“Blight Curse” Precon Upgrade | Lorwyn Eclipsed | 722

Greetings, humans. You have entered the command zone. Your destination for all aspects of Elder Dragon Highlander. Enjoy your stay. Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Command Zone podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Weeks. And I'm Jordan Pridgen. Yeah! Joining me for this pre-con upgrade. We are upgrading the brand new Jund-1-1-1 counters pre-con. It's called Blight Curse. This is from the new set, Lorwin Eclipse. And so what we're going to do is we're going to go over the deck. What comes in the pre-con if you buy it off the shelf. And then we're going to give you 10 cards to add to the deck to get it into peak fighting shape. Tighten up some of those screws. Take out some erroneous pieces that are stapled on there. Yeah, take out other screws. Take out other screws. See what happens. Find out. I'll give you 10 cards using a budget of $50. Alright, let's get started. Let's meet this deck. Starting with the face commander, Auntie Ull. Auntie Ull. I love Auntie Ull. Me too. This seems very cool. Okay, so Auntie Ull is one and Jund, one black-red-green for a legendary creature, Goblin Warlock 4-4 with Ward, Blight 2. And if you're new to this set, Blight basically means you have to put any number of 1-1 counters on your creatures. So if they want to remove Auntie Ull, they have to put 2-1 counters on one of their creatures. And then it says whenever 1 or more 1-1 counters are put on a creature, draw a card if you control that creature. If you don't control it, its controller loses 1 life. Okay, so there's a lot to take in here. This is a minus 1-1 counters deck that will sometimes be putting counters on your own things and drawing cards and will sometimes be putting on minus 1 counters on your opponent's things to make them smaller and also to drain the table. It's worth noting it doesn't care if you're the one putting on them, but you're probably gonna because minus 1-1 counters don't just incidentally show up that often. I do want to highlight with Auntie Ull. So it's whenever 1 or more minus 1 counters are put on a creature. Draw a card if you control that creature. If you don't control it, its controller loses 1 life. So it doesn't care how many minus 1 counters are put onto a creature at a time. It cares about the number of creatures that have minus 1 counters put on it. So something like a Black Sun Zenith, which we'll be talking about a lot today, puts minus 1 counters on all the creatures. It'll trigger for every creature. Each creature your opponent's control, which is very powerful. But if you do Black Sun Zenith for 5, it's not gonna do 5 on every creature. Right. Okay. So that is the face commander. I think she makes it pretty clear what direction we are going in. But let's meet the backup commander and see what the side quest is. Alright. This is the Reaper, King No More. Reaper Kingsback. Reaper Kingsback, he lost his crown and also his white and blue. So he is joined and it's two...all of his mana is two bread. So you can either pay two generic mana or one of a color. So it's two or Black, two or Red, two or Green. So technically his mana value is six, but you only have to spend three if you have joined. And he lost white and blue in being deposed, I guess. Yeah, look, who knew white and blue was the color of Kings? Yeah, if you want to be a king, you gotta be Azorius. So this is a legendary artifact creature scarecrow. When the Reaper enters, put a minus 1, minus 1 counter on each of up to two target creatures. For a creature and opponent controls with a minus 1, minus 1 counter on it dies, you may put that card onto the battlefield under your control. Do this only once each turn. So this is also a payoff for minus 1, minus 1 counters. It relies more on killing your opponent's things and interestingly killing one thing at a time is sort of best. One creature a turn means you get to steal three creatures or four creatures if you do it on your turn as well, but killing all the creatures repeatedly doesn't necessarily net you more creatures. Yeah, and you don't necessarily need to do the killing. You could spread the 1, 1 counters all over the place and then sort of incidentally get stuff. What I like about the Reaper is it also puts minus 1 counters on stuff. Yeah, it enables itself a little more clearly. And a payoff where Auntie Old has a little bit of enabling with the ward ability, but not a ton. Right. Okay, so those are the two commander options for this deck. It gives you a pretty clear direction for where we're going, but I would expect the Reaper is a little bit more targeted removal and is a little bit more controlling where Auntie is like just throw in minus 1 counters wherever she may please. Auntie has a real value aspect to her too. You know, it's like she's doing more of putting stuff on her own board to just keep drawing cards and get card advantage that way. Right. Whereas the advantage Reaper K is giving is taking other people's advantage. Classic. You lose it with the king. You just keep stealing, right? Mm-hmm. All right, well, speaking of kings, I know a good place to get cards. Oh. And it's in the card kingdom. Wow! Flawless transition, Rachel. If you enjoy our content and you want to support us while picking up magic cards, you can use our affiliate links at cardkingdom.com slash command. Card Kingdom is the best. They've got a ton of cards and sealed product all in one place. So when you're shopping for a set you're excited about or a deck you're excited about, you can get a ton of those cards all in one place. It's my favorite place to shop when I'm building a deck because I can take the deck list, pace it into the advanced deck builder, and it'll show all the cards that are in stock. I can pick all the versions that I want right away and hit buy. I'm not on the website forever trying to find a hundred individual things, trying to balance shipping, and all it's a nightmare. And then the cards will all come reliably in one package, which is really nice. Yeah, you're not chasing envelopes through the mail and digging them out of the bottom of your mailbox jammed in there. So we trust Card Kingdom when we do all of our card shopping and you can support the show if you use that affiliate link. Again, that's cardkingdom.com slash command. And once those cards are in your hand, you've got to protect them. Of course, go to oldpro.com slash command. Get your sleeves, deck boxes, binders, play mats, everything that you need to be a well accessorized magic player. If you're a big fan of Final Fantasy, they just put out a new series of Final Fantasy play mats. Their Final Fantasy stuff sold out really fast when that set came out. 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So if you're a big fan of extra turns, you like watching all of that gameplay, you can find out what was going on in the minds of the players while they were playing. What cards overperformed, underperformed, what did they wish they had done in the game. I think Turn Talk is a huge reason to be a patron. Yeah, I mean, it's the conversation that you just naturally have after games of Commander. What would you have done with one more turn? One more turn. One more turn. And we shout out one lucky patron every single podcast episode. This one is dedicated to Eddie Road Dog. Double G. Eddie, you rock. Woof woof. Eddie. Woof woof. Vroom vroom woof woof. Vroom Eddie. Vroom Eddie. All right. So we've talked about a little bit about what this deck is doing mechanically. We want to talk about the reprint value if you buy this deck. What are you actually getting for your money? It is worth saying that for Lorwin, Wizards did increase the MSRP of pre-pons. They are now $50 versus last year's $45. So they're a little bit more expensive than they were last year and a little bit more expensive a few years before that. So let's see if the reprint value matches the increase here. So the total reprint value for this deck is... $235.75. $235.71. Look, I think we need to give Wizards a little bit of credit on this because I know people are upset about the MSRP price and I think it's entirely fair. I totally get it. So to give a little bit of context, in 2025, the average reprint value of a pre-con was $152.71. This is $80 more than that in terms of reprint value. It's worth noting that all of those prices were taken at a time of recording, but we are recording the day after this deck was announced. So there's been time for a little bit of price adjustment. So they aren't quite... It's a little different than we normally do this. And it only includes the reprints. There were 68 reprints in the deck, not the 12 new cards that they've announced or the 18 basic lands. So it's $235 worth of value and it's only, what, 70% of the deck? You get a bunch of additional value, including Anteul and the Reaper. Anteul. I mean, this is a very serious reprint value even with the price increase. But