“Witherbloom Pestilence” Precon Upgrade | Secrets of Strixhaven | 741

When life gets hectic, energy ups and downs are all you need. If you're seeking energy reassurance, Eonnext can help. From smart tech that helps you take control of your energy future to always staying below the price cap with NexPledge. We're here for whatever's next. Just one of the reasons why we're rated excellent on TrustPilot by our customers. Find out more at Eonnext.com. NexPledge variable rates are always below the option price cap. 25 pounds exit fee per fuel applies. Eonnext's eligibility and fees and fees apply. TrustPilot February 2026. 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 today joining me is Murph. Hello there. I'm excited to be able to upgrade a very, very cool deck with you today, Rachel. Absolutely. This is the last of the five. We did it. It's here. Finally. Sorry it took so long. This is one that everybody has been waiting for, Rachel. Everybody has been down the column. It's always that way. Where is the wither bloom pre-con upgrade? We're delivering. It's here. It's right here. Today we are upgrading the wither bloom pestilence pre-con from Secrets of Strixhaven. Of course with our upgrades we add 10 cards. We take 10 cards out. We use a budget of $50 to improve it, get it in peak, fighting shape for your next game night. If you're watching this now you're probably like, yeah, I've had it for ages. Tell me how to upgrade it. But we're still going to do all the stats as usual in case you haven't picked it up yet waiting on this. But it's time to get to know the deck and the best way to get to know any pre-con, of course, is by meeting the face commanders. Would you like to introduce Dina? Yes. Let's talk about Dina Essence Brewer. It's one black and a green for a two three. Whenever you sacrifice a creature, draw a card. This ability triggers only once each turn. You also pay two, tap, sacrifice another creature. You gain X life and put X plus one plus one counters on target creature you control where X is a sacrifice creature's power. Okay. So a little bit of sacrifice, a little bit of pump, a little bit of life gain. Dina's kind of going in a couple different directions. Yes. Dina has a lot of words on her that all kind of pull and separate things that you can do with it. We have obviously the first line of text, which is whenever you sacrifice a creature, draw a card. So we know we want to be sacrificing things. Creatures, for sure. Creatures. We want to be sacrificing creatures absolutely no matter what. And yeah, as a second ability as well where it's gaining you life and putting counters on something. Right. So it's sort of transferring one creature's power to another creature and giving gaining you a little bit of life along the way. I think this is actually a sort of a deceptively open-ended commander. You could build this as a plus one plus one counters deck. You could build this as a sacrifice deck. It depends on like the part of Dina that excites you. So we're going to get into the stats of this deck in just a moment to tell you sort of what direction this pre-con takes Dina. But let's meet the backup commander before we get to that. And that one is Gorma the Gullets. This one's also one black and a green. This one is a one with lifelink though. Whenever another creature you control dies, put a one one counter on Gorma. And on token creatures you control enter with an additional plus one plus one counter on them for each creature that died under your control this turn. So probably you want things to be dying. And he's a pest frog mirth. A pest frog. I'm sorry. I miss probably the most important line of text on the card. Look at him. Gorma the Gullet is adorable. Yeah. So this is has some similar words to Dina. We definitely want to be sacrificing a bunch of creatures and we want to be turning a lot of creatures into plus one plus one counters either on creatures that enter after they die or on Gorma himself. Yeah. Notably this does not make you sacrifice things in and of itself. It doesn't have that sacrifice outlet on it. It is also not giving you the payoff the card draw for doing that. But when things die it's giving you a different payoff. Right. It's also worth noting that Gorma wants a lot of creatures to die where Dina only can sacrifice one creature and it looks like it wants you to sacrifice a big one. So you can turn a big creature into a lot of plus one plus one counters where Gorma says sacrifice a lot of small things and make all of your creatures that come after that at least non-token creatures bigger. Yeah. Because with Dina you have to tap in order to do the ability and it says only once each turn. So of course we're going to sacrifice one thing a turn with Dina right Rachel? So they definitely have sort of similar text boxes but may want different things in the deck. And I think that's going to be a bit of a theme this episode is figuring out how to make the all of these directions sort of feel like one direction. The band. Baby you light up my world like nobody else. Okay. That's the only one direction song I know. You had one in the pocket. I'm proud of you. That was so good. That was the most popular one Rachel. All right. In this episode we're going to be talking about a lot of magic cards. We're going to be talking with this pre-con. If you want to pick up this pre-con or any of the cards we talk about today in this upgrade you can support the show by using our affiliate link at cardkingdom.com slash command. Your kingdom is the best especially when you're building a new deck because you get a big list of cards that you want. You can paste it into one website that has a lot of the cards in one place. You can pick the version that you want the foiling the condition and you can pick and choose the ones that you like all on one page and then you hit check out and it chips for one place and it shows up on your doorstep in a single package and you're ready to build. It's always exciting when you get a package from card kingdom because it means I've got a big stack of cards waiting to be shuffled into decks or a brand new one and while you're shopping you can support the show by just using that affiliate link bookmark it. It helps us a lot at cardkingdom.com slash command. And the thing that you want to do once you get those cards is sleeve them up in ultra pro sleeves specifically apex sleeves are some of the best sleeves in the business. That's what all my cards go and all my decks go in apex sleeves. The shuffle feels so great. So nice. Ultra pro has basically all the accessories that you could ever want or need for playing magic the gathering their play mats are amazing that the manate line with like all white play mats and then the single man assemble on it so that you can say hey. Clean shop clean beautiful. I am a mono black player. Got that skull on it. You can take the play mats to magic cons and you can have people sign them in a nice black sharpie and it looks clean and cool and you can read all of the names and all the signatures and all of the best. So often at these cons that somebody will hand you like a complicated dark play mat and you're like I'm going to do my best to sign it with the black sharpie but it doesn't show up very well. So get yourself a nice moment that you can see all the signatures you work so hard to get on the manate line. Plus you can get a frame and put that play mat into a frame and the ultra pro all display thing. It's awesome. And you can put it on your wall put it in your office put it I don't know above your your kitchen table. I don't know where you want it. I don't know what the layout of your house is and you can support the show. You can link at ultra pro dot com slash command. I was trying to think of the word kitchen table. And I was like I was like what's a silly place to put a little play mat above above the toilet. I don't know. I don't know where you want it. Finally you can support us directly by going to patreon dot com slash command zone. That's the place you can join our community. You can get access to our discord. You can hang out with me Josh Jimmy Murph all of members of our team are in there. You can ask us questions directly about our content or our decks or personal questions. We'll answer at our own discretion of course. But we love to chat in there and meet everybody. Plus at certain tiers you get access to exclusive content like turn talk. I don't know if you saw the 10 player game that we released Murph did much of the editing on that. But we released a little sneak peek of what turn talk kind of looks like that goes along with that 10 player game. So if you liked that join our patreon you get access to all of the turn talks for all of the extra turns that have been released so far. Plus we shout out one lucky patron every single podcast episode and this one is