What Precon Should You Upgrade?
Precons have come a long way. Let’s look at the best ones to take even further.
Precons have come a long way. Let’s look at the best ones to take even further.
One of my personal favorite ways to start a new deck is to buy a precon. I’ll admit that I used to have a pretty severe spending issue when it came to Magic. When precons started to become a more regular occurrence in 2020, when there were three distinct cycles of product available, I started to smell change on the wind and bought every single precon on release to strip for parts or upgrade intensively. But back when I started playing in 2018, right around the time that Guilds of Ravnica released, Commander precons were a quiet-ish release that came once a year. I had no real frame of reference to understand the reception to the 2018 precons and picked up a Nature’s Vengeance deck for myself at my LGS. I made some very modest (read: bad) changes to the deck based on my limited knowledge of Magic and eventually took the deck apart entirely.
As I’ve written about previously, Commander precons have massively improved since the epic failures of 2018 and the gigantic design mistakes committed in 2016 and 2017. I won’t give another long-winded breakdown, but I will say that the overall improvement of precon design for both new players looking to break into Commander and veterans looking to start with a competently-built foundation for a new archetype has been an awesome thing to witness.
In today’s article, I want to discuss two specific precons that are great starting points for a new long-term deck. I have been considering this topic heavily for the past several days as I am about to embark on a journey into a new precon league that I will be hosting for several of my friends – newer players who have some initial experience with buying and modifying Commander decks – and am very excited about the prospect of iterating from a brand new precon into a truly well-oiled machine.
(If my adventures in the world of a precon league are an interesting topic, let me know in the Discord server @shadedfall or message me directly!)
There are several metrics by which you can evaluate the “upgradeability” of a precon, but today I want to focus on three specific categories: overall construction of the deck, theme or gameplan, and room for improvement.
Overall construction of the deck is self-explanatory; does the deck actually work? If you sit down at a table with the unmodified precon, will your deck “do the thing?” In almost every single situation, you want the answers to these questions to be unequivocally “yes.” In years past, this metric was a much bigger question mark. Fortunately, it’s not really common anymore to see Commander precons appear as unplayable garbage straight out of the box. Instead, we will focus on gameplay experience more than whether or not it has one. The questions for this category are focused on how feasible it actually is to achieve the deck’s theme or gameplan – our next category.
The theme or gameplan of a deck is essentially the thesis statement. What exactly is this deck setting out to do? Is it a combat-based deck, or does it win with burn damage? Do you have any alternative win conditions that you’re trying to reach other than reducing a player’s life total to zero? Most precons are built around relatively simple gameplans and almost always look to reduce a player’s life total to zero to take them out of the game, but there are always exceptions to every rule.
Finally, room for improvement. It’s no secret that precons are constructed much better now, but usually, the designers still leave in cards that do double duty. They are usually less related to your main gameplan than most of the rest of the cards in the box, and sometimes are specifically designed to give you variance and make alternative strategies viable so that you can “sample” a different taste for your deck. That being said, sometimes a precon requires too extensive of a makeover to simply upgrade and is better served being torn down entirely so that you can build it from scratch.
With our categories defined, let’s jump into the precons!
World Shaper
The first precon that I think serves as a great starting point for upgrades is World Shaper, which comes to us from Edge of Eternities. Szarel, Genesis Shepherd is the face commander, with Hearthhull, the Worldseed serving as the backup option. This is a Jund lands matter deck focused on sacrificing and recurring lands to accumulate value via payoffs like Moraug, Fury of Akoum, Korvold, Fae-Cursed King, Omnath, Locus of the Roil, or Hearthhull itself to either beat your opponents down with combat damage or burn them out of the pod.
How is the overall construction of the deck? In terms of statistics, let’s look at some specific categories:
· There are 42 lands in the deck; it is very important for a lands matter deck to have a higher land count than other deck archetypes.
· There are 14 ramp pieces, and 19 overall ways to increase your available mana (this includes cards like Aftermath Analyst that need some extra leg work to put more lands into play).
· The deck has 34 cards that sacrifice a permanent in some way, are lands that sacrifice themselves, are lands that put themselves in the graveyard via cycling, or simply enable you to put lands in the graveyard, 14 cards that reward you for sacrificing permanents or otherwise putting them in your graveyard (not counting cards like Braids, Arisen Nightmare that both sacrifice your permanents and give you something for doing so), and 14 cards that act as recursion, either for lands in the graveyard, other nonland permanents, or even themselves.
There are other categories of card that we could discuss at length, but these are the most important ones for this deck. This gives us a snapshot of how this deck wants to play, and it leads us into identifying our gameplan: It wants to put permanents – mostly lands – into play and find ways to sacrifice them repeatedly to generate value, while also being able to recur these permanents to continue accruing value. With a larger-than-normal amount of lands, this theme leans more heavily on lands matter cards to really help push the gameplan forward. Based on these statistics, this deck is very well-positioned to execute on its goal and win games through the massive value you generate by sacrificing lands. Now we have the two foundations for the deck – what it wants to do, and how it does it. Let’s discuss how to improve those aspects.
