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Hey Magic players! Last week was cold and snowy here in Vancouver. I spent a big chunk of my time thawing our hummingbird feeder, which was every hour during the coldest days. Here’s one of our resident birds.
Adding that to the regular routine meant no new posts on the website last week, but it was totally worth it.
After a chilly week, it was a welcome relief that this past Saturday was another iteration of our local casual Commander tournament, the Commander Challenge, at The Connection Games & Hobbies here in Vancouver. Always a warm, welcoming environment.
This time, there was a twist! Actually there have been a lot of recent twists, mostly coinciding with releases of new products, but I digress. This one was done by the store, not Wizards.
Each player in this Challenge had to bring a Commander precon decklist, and use it unmodified.
Obviously the easiest way to do this is to get a new precon and play it, but that’s fairly expensive and high demand means that’s not always possible. Assembling a list from scratch isn’t easy, and might be expensive. Some precons are also very good, and others not so. It wasn’t a full house, and many regulars were absent, likely for reasons like those.
I think most people that played used a precon they’d opened but never modified, like my roommate Andrew, or like me, used a precon they bought and took apart for parts, and cobbled it back together. Any which way, I’m able to give you the full decklists of everyone I played! They’ll be linked throughout.
Andrew played the Masters of Evil precon from Doctor Who, using The Rani as his Commander. He gave opponents a villainous choice before each game: would he sport a villainous moustache, eyepatch, or fake cigar for the match? Their choice. Villainous!
I went with a throwback. A precon I picked up in 2016, I think. Thanks to Andrew and his generous loan of Magus of the Coffers, I was able to reassemble C14’s Sworn to Darkness deck!
The deck is mono-black, which I felt would give me a bit of an advantage against the wonky mana-bases of most multicoloured precons. It also didn’t seem too threatening, and the intended Commander, Ob Nixilis of the Black Oath, isn’t known for being oppressive. The plus ability is not at all scary.
I’ve never played a planeswalker Commander before, so this was shaping up to be a unique experience. I also assumed I’d be the only one playing Nixilis… which of course I wasn’t. There was another C14 Sworn to Darkness deck.
Of course we ran into each other before any games started, and compared notes. I don’t really know what to say as far as strategy goes for this deck. Play Swamps, make demons, Annihilate opposing creatures. That’s pretty much the plan.
How would a C14 precon hold up in 2024? Let’s find out!
Round 1
Round one featured Andrew Wade as The Rani using Masters of Evil! Along with this extremely villainous villain was The Ur-Dragon from C17’s Draconic Domination and Be’lakor, the Dark Master from 2022’s Warhammer 40k deck The Ruinous Powers.
I kept a balanced hand of lands and spells, including Jet Medallion, Flesh Carver, Sign in Blood and Disciple of Bolas.
The game started with a couple rounds of lands and cheap artifacts. On turn 3, The Ur-Dragon played Curse of Verbosity on themselves. This was sort of intended as a way to deter attacks against them, but kind of encouraged them instead.
Be’lakor followed with a Dark Ritual, which was scary because it usually means bad news in other formats, then their deck’s namesake card The Ruinous Powers. Again, this looked scary, but Be’lakor was short on mana and wasn’t able to get much from it over the following few turns.
On turn 5, Be’lakor finally managed to grab themselves an Island and their first source of blue mana, but was pretty stuck overall. By contrast, I had a huge turn, sacrificing my Flesh Carver to Disciple of Bolas to draw cards and make a horror token, then followed up with a 5/5 demon token from my Commander.
I was sitting pretty, and even felt pretty good when The Rani put ‘The Mark of the Rani’ on my demon token, turning it into a goaded 7/7. A turn later, The Rani tried to land the extremely powerful Cybermen Squadron, but I killed it with Malicious Affliction and played a Bloodgift Demon.
But The Rani kept playing creatures, and I suddenly felt the limit of the old-school designs that went into a lot of my cards. How old-school? Well, do we all remember Terror?
In the early days of Magic, Terror was premium removal. It was a long time before the game saw anything near as good for two mana, other than fellow Alpha card Swords to Plowshares. Efficient and cheap, Terror needed a drawback, and the top-down design resulted in black creatures and artifact creature being immune to being scared to death.
Fast forward to 2014, and a mono-black Commander deck is stuffed with the descendants of Terror. Stuff like Annihilate and Shriekmaw. Stuff that was all useless against everything The Rani played in 2024. Especially their Commander, whose goad ability really pushed the game action.
The game continued to be very active. The Ur-Dragon finally reached enough mana to start casting their expensive spells. They brought out a few dragons and played Rain of Thorns, setting Be’lakor back further by destroying their only Island. Be’lakor managed to put out their Commander, and destroyed my Bloodgift Demon. The Rani stuck me with Vislor Turlough.