dedicated to Austin Gossamire. Austin. You rock. You do rock. Thanks Austin. Let's get into it. Okay we're going to talk about what comes in the wither bloom pre-con when you buy it off the shelf. Starting with the reprint value we have a couple of caveats to get out of the way. We are recording this pre-con episode a little bit later than all the other ones so as of time we're recording these decks have come out. But we are still using the numbers that we took before the decks are released just so you can have a more direct comparison from this episode to all of our other pre-con episodes. Because these numbers are relative we take them all sort of before the prices change once the reprints are announced. It's better to have them all be relative at the same time rather than four of them before the decks came out and one of them after. It makes it look sort of you're comparing apples to oranges at that point. And of course reprints when you reprint a card the price goes down. This is how it goes. Right so the prices that we're saying today aren't literal prices this is what the price was before the reprint was announced. All of that being said these decks are currently MSRPed at $50. You can get the wither bloom one for about $50 right now sometimes a little bit cheaper so hopefully you're getting a good deal on it. But all of that out of the way the total reprint value for this deck is… $178. Okay there's some interesting things to put this number into context. First of all the 2025 average reprint value was $152.71. So this is above our average for last year saying that you're getting more reprint value in this deck than you were on average last year. But this is the lowest reprint value of the five pre-cons for Secrets of Strixhaven and sort of by a lot. It's $50 less value than the next least valuable pre-con which I believe is Prismari. That's kind of crazy. Which is kind of crazy. It's much less value than the other ones and that's just based on price fluctuation when Wizards designs these kind of things. They don't know exactly what the reprint value is going to be depending on all sorts of uncontrollable factors. But yeah it's an interesting thing to keep in mind that this one is less value so if you're buying this to pull the parts out of it you're getting a little bit less than you would if you're buying one of the other four. It's still better than the overall average from last year. That's true. And that only includes the reprints not the 12 new cards, the three main set cards and the 16 basic lands. So for a little bit of context we'd like to take a bang for your buck value because pre-cons have come at so many different prices lately. Like the Silver Quill wrote one right now is like $80. We try and just take a number and give you an adjustable value so you can determine whether it's worth it for you. So the bang for your buck for this one if you get to buy this pre-con at $50 is $3.56 of American dollars of reprints for your $1 spent. So you spend $1 you get $3.50 back. Pretty good. That is above average from last year where the bang for your buck average was $3.06. If you find it at $60 or $80 you can take that number and you can recalculate and decide whether you think it's a good deal or not. Do your own math. Or don't. Or don't. This isn't Quadrix. This is Whitherbloom. This is Whitherbloom. It's more about vibes here. And I know you're like numbers, numbers, numbers. Tell me the cool cards that they're reprinting. And we will. It's time to talk about the notable reprints which is all the reprints in the deck that are worth $5 or more before the reprints were announced. Let's start with a big one. The big one that kind of had crept up. I didn't realize quite how expensive this card was. Guillaume Masterchef. At the beginning of your end step make a number of food tokens each with a number of non-token creatures. You had enter the battlefield under your control this turn. You can sacrifice some food and pay one to tap target creature and it gains indestructible. Oh yeah. Guillaume's house food decks are more and more popular. It's crept up to $20 to buy Guillaume. Just kind of crazy. Wild. Very powerful card, not one I expected to be this much, but I'm glad to see a reprint especially at his home in Weatherbloom. Absolutely. Up next is a card that they've been reprinting a lot of in pre-counts which I like a lot. It's Toxic Deiluge. It's got some new pest art. It's sitting at $14 before the reprint was announced. Oren Frostfang. That's the type of creature you control, Death Touch and whatever creature you control those combat damage to a player draw a card. That one's sitting at $14 as well, similar to Toxic Deiluge. So great to see a reprint here. Sitting at $12 before they announced those reprints is Nether Trader. This is a good card in any deck that wants to sacrifice non-token creatures because it's easy to get it back to the battlefield. The next one is, oh, one of my favorites. Oh, Jadar. That's the beginning of end step if you control no creature with the kid and make it 2-2 with the kid. Yeah. Just keeps pumping out bodies. Jadar's $10 which makes sense because he's basically better blossom but for decayed zombies. It's sort of a stretch but because you can't get more than one decayed zombie. You don't have to wait a whole turn. But you don't wait. You get them right away. You don't have to lose any life. It's better blossom. It's basically better blossom. It's better blossom the man. Jadar's sweet and this price has gone up and up over the years so having it be in the deck automatically is actually really great. The next one is sitting at $7.50 before they announced it. It's a Blight Mound. This is from the last trick saving. Tune a black for an enchantment that makes your pests a little bit bigger and gives them menace. Then it says whenever a non-token creature you control dies, create a pest. This is old pests. Of course not new pests who care about attacking. Yeah. Blossom and Bogby's also sitting at $7.50. That's the one creature attacks you gain 2 life and then creatures get plus x, plus x where x is the number of life you gain this turn. So obviously very good in pretty much any life gain strategy. So has held up a bit of value there. Michael Loth at $6. I'm surprised that this one was creeping up. This is like an old commander staple. It's a big plus one, plus one counters card. It has devourers who sacrifice a ton of things. It gets a ton of counters on it and then it spits out a bunch more on your upkeep. If you've ever untapped with a Michael Loth, you know it's very powerful. If you've ever cast a Michael Loth, you know you never untapped with it. Yeah. Sad but true Rachel. Sad but true. The next one is Pond of Ulamog sitting at $6. This is similar to the pest mound whenever a creature or another non-token creature you control or this creature or another non-token creature you control dies. You make an Eldrazi spawn. Great in a sacrifice deck like this one. Exactly. Priest of the Forgotten Gods is at $5.50. That's the tap sacrifice to other creatures. Any number of target players lose to life and sacrifice a creature of their choice and you gain two black mana and draw a card. Does so much. This card's great. And it says that you're sacrificing two creatures. So it's good. I mean, we've seen a lot of sacrifice synergy stuff, a lot of things that care about sacrificing a lot of creatures. So that makes me think that we are going to be in the business of sacrificing many things, which makes sense with Dina in the command zone. Yeah, but lots of great reprints. Absolutely. Love seeing all this. Absolutely. All right. That's the deck for my financial perspective. We want to take a look at it from a mechanical perspective. And the way that we do that is we break down the... Stats. Stats. Stats. Stats. Stats. Stats. Stats. Stats. Stats. Stats. Stats. You're going to get a little crowy. Oh, well. I don't know what pests sound like. And they're bugs. Okay. Well, bugs don't really make noise. They're kind of bug dogs in this one. Yeah, they look a little different. Okay. All right. We're going to start with the stats that go in every commander deck, breaking down the nuts and bolts, the vegetables, starting with ramp. Yeah. There's 12 pieces of ramp in here. Pretty good. Yeah. Like that a lot. Like this is usually between 10 and 12. Yep, exactly. There's 11 pieces of card advantage. Also good. Nice. Also a good number, a little lower than what we expect normally. But the fact that there's one DNA is a piece of card draw in the command zone goes a long way. Yep. 12 pieces of targeted disruption. Plenty. Plenty. That's a ton of great stuff to stop your opponents. Yeah. Eight pieces of mass disruption. Okay. That's kind of a lot. Mass disruption, we like to define a little bit that could include board wipes, that could include like half wipes that blow up like all the artifacts and enchantments or like all the little things, stuff like that. Those are all, you spend one card to answer many cards. So eight is a little above what we normally recommend. So that says that this deck is more disruptive than you might think. I mean, for black and green, that is understandable. Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. There's 37 lands, 16 of those are basic lands. Pretty normal. Yeah. A little under what I tend to put into my decks these days, but an acceptable number. Yep. You will be able to play magic with this deck. Okay. The next chunk of stats that we go through are the stats that help us get to know this deck a little bit better, to understand how it is working, what it is prioritizing. And we have a, there's a lot of different directions here. So there's a lot of numbers that we broke down for this deck in particular. We're going to start with the first one, which is just ways to sacrifice creatures, period. There are 22 ways to sacrifice creatures. Tons. A ton. I mean, that's fair and understandable because both potential commanders want you to be able to sacrifice them. It is worth noting that of those 22, only four of those ways to sacrifice creatures are free and repeatable. So I mean, by repeatable, I mean you can do it more than once per turn or per turn rotation. So it's the ones that don't require you to tap basically, or it's not like an instant or sorcery that sacrifices one thing. Exactly. So four is much lower than what I would play in a deck that cares about sacrificing. I want my sack outlets to be able to sacrifice basically whenever you want. I think that's a number that worries me a little bit. Yeah. So we'll see what we can do about that a little bit later. Another category that we're looking at is sack fodder because if we have sacrifice outlets, we want to have things to sacrifice. Yeah. So this is tokens. This is stuff like the Nether trader that can come back to the battlefield naturally. Creatures that are easily recurred or make a lot of stuff for you to sacrifice. Yep. And there's 19 pieces. That's plenty. That's a lot. That's great. We want to sacrifice things. So this deck has the sacrifice. It has the things to sacrifice. So that's good. Or sacrifice. We're definitely doing that. The next category is a little bit deceptive. It is life gain. Because there are a number of cards that care about life gain, we wanted to see how capable the deck was of doing that. Yeah. And there are 22 overall pieces of life gain. That's a lot. But... But a lot of the ways that these things gain life is like when they attack or it's an instant or sorcery that does it once. Or it's like when you gain life, you make a pest that gains life. So a lot of them are a little bit more conditional than you would think. And it makes this deck sort of challenging for you to repeatedly trigger the things that care about you gaining life. Yeah. Life gain is always just a nice thing to have in a commander game. But even though this is 22 pieces of life gain, the specific cards in here don't necessarily, like you said, let you do that over and over again. So it's kind of hard to build around. There's no creature that just says whenever a creature enters the battlefield under your control, gain one life. Like that's not a thing that exists in the deck. And those are the things that I would put into a life gain deck first. Yeah. Give me an ass that's worded. Yeah. So it's a bit... The life gain sub theme is, I think, a little suspicious. Especially considering the next category, there are eight life gain payoffs in this deck. And that's stuff that says when you gain life, something. And we're already looking at this thinking, hmm, it's not the most consistent thing in the world to be able to gain life. Now again, granted, Dina does let you gain life. We are not missing that fact. You have one way to do it, but... Plus you two mana a turn. And you have to sacrifice a creature to do it. A heavy cost. Yeah. What are you doing? Sacrificing a one-one and pain two and tapping your commander. You draw a card and then you can get that life gain payoff. But is that really what you want to be doing in this deck? Especially when a lot of the life gain payoffs in the deck care about at the end of each turn if you've gained life. And you're just not going to be able to trigger it that many times. Exactly. So the eight life gain payoffs are pretty wild. The other thing I wanted to investigate is the counters theme to see if that is something that matters if we're looking for like a plus one, plus one counters matter or if it's just sort of a power boost. Yeah, because again, both potential commanders do have to do with counters. Like they do have that on there. And so it's like, how much do we have in there? Not much is the takeaway. Yes. There are seven things. Yeah. So those are just cards that put plus one, plus one counters on it. There's a couple of plus one, plus one counter payoffs, but they do not make up a large theme in the deck. Yeah. And there's not really anything that accelerates that. There's no other than DNF. No other than DNF. Oh, no, no. No payoffs for that. So as you can see, we've got sacrifice stuff. We've got life gain stuff. We've got plus one, plus one counters. We've got a lot of different things going on in this deck. So we're going to try and streamline stuff in just a moment. But before we get to that, we haven't been talking about the average mana value index lately. And this one is pretty good at 3.05. That's what I would expect for a deck like this. Honestly, it's a little bit low for pre-cons. So we're happy at 3. Yeah, we take those. Oftentimes, these decks will be full of just like some cool five and six mana things that you could potentially play, but there's probably just a little bit too much of those types of things. Right. So this one isn't too far in that direction, I would say. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about the goals that you had with this upgrade. We did choose Dina as the commander for this one. The card draw in the command zone is just hard to deny. Yeah. I think in a pre-con environment especially, I guess just a commander in general, just having card draw in the command zone is just so hard to ignore and say, actually, I don't want that because it just continues to get your gameplay churning. You don't have to worry as much about going out of your way to get those card draw cards in order to keep the deck going. All you need to do is do what the commander says to do and your deck will continue to function. So I think that's probably the biggest power of Dina. And so by doing so, I think most of our deck upgrades today are going to be focused around how can we make that part of the commander work the best? Because it is also just the most powerful part. Right. I agree. The other thing is the commander's activated ability is just an expensive way to fuel a lot of your payoffs. And paying to and sacrificing a creature every turn to keep using Dina's ability is just sort of an expensive way to go about it. So we were like, okay, let's put some more sack outlets in it that are repeatable and that mean that we can sacrifice four creatures a turn, once on your turn and once on each opponent's turn. So you can be drawing maximum amounts of cards with your commander's ability and not paying that two mana to do so. Exactly. Because Dina says, do it once each turn. And we're like, well, what if we want to do it once on every single person's turn? That's the most ideal because that's the best way to get the most out of this. And yeah, I do definitely agree that the second ability is more of a side quest. It's still something that you have. It's like, it's nice to have if you need a little bit of life gain to try to survive. Great. It is at instant speed. So that option is still there. But I think that's the way that either that this deck can be built with Dina as the commander is you either build around the first ability and then the second ability is gravy. We build around the second ability and the first ability is gravy. Yeah. And given that the first ability is the more powerful one and there seems to be more stuff in the deck already that leans more towards that first ability. I mean, that's the 22 ways to sacrifice creatures and the 19 cards that are dedicated towards sack fodder. It definitely says we're going in that first. Exactly. Abilities. Exactly. Like we're not, this deck is not looking at what is the highest power stuff that is possible. There's like a couple things that are high power, but more so incidentally. So you could build around that, but it's just a lot more to do than a 10 cards 10 in 10 cards out like we're doing today. There are nine five drops in this deck. That is a lot of five drops, especially in a deck that is sort