to give you a little bit of more context... Let's talk about the bang for your buck value. With the fluctuations of pre-con prices, we've added an additional value that takes the reprint value and it divides it by the cost of the pre-con to give you an idea for how much actual reprint value are you getting for your one American dollar spent? And this one, the average last year was $3.06. And this one is $4.72. Yeah, that's really good. Getting almost $5 worth of value for your one dollar spent here. So it's really high. I mean, you're getting a ton of value. You're getting a ton of individual cardboard for your $50 even though there is that price increase. And I will say, we'll go over some of the specifics of this when we kind of list through the notable reprints. But when I was working on the upgrade, when you go through and dig into what are the staples and what are the most key cards of minus one, minus one counter decks, a lot of them are in the deck, including a lot of the most popular or commanders for the thing. So like if this is an archetype that's interesting to you, they printed a lot of the cards in here. So I just think that's cool. I do want to recognize that Wizards also made the decision with Lorwin and the price increase to remove the collector, the collector pack sampler from Commander Precons. Normally in precons, there has been like a little booster pack that had two cards in it. Usually one was foil, one was nonfoil. But they were kind of promo-y and fun to open and they have removed that, which is disappointing. I think that's a fun part of precons. And I especially putting it alongside a price increase, I don't think is super smart. But this reprint value is super, super real. And I don't think that, like I think we need to give them a little bit of credit for this being still being very much worth buying if this is a deck you want to play. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's frustrating realistically because it's not like more expensive cards cost them that much more money to print or anything. But I do like this strategy of just making the consistent cards in the deck like higher value reprints. Like I would much rather that be the case on a regular basis. Yeah, I think if I was given the choice between two random cards, that could be good or just the cards I want for this deck, I would rather the cards I want for this deck. We should remember that this is a false choice. They could have done both. They could have done both. And it wouldn't have cost them anymore. Nope. So it is definitely disappointing and I want to hear everybody who's saying that and recognize that that is a value loss in the precons. But let's talk about the notable reprints that are in this deck so you know which ones you don't have to buy. And there are a lot of them. We're talking about reprints worth over $5 a time of recording. They're 15. That's insane. 15 reprints over $5 is bananas. I've done a lot of these upgrades with you in the last like two years. And when I saw this list of over $5, I was like, that's got to be a mistake. It just keeps going. It's kind of crazy. Let's go through these pretty quickly, but we can highlight the ones that I think are like mechanically the most notable. The first one is the big one. It's $33. Wow. Necro Skitter is in this deck and it sort of has to be. This would be one of the biggest things you would add to the deck if they hadn't put it in. So it's really exciting to see a card that has had a couple of reprints over the years, but it's been a long time since it's gotten a reprint and here it is right where you want to see it. Yeah, and obviously very on theme with the Reaper King. Yes. The next one is Chimil the Inner Sun, which is $28. This is a weird one. It is. I think they just wanted to get a reprint in for this. I think they just wanted to get a reprint in. I appreciate that. This is a cool card. I don't think it necessarily synergizes with the deck. If I was building this deck from scratch, I would not be putting Chimil the Inner Sun in it, but sure, we'll take a free Chimil the Inner Sun. Why not? Sounds great. I would take it out of this deck and put it somewhere else. Yeah, and hey, spoilers. That's the plan. We're going to do that. The next one is $21. Three reprints over 20s is wild. It's Tree of Perdition. This seems like a really weird choice, but I actually do really like it. Yeah. Tree of Perdition is one where it swaps its toughness with an opponent's life total. It's a little bit of a meme card. It's a little bit of a meme card, and if it doesn't have haste, odds that you actually activated Tree of Perdition are pretty low. But if you do get to activate it in this deck, you can stack it up with a bunch of minus one, minus one counters to make it stuck even lower. And then just be like, you get two lives. You're at two life. Then you swap it, so then you have a bunch more toughness to store all your minus one counters so you're drawing cards with UL. It's pretty clever, a little weird, but I do like the include here. Yeah, and then next is for $16, Lily on a Deathwielder. I don't know why this card's expensive. It's been printed one time, and it says minus one counter on it. But it is. The next one is Flourishing Defenses. This is sitting at $11. If you don't know this card, you're not alone. It's a five minute enchantment that says whenever minus one, minus one counter, elf. It's pretty good. Yep, that's neat. After that, it's $9 for Vraska, Betrayal's Sting. The proliferate planeswalker, this is very good. And Super Friends decks is also very good here. I love this card. I think this is very strong. Also $9, Blowfly Infestation. I would say one of the more infamous minus one, minus one counter cards. Oh yeah. Exceptionally powerful. Definitely a minus one staple. Like no question. This is whenever a creature with a minus one, minus one counter on it dies, you get to put a minus one, minus one counter elsewhere. So it goes infinite with a lot of things, including some things in this deck. Then there's Midnight Banshee for $8.50. Another really solid include for minus one, minus one counter decks. Yeah, for sure. And it hasn't seen a lot of reprints, which is the big one. First reprint ever, I believe. It's sitting at $7 Massacre Girl Known Killer. This is another one that we definitely would have put in the upgrade if it wasn't in the deck and here it is. This is the one that has wither and says if a creature dies and its toughness is less than one, so zero, which is perfect for with minus one counters, you draw a card. Really solid value engine. After that, it's Assassin's Trophy, which is $6. Nice. I love that they keep reprinting this card. It's always unfun to spend a bunch of money on removal spells. When I went to the pre-release where this came out, it was selling for like $90 or something like that. And I was like, they're going to reprint the heck out of this. They have to. Up next is $5.50 for the Scorpion Guard. At last, we have Scorpion Guard and Herpatra in the same deck. Very excited. Everyone's excited. After that, it's Archfiend of Ifnir for $5.50. This is like really a discard cycle staple. Great card. A little strange to the deck. We'll talk about it later. Fire Covenant sitting at $5.50. This is my favorite reprint of the bunch. It's seen one Secret Layer reprint, but otherwise this is the first official reprint since Ice Age. And this card's really powerful. It's great in a deck that's making toughnesses smaller. After that, it's Dusk Urchins for $5. Another minus one counter card and $5 for Evolution Sage. Very powerful. That's a for eight card. Very good. So this is a ton of value. This is like an absolutely absurd number of high quality magic cards. But I do want to mention that the cards that we've talked about today are minus one, minus one counter cards. Yeah. In a lot of these cases, they don't have a home in decks that don't care about that. Right. Blowfly Infestation is not a staple that you need to add to your collection. So I wanted you to keep in mind that yes, this has a ton of value in it, but it isn't something I would just pick up to break apart and put into other decks. This is a great start to a minus one, minus one counter deck. So if I was playing it, I would start with this deck. Just gives you all the tools that you're looking for. But it's not necessarily something that I'm like, you've got to pick this up because the value is insane. I guess if you wanted to meal the inner sun. Inner sun, yeah. Sure. Then you get $20 worth of other cards. Yeah. I think this is a great list of cards though. It's very cool. I agree. I mean, I think like if you want a minus one, minus one counter deck, it's going to be hard to do better than starting with this list. It'll be interesting to look back a year from now because it is still sort of a pretty rare archetype and see how these prices have been affected by this being printed. I agree. We'll see long