on deck architecture and achieve the beauty of a mathematically satisfying play experience for yourself.

Instead of listing single cards as upgrades to the deck, I’m going to list several cards across a few different categories that I strongly suggest you add to the deck. As usual, I will be constraining myself as closely as possible to the $5 price point on TCGplayer. 

Instead of taking my specific selections, pick multiple options from every category, leaning in the directions of particular cards that interest you most, and slot them into your list. In the next section, I’ll list the obvious cuts, and after that, display several cards that could be cut from the deck if you think they can be removed or if they don’t fit your personal playstyle. Let's continue with this lesson:

Build Your Deck in the Golden Ratio

It’s a bit rude to start out an upgrade guide with counterspells, but unfortunately for those seated across the table from you, X-cost counterspells, especially those with only a single pip for the regular cost, are ridiculously strong with Zimone. As mentioned, instant-speed X spells are vastly more effective in growing your commander, and what better way to advance your gameplan than by ruthlessly forcing your opponents to pay an exorbitant tax on their own spells. Condescend and Power Sink are spells with a little extra zest of utility — Sink being especially brutal as mana denial — while Repulsive Mutation is even more brutal, compounding interest from Zimone’s discount by doubling the amount of counters that are already on her.

One other counterspell I wanted to make mention of is Spell Burst, and much like Repulsive Mutation, this one is disgustingly oppressive. Since you declare the value of X as you cast the spell, as previously mentioned, you can match the value of X to whatever spell you want to counter. Then, if the discount Zimone provides is greater than that declared value, the excess discount will cover the buyback cost, allowing you to continuously recur this spell for just a single blue mana. Keep in mind, though, that your opponents can brute-force a spell by forcing you to use Spell Burst first, and then casting a second spell once you no longer have the discount to properly cover the cost of X.

Continuing on the theme of instant-speed interactivity, Change of Plans and March of Swirling Mists make use of the powerful phasing mechanic to remove Zimone or your huge Hydras from play entirely without removing all of your banked counters. You can also use March aggressively by phasing out your opponents' creatures to make way for a big swing. Be wary, though: Zimone phasing out of existence temporarily removes access to her discount and stops you from building up more +1/+1 counters on her. In terms of pure offense, Icy Blast taps as many creatures as Zimone has counters, and as long as she or any other creature is stronger than four power, they’re stunned for the next untap step as well.

We’ll get to the generalist ramp upgrades in a moment, but first I need to scream from the mountaintops. By the time this article is live, it might have gone above my typical price threshold, but Runadi, Behemoth Caller is the most important upgrade you can make for this deck, bar none. If you only buy a single card to slot into this deck, make it this one. Runadi grants every single Hydra and other assorted X-cost creature you cast something this color pairing is desperate to have: haste. One of this precon’s greatest weaknesses is how telegraphed its winning plays are. Runadi mitigates this weakness incredibly well not only by amping up the amount of counters your big, stompy threats enter with, but also by crucially giving them the ability to immediately take huge bites out of your opponents’ delicious life totals. 

You want to begin snowballing Zimone as quickly as possible, so you need to have a robust ramp package at the earliest possible point. This means including low-to-the-ground land ramp like the usual suspects of two-mana fetch spells, and to be able to curve out Zimone on turn two, mana dorks that come out on turn one. The best ones break my usual budget constraints, but there are several budget-friendly options: Llanowar Elves, Elvish Mystic, and Fyndhorn Elves are all perfectly affordable.

If you’re not a fan of counterspells (or like keeping all your lunch money), an alternative method to grow Zimone on other turns is to run flash enablers. By flashing in creatures on the end step of the opponent preceding you in turn order, you can get pseudo-haste on your creatures. This denies your opponents the opportunity to use sorcery-speed removal and punishes them for sandbagging board wipes. This category is very straightforward: High Fae Trickster, Final-Word Phantom, and Valley Floodcaller are all general enough to slot into most decks, and Phantom deserves your attention just for referencing the GOAT. Flash enablers come in a few shapes and sizes, so consider browsing other options to see if some of the narrower flash-granting effects better suits your brew. 

Next on our list of important categories is low-investment X-cost spells that can start to grow Zimone without sounding the table’s Klaxons immediately. Broodguard Elite can be warped to put a small sum of counters on Zimone both from her own trigger and when the Insect exiles itself, while Thassa’s Intervention is a bit of instant-speed card selection that grows her as well. Mockingbird is a bit paradoxical, as it won’t copy anything that costs more than one mana, but you can invest a minimal amount to copy one of your utility creatures or dorks for cheap, increasing your available mana while growing your commander.

From the main Secrets of Strixhaven set, there are a few support and setup cards that can help smooth over your plays by aiding your gameplan without forcing you to use your X-cost coupon. Tester of the Tangential is an early-game creature with increment that can put counters onto your commander without needing to blow a higher-impact X spell just to get her trigger off. Geometer’s Arthropod extends your draw power further with some helpful card selection, and Divergent Equation lets you reclaim your spent counterspells or draw spells if you had to use them suboptimally or just to give your commander some counters.

Quandrix Unlimited comes pre-loaded with big draw spells, but there are some other powerful options available if you’re interested in experimenting. Let’s be real, who doesn’t want to cheat like hell when they play blue-green? Mind into Matter costs the same cheap rate most X spells cost to draw cards and staples a free permanent of cost X or less to it. Just be mindful that a lot of your permanents are still X spells, or are otherwise low-cost support spells, so this won’t always be as flashy, but sometimes the three or four free mana worth of a permanent is all you need. If you need to outpace another player’s big burst draw effect, Even the Score will … even the score. Ahem. There’s also Diviner’s Portent, which can enhance the quality of your draws with some deep scrying. Special shoutout to Mathemagics, which has already prompted someone in my playgroup to threaten to quit Magic entirely if this spell is cast while he is present. Sometimes numerophobia hits too close to home.