of consistently using its commanders like pay to and tap to sacrifice ability. So I just found a lot of cards to get stuck in your hand while you're gold fishing. But I like five drops because what if I like playing five drops Rachel? Well, then you can't activate your commander's ability and you won't do anything. Okay. So the five drops have to be like really good and you need very powerful five drops. And because we're adding ways that you don't have to pay that to mana to your commander's ability, it'll be a little bit easier to cast your more expensive spells. Finally, just improving the mana production overall in the deck. It is sort of deceptively mana hungry. Yeah. It looks like, oh, well, the curve is really, really low. So that means I don't have to worry about making tons of mana. Maybe that's not something that this deck wants to do. No, what the deck wants to do is play out a ton of small things, refill the hand, play out a ton of small things, refill hand, play out a ton of small things. That's the idea of what we're going for here. Right. So improving the amount of mana that you can make means you can deploy all of those cards we're hoping to draw. Okay. So we're going to get to the upgrade in just a moment. But before we move on, I want to take a second to talk about some of the new cards and highlight the ones that you won't have seen before and the ones that are very powerful in this deck in particular. Yeah. So one of the best cards in this deck is Rib Truss Roaster. Did I say that correctly, Rachel? I guess. Great. I did it. It's four and a green for a three-three with Devourer 1. That's as this creature enters, you may sacrifice any number of creatures. This creature enters with that many plus one, plus one counters on it. And at the beginning of your end step, make a one, one black and green pest creature tokens equal to number of plus one, plus one counters on this creature. So it keeps pumping out tokens. On end step now. On end step. So you don't have to wait like Mycoloth. Now that's what we like to hear. It's Devourer is not as explosive as Mycoloth. So it can't naturally put that as many counters onto it as you would think as Mycoloth does, but you get those tokens right away. And this works really well with your commander's activated ability. Gives you a good place to put those plus one counters in order to improve what the roaster is doing for you. Exactly, because it doesn't care. Like even if you don't Devour anything, you just slap counters on it later. That's great. Great card. Yeah, there just aren't many ways to turn those plus one counters into payoffs and Rib Truss Roaster is one of them. A couple things to note, a notice about the roaster that we wanted to mention. This does make old pests. It is a new card, but it still makes old pests. A little bit funky. Yep. And then there's a bit of a confusing rules interaction between Devour and with Germa's ability. Gorma. Gorma. Excuse me. Do you want to walk us through that real quick? I'll do my best because magical rules are weird and confusing. They are hard. So the question is there's Devourer one on the Rib Truss Roaster. So as a creature enters, you may sacrifice any number of creatures. This creature enters with that many plus one plus one counters on it. And Gorma, the goal it says, none token creatures you control enter with an additional plus one plus one counter on them for each creature that died under your control this turn. So the question is when you play the Rib Truss Roaster and you devour things, does Gorma see the creatures that have died? The devoured creatures as creatures that have already died this turn in time for the roaster to enter with additional counters on it. Yes. The answer is unfortunately no, not really solely because the as it enters is a little bit weird and it's a little bit awkward and a little bit confusing, but the just of it is just that the creatures have not died in time for Gorma to see its ability. Right. They're both essentially replacement effects. So they both get applied at the same time, but they don't actually happen until the creature is on the battlefield. So the creatures haven't been sacrificed by the time that Gorma's ability has been applied. Yes. A very weird and awkward thing to be putting in a pre-con. Yeah. There's two devour creatures in this pre-con. His name is Gorma the Gullet and his ability is clearly based around devour and they don't work together. It's very frustrating. Yeah. Anyway, especially when the deck doesn't have a ton of ways to sacrifice a lot of things all at once. So for it to not work the way you want to with devour, I found very frustrating. But if you were playing this deck at home, no, it does not work the way you want it to. Yes. Sorry about that. Anyway, back to Cool Cards. Cool cards. This next one's awesome. I love this card. Immoral bargain. One green black as an additional cost to cast the spell sacrifice X creatures, destroy X target non-land permanence. It's a sorcery. Thank God it's a sorcery. That is hot. Remember when we used to play Maelstrom Pulse? I mean. This is so much better. If you sacrifice two creatures to this. Done. Cool. That like you just destroy two things for three mana. If you sacrifice four things to this. Insane. Incredible. Absolutely. I mean an unbelievable spell. Cleans up so many problems on the board all at once and it's a sack outlet that's going to fuel your Gorma. It's going to fuel your card draw like the cantrips if you have Dina on the battlefield. Yeah. Which is insane. Yeah. This card's incredible. It's going to go in a lot of sacrifice decks down the line. A lot of aristocrat decks with green in them. It can very easily just be like a board wipe type of situation where you're like, well because I made a ton of tokens that aren't usable to me. I'll just sacrifice six tokens. Wipe the best things off the board. Zuliport cutthroat triggers. Like it's so good. Non-land permanence. So good. Two. Yeah. This card's awesome. I think we're going to see a lot of it. And speaking of awesome, I like the wither bloom charm as well. This is black and a green for an instant. Choose one. You may sacrifice a permanent. If you do draw two cards, you gain five life or destroy target non-land permanent with mana value two or less. So this kills little problems. Soul rings, fairy masterminds, ledger shredders, lightning greaves, all kinds of stuff in the early game. Also, you could sacrifice a land or a token or a treasure and draw two cards. This is an incredibly flexible draw spell and a very good removal spell as well. Yeah. It's like a little deadly dispute plus removal spell like slapped together on a card and hey, you got the five life there option too. That keeps you alive. Like why the heck not? You might need it. You might need it. Yeah. I think this card's just really spicy and is really, really good in any deck that wants to sacrifice stuff. Like this one, Rachel. Like this one. That's crazy. Holy cow. We have got a lot of upgrades to get to this deck. Remember, we're going to put 10 cards in. We're going to take 10 cards out. We're going to use a budget of $50, but we have to take a quick break here. While we're doing that, make sure you're leaving a comment below. Tell us what you think about this pre-con. Hopefully you're excited. I'm sorry. It took so long and we will see you in just a moment. This message is sponsored by Raycon. What's up? It's me, Jack the Rabbit out here in the forest getting my pump on. 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Oh, no not me, but I will tell you about Shopify. When the command zone was just getting started, Shopify was a huge help launching our merch store, and we're still using it today. They streamline everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns, which frees us up to focus on making more magic content. And for new brands, they've got great marketing tools to get the word out with social media and email campaigns, plus built-in templates to save time building your website. Between all of that and 24-7 support, they just make the day-to-day super easy. Or in my case, the week-to-week, because I'm Rachel Weeks. Yeah, we got it. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash TCZ. Go to Shopify.com slash TCZ. That's Shopify.com slash TCZ. You know what's my favorite thing about Architect? The play tester. Architect is the deck builder with the best gold fishing experience out there, period. Clicking cards does exactly what you want, from drawing to playing to tapping, it can handle counters, tokens, dice. Whatever your deck does, Architect can help you test it, and it's fast too. Once you get the hang of it, you can test to turn five or six in like a minute, which I love because I will literally goldfish 100 times. And the more you goldfish, the better your deck's gonna be. I used to take forever to do it in paper, but I can't go back to that life. This play tester is just too good. Architect is the best place to browse, brew, and play test Commander decks. Just go to architect.com slash command zone to get started. That's ARC, HID, EKT.com slash command zone. Welcome back, everybody. It is time to upgrade the wither bloom pestulence. Weird name. Precon. There's not even pestulence in this. I know. All right. You're not even pinging. Pestulence. No, just kidding. Do that if you want. I would care, but that is not on the list for today. So we've got 10 cards to add to get this deck into peak fighting shape. We've already told you some of the things that we're hoping to do with these upgrades. So let's get right into it. All right. First up, like we said earlier, this deck wants more mana. We want to be able to get lots of mana, to do lots of things, fill our hands, dump our hand, fill our hand, dump our hands, and be able to have lots of mana to do that. So I don't want to say it's like anemic with the mana production, but it could definitely use some help. A little spice. A little spice. So a great card that we would like to add is Insidious Roots. It's a green and a black. Creature tokens you control have tap, add one mana of any color, and some other stuff that has to do with creature cards leaving graveyard. That doesn't really matter. I think that could absolutely trigger. I mean, you've got like you've blood gassed in this deck. You have another trader. You've got stuff that leave your graveyard and come back to the battlefield, make you some plant tokens, give you some extra mana. You know what? Your rights. This was more in here as like this is a more budget like cryptolith rights, but actually the more that you talk about it, the more I'm like, it's actually pretty good. Yeah, no. It's actually pretty good. Yeah. Insidious Roots is really good index like this. It means that you're getting even more value out of your pest that you're sacrificing for value. Tap them for mana and then sacrifice them and away they go. And that is a okay. That one is $2.50 for an include. Next up is growing rights of itlamoc. Yeah. That's tuna green. And when it enters, you look at some cards, get a creature from it. But most importantly, at your end step, it flips. If you have four more creatures into a guy's cradle, tap for each, a tap for a green for each creature that you control. Talk about mana production. Yeah. It's the best in the biz. Yep. This card's just good. It draws you a card. It flips. It should flip fairly easily in this deck. You're very good at going wide. So you will have a guy's cradle in no time. Yep. And that one is currently sitting at $10. But we think totally worth it for that cost. A little bit spendier. A little spendy. Next up is twitching doll. This is a cool one from Duskborn. This is a cool one. It's one in a green for an artifact creature spider toy. It's a 2-2 with tap add one mana of any color, put a nest counter on twitching doll. And then tap sacrifice, twitching doll create a 2-2 green spider creature token with reach for each counter on twitching doll. Activate only as a sorcery. So this card literally just does exactly what she wants of early game. It will get you the mana that you need. And then slowly put the counters on it. And as you're putting the counters on it, eventually you can just cash it in for a ton of tokens. Which as we know, this deck definitely wants. You can sacrifice them. You can attack with them. They're 2-2s. Yeah. Like that's not nothing. They're pretty big. And I mean, this gives you a really good place to put those plus one counters from your commander. Because it doesn't count. It doesn't care what kind of counter is on it. Plus one counters count. So you got a big doll. You got a bunch of spiders. This gives you two different payoffs. And when you sacrifice it, you draw a card from your commander. So cool. What a neat card. Checks all the boxes and it's only $1.75. Yeah. Next up, the Gitrog ravenous ride. This is a three black and a green. Triple haste, six five. One deals a damage to a player. You may sacrifice a creature that's settled at this turn. If you do draw X cards, then put up to X land cards from your hand onto the battlefield tapped where X is a sacrifice creature's power, settle one. So you really just need to have a small thing. And you will draw a card and then you can put a land from your hand into play, which already is good. But one cool thing about Dina is that it can take those one one counters from something that sacrifices, put it on something, and you can sacrifice that then to the Gitrog. And then you can start doing that churn that we're really looking for in the stack of get lots of cards, play lots of cards, get lots of cards, play lots of cards. Yep. I mean, this is a great payoff for the plus one counters in the command zone. It's a way to sacrifice stuff to give you an extra card from your commander. It gives you cards, it plays lands. The Gitrog really does it all here. And it doubles as a big haste threat. It's a big deal. That can close the game out pretty quick. You can also put some counters on it. Yeah. I think the Gitrog is like, not going to be a card that a ton of people put in this deck, and they really should because it's really spicy in a deck like this. Yep. $2.75 for the Gitrog ravenous ride. All right. So that's our includes for more mana. Obviously, if you're doing more than 10 cards, you can add more mana inclusions. But I think that's four things that up our amount of mana is, puts us in a pretty good spot. Next up, we do want a couple more things that create more bodies, and ideally creates bodies a little bit more wide. So nested shambler is a cute one for 50 cents. It's a Blackmana 1-1. When it dies, make X-taps 1-1 green scroll. Creature tokens where X is nested shambler's power. So I wish there was a little bit more of stuff like this that existed in magic. It feels like it's so good in this deck. I'm surprised it didn't make the cut. Yeah. It's just a common two because what you can do with this is like base level. It is a 1-1. Then when it dies, it gets sacrificed to whatever. You replace it with the 1-1 that can then get sacrificed. You can do whatever with it. Right. But because of your commander, Dina, you can take plus 1, plus 1 counters and put them on nested shambler. So then when the nested shambler dies, you get more 1-1s because you get the 1-1s equal to its power. And that's just a lot of value for one mana. Yeah. I mean, your commander is three mana. So getting something down before then is really nice, but also just like having a place to put the plus 1 counters in the early game is really nice. It's weird that this deck doesn't have more places that benefit from that plus 1 counter burst, which is like sort of the most like win con ish that Dina offers. Like it is the thing that is going to win the game for you is what I said badly. Yes. Definitely. Make things big, make things wide. Yeah. That's what the game definitely does for you. Next up is Warden of the Grove at $2.50. This is one where at the beginning of your end step, you put a 1-1 counter on it. And then when an untoken creature enters, you endure X, where X is the number of counters on it. So this is another thing that wears counters particularly well. And it also just makes bodies because the endure X means that you just make a token that's X, X, X equal to the number of counters on it. You don't actually need it to be all that big. When I was looking through the stack, I was like, oh, this is a cool card, but how many none token creatures are we actually making? Because you think, okay, well, we should probably want to be making some token creatures and the token creatures go wide and that'll probably be a little bit better. But the stack already, even with our upgrades and our changes, our swaps, has over 30 none token creatures in it. Lots, yeah. So that's still a lot of the cards that you're going to be playing. So I think Warden of the Grove is a great include for that. This is sweet. I mean, I really like it with the blood gasts that go in this deck as well. It just means you can load this thing up with counters from Dina. And then you sacrifice your blood gas, do you play a land, bring back the blood gas, and it comes with another body from the Warden. It's just going to give you a ton of value, a lot of threats. And it's all on one card. Oh, for $20.50. $20.50. This card is so cheap and is so powerful. Yeah, this card is kind of insane. It's wild. I mean, they printed this and then sort of immediately printed Ouroboroid and everyone was like, Ouroboroid! And I get it, like, totally. But this card's really good. Yeah, I put this in the Hamsa. The budget Hamsa because of that. Yeah, for sure. This card is just insane and does so much. All right, let's move on to