term what kind of value this holds. But let's move on. We're going to talk about the deck mechanically starting with some stats. We haven't done that in a while. We haven't done a pre-con upgrade since Edge of Eternity. It's been a long time. Like look, we're a little rusty on our stats intros. We were so ready to do pre-con upgrades for Avatar. Yeah. No, pre-cons. All right. So we're going to talk about the categories we expect in every pre-con deck and then we're going to break things down and get a little bit more narrow. But let's start with the nuts and bolts, the vegetables of every pre-commander deck. Starting with ramp. So the deck has 10 pieces of ramp. Pretty good. Pretty standard. I think it's a good deck. Could maybe use a little bit more. I'm a big fan of ramping, but you know, 10's probably good. There are 16 pieces of card advantage, including Antioil in the command zone. That is a lot and honestly, happy to see it. Yep. Then there are 15 pieces of targeted disruption. Yes. I think that's great. The targeted versus mass disruption in this deck is very difficult. Because so many of the cards just put minus one, minus one counters which can count as some amount of disruption. So we tried to keep targeted disruption to being cards that you could realistically use to actually kill a whole thing that mattered. Yes. The deck is going to be disrupting what your opponents do all the time. All the time. Super, super effective at doing that. So 15 is like, these are kill spells, but keep in mind the entire deck is disruption. Yeah, this is true. And that is represented in this mass disruption number. Which is 11 cards. That's a lot. There's more than average. That includes all the cards that are like, put minus one counters on everything. Yeah. And you know, you want a lot of them. Like, I mean, this should show you right now this is going to be a very interactive deck. Yes. Your opponents are not going to be able to ignore you. And finally, let's talk about the lands. There are 39 lands in this deck. Including 18 basic lands. I know you're going to be tempted to cut lands. I know you are. But 39 is okay. 39 is a good number. You can maybe cut one, maybe, but. Cut two lands. No, don't. Like, this deck is very mana hungry. It draws a ton of cards. It needs to hit its land drops. It needs to be able to cast its spells. And I think 39 lands is a very comfortable number. Yeah. You're going to be drawing enough that you just want to always hit your land drop every time. So yeah, I do think that's a good idea. All right. Let's talk about the stats that are more specific to this deck, starting with the number of cards that put minus one, minus one counters. Which we have counted up to be at 30. 30. That's the magic number. That's where we want to be. Really good. If a deck is built around something, especially if your commander is a payoff, you want at least 30 of those things. And then 27 of those put stuff on your own stuff. Or can put stuff on your own stuff. Yeah. And then 23 of them can put stuff on your opponent's stuff. There's a big amount of overlapping those obviously. Yes. Because the numbers don't add up if there's a lot of overlap. We wanted to give you a very clear picture on your capability of drawing cards with your commander. Yep. And then what kind of things you have to drain the table. And the answer is you have a lot of both. You're going to be very good at turning minus one counters into whatever you would like it to be. Yep, definitely. Finally, we're going to talk payoffs. There's a lot of payoffs for minus one, minus one counters. Most of them are very powerful and you have one in the command zone. But there are 27 in this deck, which is a huge amount. These are cards that just care about when minus one, minus one counters are put or they proliferate or they enhance in some way. Yeah, or take them off or use them, something like that. So you can see that this deck is exceptionally focused on minus one, minus one counters. Yes. There's no, it's tight in terms of actual synergy. Finally, let's talk about the average mana value in this deck. It could give you an idea for how fast or slow it is. The average mana value is 3.6. It's on the higher end. I definitely think so. That's definitely higher than I would expect for a deck that is so disruptive. I usually, when I'm trying to be controlling, I'm trying to be efficient. I'm trying to cast multiple spells. Having a lot of big expensive spells does kind of mud up the works. Well, it can be tough if you're drawing a bunch of cards and they are sticking in your hand because you can't cast a ton. So I mean, one of the things we'll probably do in the upgrades is try and lower that curve a little bit. Yeah, let's talk about that. So we're going to add 10 cards to this. We're going to take 10 cards out and we're going to try and improve some of these numbers and some of the strange outliers in the deck that we're seeing. Let's talk about what you wanted to do with this upgrade. Yes. Starting with, what commander did you put in the commands on? We're going to build on to you. I think that there's definitely a case for switching it to the Reaper Kingdom or if you want to. As the deck is built, Auntie Ula is going to be stronger and I just love the card drawing on to you. That's true. It's hard to pass that up in my mind. I agree. I think Reaper is a bit more of a build around than you want. You want a lot of instant speed disruption. You want to be able to kill things full, like full all out and not just sort of make them smaller. And the deck is really designed to make a lot of things smaller, not necessarily kill individual powerful things. Yeah. I think one of the first things we wanted to do was to add a little bit more mana acceleration to the thing, to just make all this card draw, like pay you off a little better. So we're adding some of that in there. And then we wanted to cut some cards that were not quite on plan or efficient. So some high cost cards, ones that maybe were printed for other decks or something like that. The Tremel. Yeah, exactly. And then I just kind of want to accelerate the clock a little bit more. I want to just give you more payoffs when you're putting these counters on things, deal more damage to things, proliferate around the table and stuff. Because look, I mean, we're going to talk about this a bit later too, but like this is going to be a deck where you're sort of the villain and you're sort of the bad guy and you're removing things. Let's lean into it. That's fine. Let's be the bad guy. Having a villain deck, I think is like a cool thing that everybody should experience. Definitely. But what you don't want to do, especially with a deck like this, is hold your opponent's hostage and lock them. And then not win the game. So they can't do anything, but not actually progress the game yourself. And Antihull is a great example of a commander that is going to take your disruptive strategy and turn it into an actual win. So you want to make sure you're including all of the cards in the deck that can take you slowing down the game and turn it into actual advantage to close things out. All right. Before we get to the upgrade, I want to talk about the best cards in the deck. We're going to talk about some of the new ones. We're going to talk about some of the old ones. Just so you have an idea of when a card is in your hand, what are you excited about? You're excited about it. And what does it do for you? Starting with one we've already mentioned. Yes. This is Black Sun Zenith. And look, I'm a big stand for Black Sun Zenith. I love this card as just a board wipe on things. But so basically Black Sun Zenith, X, Black, Black, Sorcery, if you haven't seen it before, it puts X1, 1 counter minus 1, minus 1 counters on each creature and then you shuffle Black Sun Zenith into its owner's library. So this is a board wipe that then supplies a board wipe into your deck. And I think in this deck, you can cast Black Sun Zenith for one. You can just like a Black, Black, 1, put a counter on everything, drain your opponents for every creature they have, draw a card for every creature you have, and then you could potentially draw into a Black Sun Zenith on all the creatures you have on the board. Yeah. Depending on how many creatures are under your control, you can draw four or five cards off of this and refill your hand, have another payoff for minus 1, minus 1 counters, maybe even draw back into Black Sun Zenith, which is gnarly. When you need to wipe the board, this is going to do it really well for you. When you want to just hinder your opponents a little bit, this is going to do it well for you. And another thing that's cool about minus 1 counter decks is you can often sort of plan it out so that you've made sure all your opponents' creatures are smaller than what you have going on and make this very one-sided. Absolutely. Yep. It's very cool. I love it. The other one that we expect