The constant action and attacking took their toll. Both The Ur-Dragon and Be’lakor were hurting bad. The Ur-Dragon had Mirror of the Forebears, Lightning Greaves and Scalelord Reckoner, though, and on turn 8, added Dromoka, the Eternal and pulled off a lethal attack out of nowhere on Be’lakor.
My board was also fairly large, but almost all goaded by The Rani. With The Ur-Dragon tapped out, I launched a massive attack of my own, leaving them at 6 life while The Rani watched and piled up Clue tokens.
On turn 9, The Ur-Dragon fired off another large attack, this time at me, but it wasn’t near enough, and I was left at 34. By the time it came around to my turn, they had a single life point left, and I took them out with my Sign in Blood. Very demon.
On The Rani‘s turn, they used Doomsday Confluence to force us both to sacrifice creatures as well as play some Daleks on their side. The following turn, they used Exterminate! to kill 2 of my creatures and make me lose 6 life. Then they attacked me, now almost completely defenseless, for 11 damage, leaving me at 17.
I thought I had another turn to get some sort of something going, but The Rani wasn’t done and produced Wound Reflection meaning that the 17 life I’d lost was the perfect amount to double and finish me off. Well played, Andrew!!
Round 2
Round 2 was a rare 5-person Commander pod. The players included the now-familiar Abaddon the Despoiler from The Ruinous Powers and Cult of Skaro from Masters of Evil. I was also treated to another eminence Commander in Sidar Jabari of Zhalfir with 2023’s Cavalry Charge and Kitt Kanto, Mayhem Diva with New Capenna Commander’s Cabaretti Cacophany.
I started out with a weird hand with only a Bojuka Bog for land. It did come with a Sol Ring and a Charcoal Diamond, and I started drawing land on turn 2, but it was a bit of a gamble.
The game revolved around a few single cards even though a lot happened. My Crypt Ghast. Kitt’s Boss’s Chauffeur. Sidar’s Vodalian Wave-Knight. All were the biggest targets out there at one time or another during the game.
The Crypt Ghast allowed me to play with a lot more mana than I probably should have. I also extorted a bit. It had to be killed a couple of times over, and was copied by Cult of Skaro with Hunted by the Family. It did work for them too.
The Boss’s Chauffeur came out early, and then presented a terrifying problem when Kitt tried to use Cabaretti Confluence to copy it several times, then sacrifice the copies and make an absurd amount of tokens. I tried a Tendrils of Corruption, but Kitt answered with Boros Charm, making it indestructible. Sidar finally ended the threat with Swords to Plowshares.
The Vodalian Wave-Knight simply sat there for a few turns with some other knights. That was enough to make the others all huge. Watch out for this card in any knight build!
When the knight army was at their largest – 11/11 at the top – I had just enough mana for an 11 point Black Sun’s Zenith to wipe the board and reset things.
Kitt’s goad ability made a lot of difference, and for most of the game, it felt like they were controlling the action. One part of the effect is granting the goaded creature trample. This mattered a lot, especially when they goaded my Raving Dead. The trample, combined with the deathtouch already on the creature, made it so that whoever I attacked would need a blocker for each point of the Raving Dead‘s power, which was 4. Abaddon was the unlucky target, and lost half their life in the attack.
Which actually sort of mattered in the end. On turn 11, I played a Pestilence Demon, and fed enough mana into it to finish off Abaddon.
But time was called, and we got through another round of turns without any clear resolution. Sure, Abaddon was dead, but the rest of us had similar enough life totals, similar enough boards, and plenty of interaction left. There was no good way to resolve things, so we called it a draw.
Round 3
The final round of the day featured a third Warhammer Commander in Szarekh, the Silent King from Necron Dynasties, a third Doctor Who Commander in The Thirteenth Doctor with Yasmin Khan from Paradox Power, and a third type-forward Commander in the brand new Ixalan merfolk Hakbal of the Surging Soul from Explorers of the Deep.
This seems like a pretty good endorsement of the Universes Beyond Commander decks from 40k and Doctor Who. Both contained a considerable amount of new cards, so it’s likely the players got the decks, and they all seemed pretty playable out of the box.
I kept a questionable hand, with 5 lands and Evernight Shade. That wasn’t much action, but I wanted to try and fly under the radar for a while, and my mana was assured.
The early turns went really fast, and we played lands and ramped. On turn three, Hakbal played Svyelun of Sea and Sky, as part of a seemingly endless stream of merfolk. I hadn’t seen the decklist, but it looked really good for a quick victory if the rest of us didn’t bring them back to earth a bit.