this next one who is an old school favorite. Hendrik Sarr, Master Breeder. For and a Black Prolegendary Creature Human Wizard, whenever you cast a creature spell, create a 1-1 Black Thrill Creature Token, where X is that spell's mana value. When you control seven or more thralls, sacrifice Hendrik Sarr, Master Breeder. So the thralls eventually take over and kill Hendrik Sarr. Is that the story? I don't know. Eventually, there's too many thralls for him to live. Yeah, thankfully, we're going to fix that. We'll sacrifice the thralls. We'll find use for it. This just gives you a recurring mess of creatures. So you're going to make creatures when you cast creatures, sacrifice all of them, get value, cast more creatures, get more thralls. Don't worry, you'll keep Hendrik Sarr around just fine. And this card is only $2.50. Yes, very cool, very fun. Is five mana, but I think can definitely put in a lot of work for just the sheer amount of bodies that it can make. Absolutely. This deck wants those. The next one is eating up a lot of the budget, but it does two of the things that we've talked about a lot. It's a free sacrifice outlet and it improves your mana production. Yes, so Warren's Soul Trader at $20. It's two and a black for a 3-3. Pay a life sack and other creature to make a treasure token. So this also just makes it so that if you're sacrificing things on other people's turns, you are for sure getting value that you can then use on your turn. Because oftentimes, like a Viserysy or something, you're like, I'll scry one, sure, whatever. It doesn't really matter. A treasure is a very real thing that you can just store to have whenever you need it. And this deck has lots of life gain. You're not going to worry about that pay one life clause. Not to mention treasure tokens are really good index that care about sacrificing. This deck has Mazarek in it. Great. So if you sacrifice a creature, you trigger Mazarek, you make a treasure, which you can sacrifice to trigger Mazarek again. That's how you win. You play Mazarek in the Warren Soul Trader. Gross. Have a good time. Gross. It's very, very powerful in this deck. $20, so a big chunk of the budget, but well worth it. The next addition is another free sack outlet for one mana. This is Carrion Feeder, a single black free creature zombie. Carrion Feeder can't block and you sacrifice a creature, put a plus on plus encounter on Carrion Feeder. Two things that I like about this deck, this card in this deck, excuse me, is this becomes a big creature that you can sacrifice at instant speed and pump something. Cool. And in the meantime, it's giving you a lot of value. Sacrificing creatures, drawing cards. Yes. I think it is very easy to overlook, especially if you're newer to magic, just how like amazingly good sacrificing a creature at instant speed, even if it's for nothing. Like honestly, a card that says one mana, sacrifice a creature, do nothing would be very, very, very good. Played. Yes. Played because it's not just you can do one thing and then you have to wait a turn. It's you can do one thing and then another thing and another thing and another thing. It's like the difference between zero mana cards and one mana cards. And it's just like that gap is just so incredibly huge because you can keep doing the things. Right. You can keep sacrificing over and over and over again. So Carrion Feeder at $4.50 might seem like, well, what the heck am I paying $4.50 for? For a one mana one one. Like that seems a little bit silly, but the power level of these types of cards is just very, very high in decks like this. It's very easy to overlook. And because this effect is so powerful and you have so many effects in the deck that want it, we're also going to spend $3 on spawning pit. I love spawning pit. Me too, especially in Aristocrats decks. This is a two mana artifact. It says sacrifice a creature, put a charge counter on spawning pit, and then one remove two charge counters from spawning pit and create a two two colorless spawn artifact creature token. It sacrifices creatures and it gives you more creatures to sacrifice. It just gives you the bodies back. Like you sacrifice two things, you get one back. Like that's just a really good rate. You have to pay one to do it, but so what? It's so good. It's so good. It's so good. Free sacco. Let's give you things. This card's nuts. I really like spawning pit also as sort of like pseudo board protection index like this. Because you don't really care about what kind of creatures you have on the battlefield. If you have a spawning pit and somebody casts a board wipe, you're like, okay, I'll sac my entire board. I'll put like six counters on my spawning pit. And then once I untap and I have all my mana untapped, I'm going to rebuild, make four tokens, or I'll make three tokens and replay my commander. And now I can draw more cards with my commander right away. I have my board back right away. So lot to like about spawning pit. Well worth the $3 for sure. And that brings the total upgrade value to $50. Exactly. On the nose. On the nose. On the nose. We worked really hard to get that Warren Soul Trader in the budget for you all. Worth it. Because that card is insane. It's really good. It's really good. Yeah. But I think I feel really good about these upgrades. They're going to actually really improve the functionality of the deck. And I'm going to be even happier after we make these 10 cuts. So let's get into the 10 cards we're going to remove to make space for those cards. All right. So the 10 cards out. Sorry to all the people that love the life gain stuff. Spoiler alert, we're going to be removing a lot of that. The text is not that good at gaining life. It's just not that great. So we'll start at the top. So the first card that we cut was Feral Appetite. Two and a Green. It's hacking pests you control get plus one plus so have death touch. If I wanted a green to exile target card from a graveyard and if it was a creature you make a pest. And it's like that's fine, I guess. The fact that's five mana to make your first pass. That's like that's rough and it's three mana your commander's three mana. Like you're not wanting to play this card at your three mana slot instead of your commander. You are going to play your commander at three mana. The other thing about this deck is like, yeah, you can make a fair amount of pests, but neither of your commanders make pests. Yeah. You're not guaranteed to have pests. So like if you have this on the battlefield, your primary way to make pests is going to be activating this ability. So you're just not going to get that value out of it until you've paid even more mana into it. Like if you were playing the new Luin card that prepares and makes pests, I would consider this card because you're going to be more guaranteed to have a lot of pests on the battlefield. Yeah, this deck is not a pest deck. It is a deck where if you have cards that make pests, they'll be good in this. Great. Right. But it's not a pest deck. So when you're fair appetite is definitely a cut. Trudge Garden, do an agreeing whenever you gain life or whenever you gain life, you may pay two if you do make a four four with trample. This would be so good if we gains life. Yeah, like what are we doing? Are we playing this? And then like we're hoping that a pest dies. Yeah. Like I think is what we're hoping for, but your most reliable way to gain life in this deck is your commander's activated ability. So to me, this is like a three mana for an enchantment. Then you pay two mana to sacrifice a creature. Then you gain the life from that and they want you to pay two more to make a four four. But it has trample, Rachel, and we can put counters on that and then it's big and then we can use it to sacrifice. Yeah, we just paid seven mana for a four four. Okay. Yeah, that's probably not very good. Yeah, I just don't, I think this is going to be better in like the green, white soul sister life gain decks where like you play a soul sister and if somebody triggers it once you pay two, pay two, pay two, pay two, pay two, and you make a bunch of four fours, that seems sick. Yeah. As we've said many, many times this episode, the life gain is just not consistent for life gain stuff to be working. Next up is Gjom Masterchef. Like we said, top of this. He's cool. He's really cool. This is a food card. It's a food card. This is not a food deck. I was going to say, I don't know what it's doing here. Are there ways to get to gain life? Not. You're not really paying five. Like it's so expensive. Like that's what I mean by this. That isn't great at gaining life. Like sure, Gjom can gain you life, but like at what cost? Yeah. Whenever you build a deck and you're like, oh, my deck does this one thing. Oh, this one thing that it could do also is good with this other thing. And then that other thing that it could do is