to be extremely powerful in the deck here, because it's extremely powerful in all minus 1 counter decks, is a Necro Skitter. Yeah, there's a reason this is an expensive card. Yeah. So this is only three mana for a creature with weather. It says, whenever a creature and opponent controls with a minus 1 counter on it dies, you may return that card to the battlefield under your control. Sounds like the backup commander, but it doesn't say only once each turn. So if you have a Black Sun Zenith and you kill multiple creatures, you steal all those creatures. Huzzah! Pretty scary, pretty powerful. If this is on the board, you need to have a removal spell for it. That's why the Reaper King is not king anymore, Necro Skitter is. Necro Skitter is king. Let's talk about this new card, which is a great example of another good payoff for minus 1 counters. I think this card is sick. Me too. Village Pillagers, it is three red red for a 5-5 Goblin Warrior with weather. And it says, whenever this creature enters, it deals one damage to each creature your opponent's control. Because it has weather, that damage is dealt in the form of minus 1 counters. So it puts a counter on all your opponent's stuff. That's really awesome. Gross. And that would be good. And that would be good on its own in this deck. But then it also says, whenever a creature and opponent controls with a counter on it dies, you create a tapped treasure token. Ew, that's so good. That's awesome. You're just going to incidentally get so much treasure value out of this thing. Yeah, this card's great. We were talking about how the deck needs a little bit more mana acceleration, especially in the late game. And this is a great example of a huge burst of mana that can lead into some big explosive turns that drain out the table with Antioquil. Love this, so strong. Really strong. It gives you an example of the kind of game that Antioquil wants to play, which is a lot of creatures on the board with minus 1 counters on them. Not necessarily wiping the board over and over again, just making sure everything's as small as she is. Yeah, I mean, I legitimately think this card's going to be good even in controlled decks that aren't as much about minus 1 counters. It's going to be sick in this deck. I like it in clone decks. You can copy this thing. It is disgusting. Really good. Like if you have a deck that makes copies of creatures, like a Delina or something like that. If you play this thing, you deal damage to everything and put minus 1 counters on it. You attack with Delina, you make a copy of it, you put more minus 1 counters on it. And now anything that dies from taking 2 damage, you get 2 tap treasures. Yeah, they could die in combat later and you're just like, whoop. What? Amazing. Really gross. Card sweet. Speaking of sweet, the next one we're going to talk about is Sinister Narlbar, which just is Narl's Berkeley. To me, that's it. Two in a black or a creature tree folk. Warlock, he's a 0-4. At the beginning of your end step, draw a card and blight 1. So this looks like a Pharaxian arena and it is. It's a Pharaxian arena tree that triggers on your end step. But if you have your commander in play, this draws two cards. I've got a question, Rachel. Yeah. Does that make it crazy? Definitely. Great. Sinister. Possibly. Okay. Sinister Narl's Bargley though. It's a trick. It's a tree. All right. There's one more card that we absolutely have to talk about in this deck. It is mandatory. You're off-nap goat. Come on. And the art is incredible. This is so good. It's one in a black for a 0-5 creature goat. It has the activated ability of one. Draw a card, gain control of this creature and put a minus one, minus one counter on it. Only your opponents may activate this ability and only as a sorcery. And when this creature dies, if it had one or more, minus one, minus one counters on it, its owner draws that mini cards and each other player loses that much life. This is a joke callback because there was a card in the original Lorwyn called Goat-nap. Yes. It's reprinted in this Lorwyn. Yeah. And it lets you basically like steal a goat from somebody. It's steal a creature if it was a goat something, I think. The joke in the original Lorwyn is that there weren't any goats. This was used to steal changelings from people because they were technically goats. Now this is the goat that gets nabbed. That's the goat that gets nabbed. It's great in this deck and it's super fun. I think it's one of the highlights for picking up this deck as you get yourself an off-nap goat. It's so much fun. It puts a little mini game into the game. The way this sort of runs is that it gets basically passed around the table. Everybody wants to steal it on their turn. But you kind of don't want to be the one who steals it and kills it if you're not the owner because then you get a lot of advantage on it. You draw five cards and that's not to mention if you just put more minus one counters on the goat and it dies. You draw a ton of cards. It's worth noting if you have an off-nap goat out and you jam a black sun zenith for 30 you'll draw 30 and you'll win because it deals damage to each of your opponents. It deals damage equal to the other thing. Each other player loses that much life. Oh yeah, sick. Don't nab the goat. Careful. You gotta be careful with that goat. Careful with that goat. It is worth mentioning that this deck has a couple of infinite combos in it as is common for many minus one, minus one counter decks. If you've played against Tapatra, if you've played against Scorpion God you know that this is the case. And all these are enabled by blow fly infestation. Yes, let's read that one. That is tuna black for an enchantment. It says whenever a creature dies if it had a minus one, minus one counter on it put a minus one, minus one counter on target creature. So you can imagine that if you had a card that said whenever you put minus one, minus one counters on a creature, make a one one, how that could go infinite. So the basic way it works is if you have Tapatra, Vizier of Poisons, who basically whenever you put a minus one counter on a creature makes a one one green snake token with Death Dutch. Or flourishing defenses, which we mentioned already. Or flourishing defenses makes elves when that stuff happens. Basically as long as you have two one ones on the board that you've probably made through Hapatra or something, you can just put a counter on one of those one ones. It dies. It dies. Blow fly infestation triggers. It puts a counter on the other one one. It dies. Blow fish infestation triggers. Both those times the things are being put on. Hapatra is making new one ones. That is infinite dies triggers. It is infinite counter on a creature triggers. Yeah, it's infinite wool triggers. With Auntie Wool that draws your whole deck. And if you can't win when you've drawn your entire deck, then you have a bigger problem. Yeah, it's a very very powerful combo. That is naturally in the pre-con. If you're not interested in playing a deck with an infinite combo in it, you could take out blow fly infestation. We're not going to for this build because it is pretty traditional for minus one counters decks to go infinite in this way. And it is a three card combo. So we would consider this deck probably around bracket three because it is highly disruptive. That's part of the plan. And it has this late game infinite combo. Yeah, I mean, you know, you're going to probably draw a lot of cards in this deck. So a lot of games will probably end with this combo. So just be aware of that, you know. Absolutely. All right, we're going to get to this upgrade. We've got 10 cards to add, 10 cards to take out. But we're pretty excited about this deck. Let us know what you think about the Blight Curse deck and we'll let you know how to upgrade it after a few words from our sponsors. Yes, I win! Probably. Anyway. Probably. What's going on? I'm going to turn on Arcadec. Check it out. They've got the best playtester in the business. Playing and tapping your cards is as simple as clicking them. Everything goes right where you want it, but you can drag things by hand and group them together in different ways too. Then there's easy shortcut keys for things like making copies, sending cards between zones and starting the next turn. Nice. So this is a track, so all that proliferating is going to take a while. It doesn't actually. Just right click and hit proliferate all counters. Oh, wow. Yeah, you probably do win. I think so. Arcadec is the best place to browse, brew, and play test commander decks. Let's go to Arcadec.com slash command zone to get started. That's A-R-C-H-I-D-E-K-T dot com slash command zone. Welcome back everybody. We are adding cards to the BlightCurse pre-con from Lorwin, and I'm very excited. We've got some cool cards to add. Let's start with, I think, one of the most obvious ads in the deck and one of my favorite cards when I first started playing. This is Nest