There are already several big Hydras and impactful X-cost creatures that can present big threats at the table, but that doesn’t mean you can’t swap in a couple more creatures that help them out or provide utility. Kalonian Hydra is a classic +1/+1 counter power-user, amplifying the existing value of the counters you have on board, and Herald of Secret Streams helps guarantee those big beefy boys can get in for damage.  

Oh, you sly dog, you thought you got me monologuing didn’t you? Did you really think I’d forget the funniest X-cost/big mana win condition in the game? Think again, bozo, because Doppelgang is seared into the DNA of every guilty-pleasure blue-green player to have played Magic in the past two years, and anyone who says otherwise is a filthy, dirty, no-good liar.

Lesson 5: The Shortest Route is the Detour

With so many juicy options for upgrades, you’re going to need quite a few cuts to slot in every toy you want to play with. Let’s get right to subtraction.

To start, cut out anything that feels like an obvious diversion from the deck’s intended theme. Deekah, Fractal Theorist and Zimone, All-Questioning may synergize with big spells or +1/+1 counters, but they’re both distractions from the themes we’ve tried to establish in our upgrades as threat response, interaction, and more efficient plays. Expansion Algorithm is an insanely cool spell, and can work well to inflate our creatures with more counters, but it’s better-served in decks that need more ways to increase specific types of counter, such as loyalty, poison, or energy.

Some of the spells in the deck are just a little on the suboptimal side. Zimone, Quandrix Prodigy is doing a bad impression of Growth Spiral (which is honestly starting to get outclassed these days anyway), while Entrancing Melody is a strong effect that will immediately piss off the player on the receiving end and cause them to come after you and your commander. Quandrix Apprentice, on the other hand, just sucks. Bye.

Decisive Denial and Quandrix Charm are flexible, but inefficient compared to other options already in the deck that cover their modes, and Eureka Moment is just the inbred cousin of the aforementioned Growth Spiral.

You can continue to cut out inefficient interaction and removal with Quandrix Command and Zimone’s Hypothesis, though you may want or need to keep Hypothesis since blue-green is sorely lacking in the creature-based boardwipe department.

Lastly in the instant category, Stroke of Genius is a worse rate for less utility than some of the other draw spells you added in the upgrades section.

Now that you’ve tightened up your ramp package and modeled your curve after that beautiful Golden Spiral, it’s time to cut down on the mana rocks and other artifacts. Brass Infiniscope, despite being a four-cost mana rock in a blue-green deck, is negotiable purely on the basis of being consistent incidental lifegain, which most decks should have. Arcane Signet can have its merits, but to my personal tastes, it's much harder to justify including it, especially in green-inclusive decks that run two-mana land fetch spells. To cap it off, I unfortunately advise you to kill my darling. Fractal Harness, my beloved, is too slow and much too costly for a benefit you can find elsewhere.

Those Who are Willing to Lose…

In the pursuit of science, it is always prudent to secure funding from the absurdly rich to finance your insane experiments in the fields of unknown mechanics. Once you’ve got that sweet, sweet carte blanche, it’s time to spend some big bucks on some esoteric equipment.

If you’ve ever seen The Ozolith in action, you know it needs no explanation. It’s ridiculously expensive, but it near-singlehandedly solves the issue of Zimone’s status as a removal magnet, and if you want to expand your artifact package somewhat, you could always throw in a Whir of Invention to fetch the wacky blue rock and other assorted artifacts out of your library.

Bristly Bill, Spiny Sower is the rootinest, tootinest +1/+1 counterest cactus that ever lived, and converting landfall triggers into more fuel for Zimone is a huge boon to our strategy, especially with Open the Way and the previously-mentioned Animist’s Awakening available. The cowboy cactus also serves as a way to beef your board up to swing for the win.

Jeez, these are some expensive break-the-bank upgrades. The Great Henge might not discount its dollar price tag or do your taxes, but it certainly does everything else your deck could ever want. 

While $7.50 isn’t too far beyond my price range, you might balk at it, and that’s perfectly okay. That being said, Mutational Advantage is an excellent protection spell that preserves all of your counter-bearing creatures from a variety of threats while continuing to grow them stronger.

Looking to go to Bracket 3 and beyond? Check out these Game Changers:

…Ultimately Gain Everything.

Since I did this deck upgrade a little differently, make sure you pay careful attention to the upgrades that are actually in the deck by enabling the tags function on Moxfield. The cards I cut are in the Sideboard category. Here’s a visual:

Thanks for joining us this week for all of our precon upgrades. I sincerely hope that you got some good inspiration for your favorite Secrets of Strixhaven Commander deck from this article series, and I hope to see your own interpretation of the upgrades I presented to you today! Good luck experimenting!

All good scientists share their research via presentation or publication in a peer-reviewed journal. We might not be scientific reviewers, but you can present your custom-upgraded decklist to your friends on our multiplayer platform, or practice your dissertation defense in our Playtester. Here is the EDHLAB link to my version of this upgraded precon if you want to see how I solved the equation.

For a community full of eager players ready to join your lobby, head over to our Discord server and give a shout to get a game going. If you found this upgrade guide helpful, ping me @shadedfall65 with your feedback!

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