We all played our Commanders, but Szarekh took mine out pretty quickly. The Doctor got rid of Hakbal’s Commander, and tried to get rid of Svyelun also, but Hakbal saved the merfolk god with the very cool Ripples of Potential, phasing it out.
Hakbal reloaded really quickly, and just a couple turns later replayed their Commander alongside Singer of Swift Rivers and Tributary Instructor, then buffed their entire board with the explore trigger from Hakbal of the Surging Soul. They kept the pressure up, attacking me, even though I was lurking below the radar.
I really didn’t have much in hand. I played Liliana’s Reaver just to do something, then watched as Szarekh suddenly surged into the lead for the biggest threat with a large board of artifact creatures. They topped it all off with the dangerous Cryptothrall, giving them all hexproof.
It looked like Szarekh had the game in hand, but Hakbal had been exploring, so I’d seen some what they’d drawn. When Hakbal said they had a solution if there wasn’t any hexproof, I was able to offer some assistance.
Luckily there are a few cool non-basic lands other than the billion Swamps in my deck. I used my Arcane Lighthouse to remove all of the hexproof, and Hakbal used Curse of the Swine to clear away almost all of Szarekh’s board.
I finally managed to get on board myself, playing Reaper from the Abyss and good old Gary, Gray Merchant of Asphodel. Life totals were shrinking fast, and both Szarekh and I were well ahead of the others.
Between my draining and Szarekh and the Doctor attacking, Hakbal was really low on life. They started the ninth game turn at 5 life. We all loaded up, including me. I added Xathrid Demon, my Commander, and a 5/5 demon token to create a big flying threat.
Szarekh was back in business with their Commander, equipped with Resurrection Orb, but the Doctor had a huge turn, playing a Flaming Tyrannosaurus and killing Szarekh’s Imotekh the Stormlord, and all sorts of other things.
On turn ten, Hakbal made most of their creatures unblockable using Thassa, God of the Sea and swung for a surprise lethal strike at the Doctor. They were at 3 life, and expected to lose out to myself and Szarekh, and wanted to make a big move at the end.
All this, including the Doctor blowing up Szarekh’s creatures, opened the door for me. I did some quick math, then swung my big flying demons at Szarekh. Szarekh definitely wasn’t expecting it to matter, and absorbed it all with their big life total, bringing them below 20.
Then it was Gary’s turn. I’d used a Reaper from the Abyss trigger to get Gary into the graveyard on the previous turn, and now cast Victimize to bring him back, draining for 11 with all my black permanents in play. I managed to sacrifice Gary again, and then passed the turn. As soon as Szarekh went to combat, I cast Wake the Dead to bring Gary back once more for a lethal lifedrain!
It was an okay win. I’ll take it. But Gary did the heavy lifting. What a card. There really isn’t anything else like it. On to prizes!
Wrap Up and Prizes
The big winner of the day was Andrew Wade! Winner of two games, and undoubted recipient of many votes. Well done, Andrew! He selected a LoTR precon as his prize, Riders of Rohan, and intends to play it the next time one of these precon-only events happen.
I had finished 4th in each of the 3 preceding Challenges, but didn’t hear my name called until nearer the end of this one. I was able to grab a Time Spiral Remastered pack, along with 2 Dominaria Jumpstart packs, as my prize. The other Ob Nixilis finished after me as well, making it very possible it’s just not that fun to play against.
The Time Spiral pack yielded a Swarmyard which is always cool, and an old-frame Shriekmaw, which will go in the Ob Nixilis precon deck if I ever play it again.
The LGS owner says that another precon Challenge this year is likely, so if you’re a Challenge Regular and don’t have one together, it might be worth seeing which lists you can put together out of your collection, or even grab a new one.
If I can’t figure out another precon for that Challenge, I would run back the Sworn to Darkness list with Ghoulcaller Gisa as the Commander instead.
Sworn to Darkness was okay, but not great. The mana was good, but it fizzled easily, and often looked more threatening than it was. I doubt the deck’s ability to win a lot of games that it doesn’t draw Gray Merchant of Asphodel. Maybe with a bunch of big demons, but that’s about it.
The deck’s biggest weakness was a lack of good ways to interact with opposing enchantments, artifacts, and even black/artifact creatures. All of which are still problems for black decks.
Conclusion
The next Commander Challenge is in February, after the new set, Murders at Karlov Manor, drops. It’s back to normal, with the usual rules, and I expect to see a lot of Commanders and cards from the new set.
Next week I’m looking to take a close look at some Murders cards that might have slipped under the radar. Put on my Thinking Cap and browse all the detective tropes I could possibly suspect. Hope you check it out!
Thanks for reading!
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