of Scareubs. I actually started playing commander in Omencat. Yeah. I played before that, but I started playing commander in Omencat, so this was a fresh new card of the time. This is an enchantment that says whenever you put one or more minus one, minus one counters on a creature, create that mini one, one, black insect creature tokens. This is also one that goes infinite with blow fly infestation. Hey. But there's a reason you want this affecting your deck a lot of times. This is just turning it into, and sort of the whole category of cards we're trying to do here is ones that were like, hurting them helps you. Making it so when you are putting those counters on their boards, you are building your board. You are making things that you can put your counters on for Auntie Ull adding stuff in. I think Nest of Scareubs is one of the best and most efficient ways to do that. When I first started playing magic, Omencat was on the shelves. It had been out for a little bit, but I bought the minus one, minus one counter like a standard pre-con deck. I believe it was a play set of Nest of Scareubs. I'm not sure, but I definitely upgraded it to have a play set, and it had a couple of the cards we're adding today and how I try that kind of thing. It definitely led to me being interested in Commander, but I always love this card. It also is that many, minus one, minus one, black insect creature tokens. Even better. Again with Black Sun Xenith, you do Black Sun Xenith for five, and there are 10 creatures on the battlefield, and you walk away with 50 Scareubs. That seems okay. That seems fine. Nest of Scareubs is sitting at $4, but is probably going to get more expensive because this pre-con is already very popular, so make sure you pick it up quickly if you would like one. Grab it. This next card is great in minus one, minus one counter decks, despite her pleasant demeanor. It's Generous Patron, two in a green for a creature elf advisor. She's a 1-4, and when Generous Patron enters the battlefield, support two. This is put a plus one counter on each of up to two other target creatures. You can put it on your own things, you can put it on your opponent's things, but it says whenever you put one or more counters on a creature you don't control, draw a card. Doesn't care about what kind of counters to trigger this draw ability. Here, this minus one counters for you. I'll take a card for you. Thank you. How generous of me. I'm so generous. Generous. So when she enters the battlefield, you can put the counters on your own things, or you can put on your opponent's things to draw cards, and then whenever you put minus one counters on your opponent's things, you draw cards. I'm just pointing out that a lot of you probably know this, but plus one counters and minus one counters are anti-matter. They get rid of each other. If a creature has one minus one counter on it and you put a plus one, plus one counter, it doesn't have counters on it anymore. That is a great thing to point out. You can use Generous Patron to remove the minus one counters from your own things if you want to buff them up a little bit. Yeah, and you have to be a little bit careful if you care about the number of creatures on the battlefield with minus one counters on them. You don't necessarily want to remove that minus one counter from it. I do want to mention that this is not triggered by blight effects. If you're forcing your opponents to blight, like with Auntie Wool's blight ward ability, it says to blight to, a player puts two minus one counters on a creature they control. Your opponent is making the decision and putting the counters on it. So Generous Patron will not trigger even though it's your effect that is causing that to happen. You have to put the counters on them. Yes, but proliferating. Oh, that counts, baby. Oh, yeah. All right, 75 cents for Generous Patron and honestly going to be one of the most powerful cards in the deck. This next card is a commander in his own right, but works really well with Auntie Wool's trigger. This is Obnixless, captive kingpin, who is currently sitting at $11. Spicy. I have a commander deck built around Obnixless, so you can just see how powerful he is. But the thing that's cool is when you put the counters on opponent's creatures and get the Auntie Wool trigger, it deals one damage to that opponent. Let's read Obnixless for those who haven't. Yeah, I guess we would do that. Fine. It's two Black Red for a legendary creature demon. He's got flying and trampolies for three. Whenever one or more opponents each lose exactly one life, put a plus one, plus one counter on Obnixless, captive kingpin, exile the top card of your library until your next end step. You may play that card. Okay. Real strong. Yeah. Cool, sis. Whenever you put a minus one counter on your opponent's creatures, they lose one life. Which triggers Obnixless, which basically temporarily draws you a card, you know, it exile draws you a card and makes Obnixless bigger. So that makes Obnixless one, a big threat that you can hit people with, a card draw engine, and if you want a place for you to put your counters. Right. If you need to blight, he's a great place to just store it and they'll disappear and you're not worried about losing one of your own creatures. The other thing I really like about Obnixless in this deck is he's terrifying. He's super scary to play against and you're going to have a lot of really important and a lot of really important scary pieces. So spreading out your opponent's targeted removal among things like Obnixless and your commander and your necroskitter and just all of these threats is just going to sort of wear out your opponent's targeted removal, which will likely be going at your board. He's only four mana too, which it does mean in a lot of cases you're probably going to play him down and get some pretty immediate value out of it. I think this is a fun add. Yeah, I like him. I think he's cool. He's cool. Like Auntie Ool. Auntie Ool. The next card that we're going to talk about is another one of those slam dunk adds. Sort of surprised it's not in the deck. It's Obelisk Spider. One black and a green for a creature spider. It's a 1-4 with reach. Whenever Obelisk Spider deals combat damage to a creature, put a minus one counter on that creature. So it has sort of like the toxic version of wither. Yeah. Honestly, I don't see you using this part of it all the time. Probably not, but it's a 1-4 with reach. Could happen. Whenever you put one or more minus one, minus one counters on a creature, each opponent loses one life and you gain one life. So it's redundant effect for Auntie Ool's drain ability and gives you a little bit of life gain, which is super important when you're the baddie. Well, it's also nice that when you are putting the counters on your creatures to draw the things, it is doing the damage to your opponent. That's true. So it's letting your card draw a plan when you the game instead of just draw the cards, which seems really cool. That's pretty fun. Yeah. Not only three mana for Obelisk Spider. Yeah, very nice. Also from the... And only $1. Also from the Omenket block, because that was a cool time for minus one counters. The next card is... And category. Not from Omenket. It is not. One of the add some cards that I proliferate, because especially when you kind of get to the late game and you've done your job of spreading around your minus one counters, proliferate is going to be a really, really powerful mechanic. Like it basically is doing the Black Sun Xenia thing where it's going to draw you a ton of cards, hurt everyone's creatures and stuff. And it just gives you a lot of control over how the board goes. And the first one I wanted to add for this is a big old guy, Agent Frank Horrigan. This is five, a black and a green for an eight, six legendary creature mutant warrior with trample. And it says Agent Frank Horrigan has indestructible as long as it attack this turn. And then whenever Agent Frank Horrigan enters the battlefield or attacks, proliferate twice. So he's a Titan basically. Yes, for proliferation. But those proliferate twice means you get two triggers of every creature on the battlefield potentially, if they survive. So you play Agent Frank Horrigan, you proliferate, which triggers onto you will. And then you proliferate again, which triggers onto you will. So you get all of those triggers twice and it's the most powerful iteration of that. So a lot of times you're kind of be able to just like sort of wipe the board of your opponent. Absolutely. And then just have this big eight, six attacker who's going to be coming in, drawing you more cards, doing more damage. I think he seems great. He seems really cool. And this is the kind of seven drop that I really want to slam. You want big six and seven and eight drops that you've done your thing and they slam the door shut. Yep. And that's what Agent Frank Horrigan really brings to this table. He's a