also good with this other thing. Like the more layers of separation that you go from like the core of what your commander does, which is for this sacrifice things, that's the core of the deck. Not even things like creatures. This doesn't even do that. Sacrifice creatures. Yeah. The life gain is just too far removed from that main plan to be like legitimately good. Yeah. So again, cool card, but gone. Yeah. This next card makes me a little sad because I liked this card. It's wither bloom command. It's black and a green for a sorcery. It's choose two target player, mill three. Then you return a land card from your graveyard to your hand. Destroy target non-creature non-land permanent with a mana value two or less. Target creature gets minus three, minus one until end of turn or target opponent loses two life and you gain two life. So hypothetically, this is like a life gain card that can kill a soul ring or like maybe get you a land from your graveyard to your hand, but it just kind of half does all those things. And at sorcery speed, there just isn't enough synergy with the card to really justify its inclusion other than the name wither bloom. Yeah. Like the million thing like doesn't really help us that much. There's a couple. Not really a graveyard deck? Not really, no. And so you look at that and you're like, okay, well, I got plenty of removal already in the deck. Like this deck is not wanting for removal. Especially conditional removal like that, that you can only remove a little non-creature thing. Like this can't hit any of the creatures we were talking about before. And so this one, like it's a decent card. It's just kind of by virtue of it's probably the worst of the removal that's in here. So away it goes. Yep. All right. On to the first of many life gain payoffs. Yep. These two are kind of occupy the same space in my brain. So I'm going to talk about them together. So Vaynewich Coven and Witch of the Moors. So let me read them each individually. Vaynewich Coven, two in a black menace, three three. Whenever you gain a life, you may pay a black. And if you do return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand, and somehow that is different from Witch of the Moors, which is three black black four four with death touch at the beginning of your end step. If you gained life this turn, each opponent sacrifices a creature of their choice and you return up to one target creature card from your graveyard to your hand. They look the same. They do kind of the same. Do kind of the same. Five mana one, obviously you don't have to pay the mana for and it makes people sacrifice things. But both of these fall under the problem of life gain. Yeah, we're just not very good at it. I don't want to be paying too much to trigger it with your commander's activated ability. And then paying mana on top of it for Vaynewich Coven. So yeah, those two are getting the axe. You can put it in a sick black white life gain deck that has more reliable life gain. So our plan is to just make this deck better and then we'll have enough pieces to make it for like a totally different, really cool life gain deck that's like AdSanth. I love that. It's a great idea. I'm stoked about that. This next one is a bit sad to cut, but I it's part of this whole package. The filing Demagoth, three black black, five four with menace. Whenever a creature you control deals combat damage to a player, you gain a life. Well, we're sure. Why are we cutting the life gain, Rachel? What if we just keep all the life gain in here and then our life gain paths will be better? You're right. Thoughts. You're right. But at the beginning of your end step, each opponent loses x life where x is the amount of life you gained this turn. Sure. If you sacrifice a really, really big thing to your commander's ability on your end step, this will work. But it's five mana. But that requires you to have a five mana thing in play, a big thing in play, and a commander in play and two mana to play activate the ability. And that be enough to actually kill everybody, which it just doesn't seem like this deck is capable of doing. Yeah. This card is also just kind of getting lost because it is just too slow and clunky and. It's great at a deck that's good at life gain. All right. Stop saying that. All right. The rest of that's the life gain package. That's some of the many life gain packages in the deck. Up next, we're cutting Cultivate. Cultivate is a good ramp spell when your commander is not three mana. I feel like everybody's going to be like, you said this was a mana hungry deck. Yes. Why are we cutting Cultivate then, Rachel? Because it is the same cost as your commander. It is a weird ramp spell in your curve. It is just very, very clunky to draw Cultivate and then be like, hmm, I want to get my commander out so that then I can start sacrificing things and getting that card draw. It's very like in play testing. I think what we learned is that you just don't have a very good place to play the Cultivate in your curve like at all. You're just like, I want to keep playing my things. I want to keep playing my things and Cultivate just doesn't really help you do that. Yeah. All that well. It's just not a good time to cast it where it feels it feels good. No. Cultivate is a very good card obviously, but it's not great here. Moldervine Reclamation is next three, a black and a green whenever creature you control dies, you gain one life and draw a card. This is another one. A five. You're like, man. What are you doing because this gains the life and draws you cards. It's five mana. As long as a creature, but it does the exact same thing as the commander, Rachel. Yes. Right. Yes. The commander's once per turn and then this one is also that. So what the heck are we doing cutting this? This isn't once per turn. This you can draw repeatedly. True. True. True. Yeah. I mean, this card is very good in it in the deck, but again, it is expensive and it is only doing something when your engine is already online and you already have that ability when you have access to your commander. Yes. And the deck also has things like smothering abomination, which also. Cheaper ways to do this. It's cheaper and that one also lets you sacrifice something on upkeep. So. And we're cutting the life gain package. So we don't need this. We're cutting the life gain package. So this is kind of gone as a result of that. And you don't actually need that much card draw because your commander keeps things chugging along quite nicely. Speaking of which. Yes. Last cut is Oran Frost Fang. Again. Great to see this as a reprint, but not so great to see in this deck. I think the thought process is, well, you're going to have a lot of pests and you can just attack with them and they'll have Death Dutch and people won't want to block them. Right. And then you'll draw lots of cards. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if we're cutting mold divine reclamation, I think Oran Frost Fang's even worse. Yeah. In this type of deck. This synergy just isn't quite there with it. If I'm playing this deck, I'm not super interested in attacking with my pests. I'd rather hold them up for defense and do use my Sac, sacrifice engines to take my opponent's life total down. I'm much more likely to like chip away and use my tokens as a defense than I am to get aggressive. Yes. With something like an Aristocrat stack, you're probably not getting aggressive until your engine has been fully online. And then you have used that engine to say like with Mazurik, put a lot of counters on things. And then you start to swing outs. You're probably not doing a ton of that. Once people are dying. Yeah. Yeah. Not in the early game when you need to draw cards. Okay. We don't usually touch mana bases when we do these upgrades, but this deck does come with a study haul in it, which is terribly flavorful and also very bad in the deck. Holy cow is this card bad. This card is very bad. It's one tap, add one mana of any color. When you spend this mana to cast your commander, Skriax, where X is the number of times it's been cast from the commands on this game. And you did top four colorless. And it's like, okay, well, this doesn't fix you. And you're already like, when you want to recast your commander in commander, you're always like, you're already paying extra mana for them. You're paying extra mana. You're like, is this worth it? No. Put any green, black land in it. Anything. Any green, but like random tap play comes in tapped, evolving wilds. Nice. Cause it goes with Mazurik. Any base land. I don't care. Totally fine. You don't need study. Okay. That's the upgrade. We've added 10 cards. We've taken 10 cards out and given you a little bonus. 