I have been thinking a lot about upgrading decks.

I’ve been avoiding upgrading my precons for quite a while now. I don’t really know why, to be honest. At least for the Universes Beyond decks, one reason has been that it is cool to have the cards from that specific universe. However, since I started the Commander 32 Deck Challenge, I have been playing more. That has slowly been showing me some cracks my decks have, and where and how they could be improved. So this month, I started doing research on how I can improve my decks.

Of course, I haven’t started working on all my decks because I haven’t played some of them enough, and some don’t really need any upgrades. For example, I haven’t played my Eldrazi Incursion deck at all in the past few months, so I don’t know what I want to do with it. As for my Yennett deck, it’s just a silly deck I made in a couple of hours, so I haven’t found a reason to change it yet.

But which decks am I going to upgrade first? The decks I’ve been playing with the most the last couple of months have been Mutant Menace and Scrappy Survivors, with World Shaper as a late addition. Seriously, World Shaper has turned into one of my favourite decks. I’ve been having a ton of fun running this deck. And as a bonus, I need to deal with a ton of triggers and abilities, so it kinda helps me improve my thinking a bit. Also, to be honest, this deck was the main reason I decided to do some upgrades.

I won’t be doing major overhauls of the decks, at least not now. I just want to swap some cards and test how things go. So this time, for World Shaper I made these changes

+ Life from the Loam	– Formless Genesis
+ Icetill Explorer	– God-Eternal Bontu
+Spelunking	– Hammer of Purphoros
+Assassin’s Trophy	– Escape to the Wilds

Icetill Explorer and Spelunking feel like natural additions to the deck. Hopefully, they will allow it to work much better. Life from the Loam seems that it will also work amazingly. The deck values the graveyard, so why not add a card that bolsters this a bit? Assassin’s Trophy is interaction. At least in my community, people use a lot of non-creature permanents, so I need to have options against them.

As for what I removed, Hammer of Purphoros has been in my hand multiple times and never found a reason to cast it. The same goes for Formless Genesis. I feel like I’m doing something wrong with how I am supposed to play this, but so far, it hasn’t done much for my playstyle and me. God-Eternal Bontu is a big creature, but the deck has a few already, and I have preferred others over this one. Escape to the Wilds is the one I am not so sure about, but Icetill Explorer and Spelunking probably make up for removing it.

I will playtest this later today on Commander night at the LGS and see how it goes. I have created a new decklist for my Modified World Shaper because I like keeping a clean list of my precons.

As for Mutant Menace and Scrappy Survivors, I haven’t done much yet. I think I understand what Dogmeat needs better than what Mothman needs. Dogmeat wants good artifacts and auras, and ways to bring them to your hand, and board, either this being in the library or the graveyard. Mothman could use more ways to distribute counters and make players discard. But that’s all I have so far.

Any new decks?

Actually, yes, and thanks for asking. Last time, I was pondering what my Bant and Abzan Commanders would be. While I haven’t made much progress on Bant, I have some sort of plan for Abzan. The same day I posted that update, I mentioned at the LGS that I wanted to create a Doran deck. Another player told me they had a Betor, Kin to All up for grabs, so I got that. Then, I saw there is a Dragonstorm precon that has a lot of cards that could probably go well with Doran and Betor, called Abzan Amor. Then, yesterday, I saw it was available for a good price, so I went and got it. At the moment, my plan is to use Abzan Armor as a shell and start making changes to it until it looks like what I have in mind.

Apart from that, I have been thinking about a mono-black deck. I am not a huge fan of mono-coloured decks, but I can understand their uses. So, as my card organisation goes on and I see what my collection includes, I’ve been thinking of making a mono-black control deck. What does control mean in this context? I’m not 100% sure yet. Probably some dicard and sacrifice, with a bit of lifegain on the side? It is still up for debate.

Commander Brackets Beta Update

A few days ago, we got an update on the Commander Brackets. I haven’t finished reading all of it yet, but I’ve seen a lot of discussion around it. For one, I am glad the bracket exists, even as an abstract concept. And I’m glad people discuss it and that we get updates on it.

And that’s all for now. If I manage to set up a simple mono-black deck within an hour, I may take it on a test drive at the LGS tonight.

And until next time, have fun!