dollar 75, pretty easy to pick up here and is going to be really, really good. The next one is also a proliferation effect. It's staff of completion. The three-man artifact with four abilities, four, five, five abilities. Tap, pay one life, destroy target permanent you own. Sure. Tap, pay two life, add one mana of any color. Also okay. Tap, pay three life, proliferate. There we go. Tap, pay four life, draw a card. We'll also take that. And then five colon, un-tap this artifact. So there's big turns with Auntie Ull that I can see. If you proliferate, you proliferate again. You can win the game depending on the number of creatures that are on the battlefield. So having this ability that you can play it for three, proliferate and have the potential to untap it and proliferate again is so nice. Yeah. And you know, this is the sort of card where, like, yeah, it has a lot of sort of expensive abilities it has, but just the versatility it brings is really nice. Right, for sure. And this is only $4 to pick up. It's going to be a slam duck in the deck. Feel really good. Up next. Yeah, the final proliferate effect. This one I think is sort of an underrated card. It's just a real like role player in a deck. It's a kinker bloom, which is just one in a green for a 3-2 Pharaxian fungus creature, which has one sacrifice kinker bloom. Choose one. Destroy target artifact, destroy target enchantment, or proliferate. This card is great. I think this card is like deeply underrated because it has kind of a one-time effect, but it's just so efficient. And if you have a threat, you have to get rid of it. If you need to disenchant something, you can do it. But you can also proliferate and potentially draw ton of cards and do a ton of damage just for this little two-man creature with a one-man ability. I would also say that this deck is very good at dealing with creature threats. It is a little less efficient at dealing with non-creature threats. So adding another way that can blow up an artifact or enchantment that is causing problems, maybe there's a solemnity, god forbid. Which to be fair, solemnity does make it impossible for them to remove Auntie Ull. But she doesn't do anything. That's true. You need an answer to that kind of card on the battlefield. You have one extra one that can also win you the game. Pretty nice. Canker Bloom is only $1.25, so a nice easy one. This next card is a little bit spendier, but when it's on the battlefield, you're going to feel it. It's Maha, it's Feathers Night. Oh yeah. Three Black Blackberry Legendary Creature Elemental Bird. It is a 6-5 with Flying and Trample with Ward Discard a card. And then it says creatures your opponents control have base toughness, one. And you know what's great about base toughness, one, it means a single minus one counter will do it. Yeah. Yeah. This card is a lock on the board. If you have any way to put minus one, minus one counters on stuff, your opponents are just not going to be able to keep a creature on the battlefield until they deal with Maha. Like we said, we were going to just lean into the villain thing we went into this. Maha is a villain card. Villain. So much fun. It is so fun. It's really, really good in this deck. And it's the kind of thing where if everybody has minus one counters on all their stuff, you play Maha and it's a board wipe that leaves you with a 6-5 that protects itself. Like it's just, it's going to be really dominant, it's going to feel really powerful. And the earth is really cool, so you should buy it. $15 for Maha. After that, we wanted to kind of do some cards that would do the mana acceleration, like we said. And this one doesn't have any direct counters synergy, but is just going to be a very strong card. This is Maha-D, Emporium Master. This is one. Second Maha. Maha-D. So I don't know where Maha, B and C went. This is one, a black and a red for a 3-3 legendary creature, Cat Devil. And it says at the beginning of your instep, create a treasure token for each creature that died this turn. So if you're going to be doing your one-sided board wipes, you're going to be doing things like that. Maha is going to get you a lot of treasures, which I think is really good. It gives you just a burst of mana, which this deck can use really well. It gets huge bursts of card draw, so you have a ton of cards all at once, so you need a lot of mana. If it's one-time mana like treasures, it just helps you get stuff out of your hand and make sure you're taking advantage of all the cards you're drawing. Okay, Maha-D is only $1.75, but is a real winner. And this last one is very similar to Maha-D actually. It's sitting at $8. It's Spiteful Banditry. It's X-Red-Red for an enchantment that says when Spiteful Banditry enters the battlefield, it deals X damage to each creature, so it's a little board wipe. And then it says whenever one or more creatures your opponents control die, you create a treasure token. This ability triggers only once each turn. But it's not going to get you a huge burst of mana when you cast it, but what I think is nice about this card is the versatility. You cast it when you want to kill some stuff, and then it will just continue to sit there and gain you treasure. Yeah, I could absolutely see casting this for Red-Red, one killing everything that has one toughness on the battlefield, making a treasure, and then it just chills. I think that this is a really nice early game, a board wipe that doesn't kill any of your stuff hypothetically, and gives you that bank of mana that you can use in the late game when things get crazy. Heck, I probably wouldn't, but you could realistically play this for two, just have it come out in the battlefield, and then as your game plan moves on, you just are getting treasures. Yeah, played on turn two for Red-Red, and just wait until it gives you a bunch of value. It's $8 for spiteful banditry, but I do think it's going to put in a fair amount of work in your games. Yeah, me too. I made this note on Black Sun Zenith, but the thing that is cool about damage dealers that you can affect the cost of, or you can... X spells? Yeah, X spells in this thing is that with your counters, you can be in control of how much damage you need to wipe your opponent's board as opposed to yours. What lives? What dies? You'll be like, well, if I just spread my counters out and make sure nothing has above too toughness, then this is a full one-sided board wipe for four. Yeah, really tidy, really powerful. I think it's going to be great in this deck. That brings the total upgrade to $48.50 right under the wire, getting you some real value in here, though, and I think is a reasonable upgrade. We do have a couple of cards we want to mention before moving on to the cuts. These are sort of maybe board cards, is what I called them. Well, yeah, this card I wanted to add. I know. Rachel was like, no. No. She's a tyrant. Tell us about your very cool card. Harbinger of Night. This card is two Black Black for a two-three spirit. Actually, it says summon spirit because it's an old card. It says, during your upkeep, put a minus one, one-one counter on each creature. So it just does the thing every turn as it goes around. The reason we didn't put it in the deck is because it is a reserve list card and this price is probably not what's going to stay at and we didn't want to just tell you to go buy a card and then it ends up being a $70 card. Yeah, it's sitting at $21 right now, but with the popularity of this pre-con, it's very likely that it is very difficult to get your hands on and gets very expensive very fast. Yeah, reserve list cards tend to go up in value and not go down in value. Which is what the reserve lists do. So if you want to spend some money, pick up a Harbinger of Night. It's sweet. It's very good in the deck, but we can't necessarily guarantee it's going to be an easy card for you to find. There are a couple of sweet cards in the main set that you can keep an eye out for. We don't usually do main set cards in the upgrade just because we don't know how expensive they are. We don't know how hard it is to get a hold of them, but there are some good ones that are worth mentioning. This one's just an uncommon. This thing's pretty good. This is Darkness Descends. This is two black, black for a sorcery and it just puts two minus one, minus one counters on each creature. This is really neat. I mean, it gets you the full value for everything on the board. And even if it's not a full board wipe, sometimes it just leaves your opponent's creatures smaller and vulnerable and it's pretty solid. Yeah, I mean, Black Sun Zenith where X is two. That's what this is. And getting minus two, minus one, minus one on everything, I think it's going to take a lot of commanders, it's going to take a lot of creatures to be zero ones, basically. And that is a precarious place for them to be. It's a really good thing for you to make your proliferation stuff even better. Anytime you can blank at the