11 to swap in there as well. We're going to talk about how this deck plays, how we recommend you, things you think about when you're piloting the deck in just a minute. But of course, if you enjoyed this upgrade, you want to pick up any of the cards that we added to the deck or maybe some of the cards we took out because you're building a sick life game deck. Go to cardkingdom.com slash command. Card Kingdom has a ton of cards all under one roof, which is the best because when you're building a sick life game deck, you can add all of the cards to one list and you can pick out the versions that you want all on the same page and you're only paying shipping once and it's showing up in your doorstep all on one day and you get to build your whole deck and it's just done and you can come play it at card kingdom and you trust that they're going to take care of you because they got an amazing team there. So if anything happens to go wrong, you know, you can reach out to them and they'll take care of you right away and you're supporting the show. If you use our affiliate link at card kingdom.com slash command. And what is the most emblematic color of life game? Black. No, white. White. Like the mana eight play. Wow. There we go. Segway. The mana eight sleeves are perfect to sleeve up literally any deck that you have show your support for your favorite color. The play mats are just so nice to use. They look so clean. Great to get signed at magic conventions. There's all sorts of conventions coming up this year. So I was literally talking to 80 yesterday, my, my partner yesterday about apex sleeves because I was like, you should buy them. They're genuinely really good. They're really good. And he bought them and he's like, well, shoot. Now I hate all of my other sleeves. Oh, they are really good. Oh, no. He was shuffling one of his other decks and he's like, this never, this never bothered me to shuffle before. This is this is now it's made of my sleeves. Apex sleeves make all other sleeves worse. They're already here first. They're so good. Anyway, and you can buy them while you're supporting the show. If you use that affiliate link at oldpro.com slash command. All right. Let's talk about the wither bloom pre-con and how we already been talking about the wither bloom pre-con Rachel. What? I'm losing my mind. And how this deck plays. Yes. Because I think aristocrats of decks are very difficult to pilot in general. The pacing is very specific. You need a lot of pieces to make this work. So let's talk about some tips that we have for people who want to play this deck successfully. So it's going to be slow. That's okay. Don't be like, I'm going to be coming out of the gates super hot. I'm going to be doing a bunch of damage all at once. If that's what you want, this is not the deck for you. Sorry. The best thing to do is to try to build up, try to get some sort of thing that can make creatures over and over again. That free sock outlet that we were looking for. If not, at least you have something on the commander, but ideally you want that free sacrifice outlet and then cast your commander. Once you have that, you're kind of good to go because then like say you have an Ophiomancer or whatever, well you got something to sacrifice and your commander says draw a card when that happens. And so no matter what you will be drawn guess and you will be playing magic. And so that's probably the most important thing to have. Absolutely. I mean in any deck that needs a lot of pieces to get working, you need more card draw and having that card draw on your commander just means that you'll be able to assemble the pieces that you need a little bit faster. And in this case, the pieces are stuff to sacrifice and a way to sacrifice them. Your payoffs are sort of few and far between in terms of like Aristocrat effects because we didn't focus on that in the upgrade. So those will come later once your card draw engines are online. Yes. I think that is a big thing to keep in mind. And if you have a free sack outlet on the battlefield, hold that other one in your hand. Don't run both of them out because that will probably be a target for removal. Yes, you don't want to lose both of your sack outlets in a board wipe if you can help it. The other thing to keep in mind is you do have a lot of mass disruption. So you can kind of sit back and play a little bit of control, make sure that everybody else is playing your long game as well. You have a couple different board wipes in this deck. So don't be afraid to fire one off in the early game if you feel like you're slower to set up than everybody else. Let them set up, fire off a board wipe, then you can set up after that and you're going to be in a much better spot. Exactly. Because you don't care about things dying and oftentimes actively like things dying. And you do have some amount of life gain that is going to stabilize your life total. Not reliably, not every turn, not all the time. But like some amount of life gain that's just going to bolster your life total enough that you're not worried about taking a little bit of chip damage in the early game because you didn't get a blocker down. You know you can gain some amount of that life back. Yeah. And I really like the fact that Dino's ability is instant speed. Yes. You can activate. Huge. The controlling aspect of things is very easy to do once you have your stuff set up. You just leave a couple mana open and then people attacking you is going to be very, very difficult because it's like well what can you sacrifice, what can you bring back, what can you activate Dina in order to put one-on-one counters on this thing and then block my big thing. And then my big thing dies and then it's like there's just so much math that ends up having to happen there that's people are going to be hesitant to be attacking into you. I think one of the cooler tricks this deck can do is in the late game when you have a bunch of your pests and you have like one big thing which the deck can reliably put together. You attack with your four pests, you wait to see how they block. If they don't block 100% of your pests, you sacrifice your big creature, put all the counters onto the unblocked pest and bonk somebody for a whole bunch of damage, gain some life, put some counters, draw a card. And they have to respect the fact that they might potentially lose a big thing if they block poorly. Exactly. So just put fun all around. It's what's it called? There's like this benefit, it's like last act benefit or something like that. It's like a game theory thing. So the later you can act, the better position you're in because you have the most information when you act. And Dina gives you a good way to do that. Fun fact, that's why we crack fetches on it's tip. Yeah. For that very reason. Just in case you never know what could happen. Yeah, so just take the gravy, this deck has a lot of gravy because it's got a lot of sub themes. So it's got a lot of life gain that you don't necessarily have to build around in the way that the deck had before. It's got a lot of plus one plus encounters that you don't necessarily have to build all the way around. So this we've rebuilt as a sacrifice aristocrat style deck, but this could also be built as like a power matters deck. This could be built as a count like with counter doublers where you're sacrificing a six six and putting 12 counters and gaining 12 life or six life and just like huge amounts like chunks like that. And so Dina can be built a lot of different ways. And we have a whole other commander that we barely even talked about about the potentials that you could build. So Gorma! I really like the different directions that this deck can go. At its base, it kind of makes it feels like kind of old commander design where they just put a ton of stuff in and they're like, well, you could go this way or this way or this way. And it's just kind of up to you to figure it out. And so yeah, I just like the flexibility of it. I agree. Not amazing out of the box compared to some of the other more focused designs, but a really fun commander deck nonetheless. And I do think this upgrade will help a lot. Okay. Before we go, we have to say thank you to our amazing teamer at the Command Zone that made this episode possible. Thank you to Karina Cruz, Josh Diaz, John Schneider, Rob Galati, Jamie Block, Jordan, Pritz and Jake Boss, Becky Bell, Manson Lung, Evan Limburger, Sam Waldo, Joshly Kwi, Jimmy Wong, and of course to Josh Murphy, who took the time to record today, and Eric Lem, who did a lot of work on the upgrade, but was sick recording today. Sorry, Eric. Sorry, Eric. We hope you're feeling better. We miss you. Bye. Bye. Keep the cuddles and lose the mess with Advantage Chewable. Just one tasty tablet kills fleas and ticks for a whole month. No mess, no stress. Just one tasty chew. Advantage Chewable. Flee and tick protection made easy. Find out more at advantagechewable.co.uk. Easy to love, easy to protect. 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