In terms of room for improvement, there are a ton of options for easy cuts and obvious upgrades for you to swap in and out of the deck to make it hum more readily. Subpar lands theme cards like Groundskeeper, Centaur Vinecrasher, and World Breaker are immediately apparent as less-than-effective cards with regards to the specific theme of the deck, oddly specific and expensive “generic” effects like Planetary Annihilation and Hammer of Purphoros don’t specifically contribute to graveyard and sacrifice synergies, and some of the inclusions in the landbase like Escape Tunnel, Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse, and most confusingly, a single basic Wastes (forced in to make the aforementioned World Breaker work properly) are all lands that can be immediately replaced with much less obtuse options.
As far as upgrades are concerned, lands matter and graveyard strategies are both extremely common themes in Commander that are replete with a huge variety of upgrades that range from budget-friendly to my-wife-is-going-to-murder-me-for-spending-this price tags. Highlights include Icetill Explorer, Tannuk, Memorial Ensign, Azusa, Lost but Seeking, World Shaper (the card), and Mightform Harmonizer (which I personally pulled a cool alternate treatment of in my sample pack when I bought this deck).
Quick Draw
Switching gears into the world of spellslinging, Outlaws of Thunder Junction brought us some really interesting themes to play with, as well as some new options for mainstay themes in the format – in this case, as mentioned, slinging spells. Stella Lee, Wild Card is the face commander, and when I bought this deck, I switched gears to use the backup, Eris, Roar of the Storm as my personal choice of commander. This is a fast-paced Izzet list that seeks to use Magecraft and associated types of triggers to accrue value via payoffs like Electrostatic Field and Guttersnipe which can accumulate pings to burn out your opponents, or flood the board with Talrand, Sky Summoner, Young Pyromancer, or Third Path Iconoclast to overwhelm the other players with tokens.
What does the statistical profile of the deck look like? Here’s a quick peek under the hood:
· 17 permanents or spells that reward you for casting (and sometimes copying) instant and sorcery spells.
· 13 cards that allow you to either recast spells that are in your graveyard, cast spells by some method other than just paying mana to cast them from your hand, copy your next spell or a spell on the stack, or other methods of increasing the amount of instants and sorceries you can cast or copy in a given turn.
· 17 cards that cheat on mana by decreasing the cost of spells you cast, refund you mana for casting spells, cast one or multiple spells for free, or provide you some way to get around the historic ramp problem non-Treasure Izzet decks tend to face so you can cast more or bigger (or both) spells every turn.
Looking at these statistics gives us a pretty clear image of the deck’s gameplan. The best way to win with this deck is to load up on spells in hand or in your graveyard so that you can dump them all in one long, flashy, long, mechanically intensive, long, probably-boring-for-your-opponents, long turn that hopefully ends with you winning the game or being easily poised to do so on your next turn.
What options are there to pull from the precon to jam in some exciting upgrades? Similar to the World Shaper list, there are some pretty easy calls in terms of inefficient cards that are either too expensive, too slow, or both. Bloodthirsty Adversary, Crackling Spellslinger, Think Twice, and Forger’s Foundry are all cards that require a significant amount of mana to get the promised mileage, and Smoldering Stagecoach, Arcane Bombardment, and Lock and Load are generally too slow to really capitalize on the large number of cards they can copy, recast, or draw, respectively.
For inclusions, you have “refunding” spells that untap the lands as part of their resolution like Frantic Search, Snap, Unwind, options to reset your commander (which, incidentally, will instantly give you infinite copy triggers with her second ability) like Refocus, Cerulean Wisps, and Shore Up, and powerful (and Game Changer-y) spellslinger mainstays like Mystical Tutor, Mana Geyser, and Grapeshot. Spellslinger is an old-guard deck archetype in Commander with a really long history of popular cards to pull from. You should have relatively few issues finding options to beef up your precon even on a shoestring budget.
Conclusion
Hopefully today’s article has given you some food for thought in terms of upgrading a precon you might even be able to find on the shelf at your LGS (editor’s note: Quick Draw has apparently ballooned to over $150 USD market price at the time this article is being edited. Please do not buy this precon for that amount if you can help it). While I only wrote about these two precons today, if you apply this same framework to other precons from recent years, hopefully you too can evaluate and identify some fun precons to purchase and upgrade over time to shape into a deck you enjoy!
Continue Improving Your Commander Gameplay
For tools designed to help you build smarter Commander decks, analyze synergy, and refine your strategy, visit:
When Ben Alban-Berth isn't taking awkward promotional selfies and casting Craterhoof Behemoth on empty boards, he plays roguelikes and Dota 2 and promises people that he will finish his novel soon (he won't).
EDHLAB does not support the use of generative AI as a means to produce content. Any articles you read on our website will never incorporate generative AI for written or visual materials.