board and minus one counters, your deck is going to be super charged. But cool. Another effect like that is great. Finally, there's a new oof that is very cool in this deck. It's Shadow Urchin. It's two and a hybrid black red for a three, four creature oof. Whenever this creature attacks, blight one. So you put a minus one counter on your own stuff, but it also says you draw a card. Whenever a creature you control with one or more counters on it dies, exhale that many cards from the top of your library until your next end step, you may play those cards. So you attack, you put a minus one counter on something. If it dies, you get to impulse draw some amount of cards to spend that turn. We've given you some big bursts of mana, some ways to like dump a bunch of cards onto the battlefield at the same time. This is another good source of a lot of card advantage elements. Yeah, seems very cool. Also just when it attacks, you draw a card. I love it. It's a great place to start. Yeah. Shadow Urchin, that's a new one. Pretty fun. All right, we've added 10 cards, which means we have to do the toughest thing in magic. We have to say goodbye to 10 cards. So sorry. Actually, I'm not that sorry on some of these. It's fine. Some of these can go. Starting with this first one that we just both were like, what's that doing here? Got it. Yeah, this first one is Horder's Greed. This basically is just a pretty, I don't know, inefficient card draw spell that also loses you life as it goes on. It clashes. It clashes and you can keep reusing it. But we've sort of lowered the mana value of this deck overall. We're going to cut some big things in a second here. So it just gets worse and it's not super efficient at card draw. The next one that we are cutting is a Seven Mana Plainswalker. It's Liliana Deathwielder. This is one of the more expensive reprints in the deck, but Seven Mana to kill one thing or get one minus one minus one counter is just not the rate that we're looking for in this deck. Yeah, it doesn't even necessarily come down and kill something immediately. Well, yeah, right. You have to put something on and then kill it. Yeah, exactly. So if you pay Seven Mana and then you put a single minus one minus one counter on something and then they attack and kill Liliana, that's not good. That's not what you want for Seven Mana. Like we said, we were on Seven Mana to be haymakers to slam the door shut. This doesn't really do that. Nope. Seven Mill, The Ender Sun, which as we said is a high value reprint and it is a cool card. It is. It's Six Mana for something that makes your spells not able to be countered and then getting your instep you to scuver five. I think discover is a little bit of a trap. Yeah, I think it's quite good. Yeah, it's neat. It gets you things for free, but at least discover puts it into your hand, but I think it feels like it's going to be amazing and it always disappoints a little bit. Yeah. That's why I feel about Cascade and Discover. You could totally leave this card in and it would be fine. I just don't think you need it. You have a lot of card advantage. You have a lot of ways to make mana, especially with the upgrade. I agree. I don't think you need it. Up next is always sad to cut. It's Gravedad. Gravetitan is in this deck. It is essentially a place for you to store minus one counters. You make zombies. You can put counters on them. Yep, sure. But we've added better ways to make tokens and give you places to put counters. There's no real major synergy in the deck besides it just being a cool big guy. Up next we have Chain Reaction. This is a two red red for a thing that just does basically damage wipe for a number of creatures on the thing. It's a fine board wipe. I run it in a lot of red decks. Yep. I just think Spideful Banditry is like a better addition there and you have plenty of disruption and this one doesn't have any direct counters synergy. So I cut it. I think that's fair. Up next is a three mana rockets commander's sphere. You are either playing a three mana commander in your command zone or a four mana commander in your command zone. So commander's sphere just doesn't really fit into the curve. It also doesn't really give you all that much mana. I'm so sorry commander's sphere. You were once one of the first adds I would do to any deck. I don't play you anymore. After that we have Archfiend of Ifnir. This is another one that was on that high value reprints list and this is basically a big flying guy that makes it so whenever you cycle or discard another card you put a minus one counter on each creature your opponent's control. Here's the thing. There are two cards in this deck that cycle or discard. It's weird. You won't trigger it. You won't trigger it. So I was thinking about it and I think the world where this triggers the most is where you just go pop pop pop pop pop and you put counters on all your stuff and at the end of your turn you go I've got too many cards. I have to discard. Discarding the hand size with onto you will is like how you will trigger this the most reliable and then it wipes the board every turn which is neat. It's neat. I also like if you've just drawn a ton of cards off of onto you will and then you wipe the board you're like okay I already just I just drew a ton of cards. I just got it with my cards. I'm pretty good. Yeah, I don't I don't this card strange in the deck. It's great and a lot of decks. This isn't one of them. And I'm also cutting one of the ways to discard cards which is cathartic reunion which you probably know this card. It's additional cost to cast this you discard a card or discard two cards and then it draws three cards. This is not card advantage. It's just card selection. Card selection you've got a lot of advantage and we added a little bit more so you just don't really need this spell. When I was a little biased to get rid of this card. Because you say this never happens but in my play group if you say as an additional cost I'll discard two cards and cast cathartic reunion. My opponents go counterspell. They were like sick. I just got a three for one. I'll take it. Yeah, I've never had a cathartic reunion counterspelled but maybe I just play with sweeties. Finally we are cutting a fair of four not finalist two more fair of four young you. This is really cool card. It's six and a green whenever fair for enters create a number of one one green sapper link creature tokens equal to the number of counters among creatures target player controls. So and then you can tap it to double the number of counters on a creature. This makes a ton of things. Yeah, your opponents have a lot of creatures that have survived all your minus one minus one counters. Yeah, or if you have a lot of creatures that are just sitting with a lot of counters on them. It just feels like sort of a strange place to get a whole bunch of one ones. I feel like it's ceiling is a lot lower in this deck because if you have a lot of counters on things they die. Yeah. This makes like I feel like this would be a sick finisher in a deck where you are like putting lots of plus one plus one. It's such a good like cathars crusade card. It's like so good in plus one plus one counters decks where you're trying to stack a ton of counters but in minus one minus one counters deck you're right the ceiling is just much lower and for a seven mana card you want that ceiling as high as possible. Yeah, wrong deck. Final cut. Puppeteer clique. I like this card. Me too. Honestly, I think that this being on the cutting list shows that it's a pretty strong put together deck. It is. Kind of from the thing. Puppeteer's clique is basically just one it is a five mana three two when you play it you get to put a creature from the opponent's graveyard into the battlefield under control and it gets haste and at the beginning of your next instep you exile it. It's like a piece of removal that like gives you the thing. It doesn't remove anything. It's good with removal. It reanimates the thing. It exiles the thing. When this creature enters put target creature card from opponent's graveyard. It's graveyard disruption but it doesn't like. You're right. It doesn't get something that was on the board but it gets rid of that thing afterwards. It does. It reanimates the best thing in a graveyard and then gets rid of it. But then it has persist so it comes back with a minus one counter which does get the Auntie UL thing unless you do it a second time. This is fine but I actually think persist is interestingly enough not that great in this deck because persist doesn't trigger if it already has a minus one counter on it and you want to be able to put counters on your stuff. So it gets you the thing. This is okay just for the cost. I think it's not quite good enough and it's not quite on theme with everything. It's not quite synergistic enough. You won't necessarily have stuff in your opponent's graveyard. You're going to be killing a fair amount of stuff but not necessarily like the biggest thing on the board which you kind of want this to reanimate like an Itali. Something big. Exactly. And you can't really. It's better in a mill deck when you have a ton of options or in a plus one counter deck where you can reuse the persist multiple times. There's just a few things that are a little weird about this card. I don't love with reanimate cards like that. Just relying on the fact that your opponent's will have great creatures to reanimate with it because it just doesn't happen in a lot of games. I agree. Or they're just not in the graveyard yet. But of course if you disagree with any of these cuts. Don't cut them. Go through the deck and cut your own things. Cut your own stuff. You could cut blow flying fustation if you're trying to get away from that infinite combo stuff. But those are the 10 that we cut in this upgrade. So that is the full upgrade. We've given you 10 to add, 10 to take out. But we're going to give you a couple of tips for piloting this deck in just a few minutes. Of course if you want to pick up any of the cards that we talked about today, if you want to get the pre-con, you can support the show by using your affiliate link over at cardkingdom.com slash command. Card Kingdom is a great place to pick up the pre-con. It's a great place to pick up this upgrade. In fact there's going to be a link to the architect deck where we're going to have the entire pre-con and we're going to have the 10 cards that we added to it. If you don't want to buy the pre-con you can just add all those cards to a card. And you get going. But you can buy the 10 cards from the upgrade from Card Kingdom. Do it quick. It will out pretty fast. But it's a good easy way to support the show by using that affiliate link and just throwing us some credit with a sponsor that supported us for a really long time. And then you'll probably play with all those cards unsleeved and not in a box, right? Never! I would never look at these foils. I want them protected by sleeves and by play mats and by deck boxes and by binders. But sadly there's nowhere to get those. UltraPro.com slash Command has all of the gaming accessories that you need to be a well-accessed orized magic player. It's the new year so I'm doing a bunch of organizing, I'm doing a bunch of sorting, I'm trying to get my cards in order and I use UltraPro products to do that. The card sorting tray has truly changed my life. It's like how I store cards when they're not away. And you can get just high quality sleeves and deck boxes and play mats. Everything that you need to build a new deck. Check out UltraPro, get their new Apex sleeves, sign up for their newsletter, they're the best over at ultrapro.com slash command. Alright, let's talk about it. Let's talk about how to pilot Auntie Ool. So we'll reiterate something that we said earlier, which is when you sit down at the table with Auntie Ool, you're going to be the villain. Make sure you are like playing with a table that is ready to play with a bit of a villain. And you're ready to play the villain. You have to, when you're playing a deck, that the whole plan is to make it harder for your opponents to keep their stuff around. You have to recognize that they have to stop you. Yeah, and you have to be able to find that little bit of glee in your heart when you destroy their plan. Which I know is in there. I feel it in all of you. Embrace it. Embrace it. It's fun to be the villain sometimes. It's fun to sit down and be like, I'm going to be a wall. Can you get through me? And this deck is a great example of a deck that can put that vibe out into the world. Yeah, but it's not everyone's vibe, so make sure you're with the right table. Exactly. So, I think when you're playing this deck at first, you want to be building out your board and putting counters on your own creatures pretty often. Because as soon as you start distributing stuff to other people's creatures, they're really going to notice. Even the little pinging of life loss thing will really set off a radar in people's minds that you need to be dealt with. So at first, you just want to be generating card advantage, putting things on your creatures, getting your ramp out, building your stuff to the point where then you can start switching to offense on this whole thing. I think you want to play this like a... This is a control deck. It wants to play as a control deck. And Auntie was going to draw you a lot of cards sometimes all at once. So, you're just going to need to do a lot of thinking and planning and the whole thing. No. Figure out who's going to be your toughest opponent. You're very good against creature decks, but you're going to have a little bit more trouble interacting with spells decks or with enchantress decks, those kind of things. So, understand, okay, if I'm in the 1v1, I have a lot of tools against the big stompy player, but I have a little bit fewer tools against the enchantress player, so I should really focus my attention. Yeah, and try and make kind of a plan against them. I think threat assessment is really key in this deck, and I don't think you want to just remove everything. Yeah. Like in a lot of control decks, you're just like, boardwrap, get rid of everything, kill everything. But I think in this one, you want to just being like, well, that's going to be something I can't deal with, so I need to deal with it now. Because you actually want there to be a bit of a board going on so that your things like your black suns are going to be big, impactful hits that deal a lot of damage to everybody. Yeah, I agree. You're actually in a tough spot if there's not a ton of creatures on the battlefield, because a lot of your cards are dead. Yeah, exactly. It's definitely something that you need to keep in mind to be like, okay, if I proliferate, how many creatures are there going to be? If this happens, like being able to predict how your opponents are going to respond, what they're going to do, who's going to be your toughest matchup plus one counter decks or your nightmare. Yeah. Because they're the anti-matter to your deck. You obviously both hate each other. You must do battle until the end. I think one thing you should know going into this, it's not going to be a mindless deck. It's not just going to be play the cards, draw cards, play cards, draw cards. Counters take thinking, especially minus one counters, because it might make sense instead of killing off the creature that you've been working on to start putting counters on a bigger creature, to set something up so when you are casting one of your, put it all over, you kill a lot of things. You might want to be careful about getting your creatures below certain values so they can attack and block and things like that. You just want to be thinking the whole time. You want to be thinking. The other thing I would say about this deck is bring dice. Bring a lot of them and bring them all in one color. You should have a little set of as many D6s that are the same color as possible. Spread out to your opponents. Ideally red ones or black ones. Ultra Pro has minus one, minus one counter dice. I don't know if they're still in stock, but having something specific that is legible to your opponents so they know what you're demonstrating. If you just show up with a whole bunch of random dice, it's really tough to know what kind of counter is what. You're bringing the weird dice to the table and make sure you have dice to match. Yeah. Then I think the last thing I want to say about this is that you're going to draw a lot of hate eventually. You want to make sure that by the time you really start drawing the hate, you have set up a card draw and removal engine so that they just do not have the resources to compete with your resources. Absolutely. You're going to be playing this game by drawing more cards, by having more answers, by having bigger creatures because all of them are so wee. But the second is a ton of fun and honestly, I played against it a little bit and it is definitely a frustrating thing because you can't keep your stuff on the board. But it moves the game forward, it is dynamic, it's an interesting puzzle to play through. So hopefully you get a chance to play it or play against it and everybody has a ton of fun. Thank you for watching this episode. We'll be upgrading the other pre-con as well. We've got the best commanderous episode and we've got in the 99. So lots of lower wind content around the corner. But before we say goodbye, we have to say thank you to our amazing team here at the Command Zone. Thank you to Sebastian Salazar, Karina Cruz, Josh Diaz, John Schneider, Garab Ghaladi, Jamie Block, Jake Boss, Becky Bell, Rachel Kendra, Eric Lamansum, Lung, Josh Murphy, Evan Limburger, Sam Waldo, Josh Leequid, Jimmy Wong, and of course, Jordan Pridgen. That's me. Thanks for taking the time. Yeah, always fun. Let's get ready. Where we work, create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday.com.