“Lorehold Spirit” Precon Upgrade | Secrets of Strixhaven | 735

Indeed presents. Highers, you can't afford to get wrong. Like payroll manager. Hi, I was just checking my pay slip and it's all in Japanese yen. Yes, you're welcome. Sorry? Given the exchange rate between the pound and the yen, you're technically a millionaire now. Don't spend it all in one place! I can't really spend it anywhere. This is a job for sponsored jobs! This is what happens when you don't sponsor your job on Indeed. So the next time you need someone to get the job done right, get matched with quality candidates with an Indeed sponsored job. Visit Indeed.com slash NextHire and sponsor your job today. Greetings, humans. You have entered the Command Zone. Your destination for all aspects of Elder Dragon Highlander. Enjoy your stay. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Command Zone podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Weeks, and today we have a very special guest. It's Becky Bale! Oh my gosh, hi! Thank you for joining me, especially for this very special episode. Today we are upgrading the brand new Lorehold Precon from Six Secrets of Strixhaven. Excuse me, that name is going to get me this entire time. So today we're going to talk about what comes in the box off the shelf, why it's cool, what the commanders do, and we're going to give you 10 cards that you can add to it to get it into peak fighting shape before you take it to your next game night. So a lot of stats, a lot of discussion. Let's jump into it. Starting with the most important thing of any precon. The commanders. Oh yeah, and this one actually I think has two really cool commanders. I agree. I think you're excited for one in particular, so I'm going to save one for you and I'll talk about Quintorious, which is kind of the main face commander that you're going to see from the box. This is going to be like one of those moments where I feel like I have to talk about like some silly basic things just like get them out of the way in the way that... We should probably read him first. Oh yeah, we can read him. Let's let the people know what he does. He's been out for a little while. He has. But it's a four mana, so two in a red, white comes in with five loyalty for four mana, which is kind of gnarly. Obviously can be your commander and has the passive ability of whenever one or more cards leaves your graveyard, create a three, two, red and white spirit creature token. The plus one is you may discard a card if you do draw two cards and then mill a card. So some interesting kind of filling the graveyard, putting some in your hand, putting some in your graveyard. A lot of different alternate forms of card advantage. Filt and selection. And then has the minus four of a spirit you control, gain double strike and vigilance until end of turn. Okay. So that is good old cointorious history chaser. So this tells us a lot about what's going on in the deck. We've got a commander that cares about cards leaving the graveyard and giving you spirits. And then this like big spirits, anthem effect is the wrong word, but this big, the double striking and the vigilance. Plus it's got a little bit of card advantage on it. I usually like to talk about these pre cut the commanders in terms of like, if you were going to build this from scratch, what would you expect to see in this deck? Because that's the angle that we're going to be judging the pre con on. Yeah. And I think that this is an interesting question in this moment in particular, because I think you'd be surprised the amount of other cards that care about something leaving the battlefield or leaving the graveyard. And I'm going to probably refer to it as like movement from the graveyard, but know that that is me kind of also meaning leaves, but with a wording that clicks better in my mind. Sure. Yeah. It feels a little more open ended. I feel like I associate leaves with like being exiled, which does work for Quintorious's ability, but something going from the graveyard to the battlefield also works. Yeah. Or from the graveyard to our hand, all sorts of things. Exactly. And I think that this, it's important to kind of mention that this commander in particular out of the box is going to mostly enable some of the other things that care about cards leaving your graveyard. And there's some other situations and other commanders that you're kind of used to seeing that are more like this is the engine piece. Whereas Quintorious is kind of like an enabler of the engine. He's definitely an enabler and a bit of a payoff. So because of the, it makes the spirits as well. But the most important thing that's, I found very difficult in Boros graveyard decks is filling your graveyard. That is really difficult to find efficiently and like on good cards in a lorehold colors. So Quintorious doing that, I do think is an important piece of this enabling. And then of course giving you a payoff for actually doing what the lorehold want you to do in this set, which is make stuff leave your graveyard for one reason or another. Cool. Quintorious is a very cool commander and is definitely like one half of the puzzle. Yes. Do you want to talk about the other commander? Because I do. I feel like I want to leave it to you. I do. I know this is a special place in your heart and feels wrong to take the horse card away from Rachel Weeks. Look at this. It's a freaking horse. They made a horse for me. Just for me. It's a Boros horse. This is Excava, the Risen past. Okay, this card is so cool. It's so cool. It's too red white for a legendary creature spirit horse. He has flying and haste. And whenever Excava attacks, return up to one target artifact, creature or non-ora enchantment with mana value three or less from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter on it. It's a one-one spirit creature with flying in addition to its other types. Yeah, it's a Boros horse that sun-tightens and flies. This is for me. They made a card for me apparently because I'm freaking stoked about Excava. But this is definitely the other half of the equation, right? Where Quintorius says, I'm going to fill your graveyard and give you stuff when stuff leaves your graveyard. And Excava says, I'm going to give you a way to make stuff leave your graveyard, but you're going to have to solve the other half of that puzzle. Yep. And it's kind of for that reason where we're going into this episode and Quintorius is kind of the commander that we're going to talk about a little bit more. And I think it's purely from my point of view because out of the box, it is a little harder to make Excava work if you don't have something like Quintorius in the command zone where you have a way to reliably start putting things in your yard. It's just a little light on those things. And when we get into making some swaps on cards, that is going to be one of the first things that we start talking about or how do we lower the mana curve, which is kind of something I'm always trying to do with a pre-con. And then also how are we getting things into the yard so that we can start doing all these really cool graveyard movement things. Yeah. I think there's a couple of hoops that Excava asks you to jump through. First of all, you want three mana things or less, which the deck isn't necessarily built around. And you do need a lot of ways to get stuff in the graveyard. And if it's built with Quintorius in the command zone, you just don't need as many. So Excava would definitely probably require more than 10 changes to get this pony in the command zone. But if you want to see a cool deck list for Excava, I'm going to be playing it on game nights. I know you're shocked. You're shocked. But it's a super cool deck. And I really like this lorehold mechanics. So we're going to get into this pre-con. We're going to break down all the stuff that does come in the box. But if you want to buy this upgrade or if you want to buy this pre-con, you can support the show by going to cardkingdom.com slash command user affiliate link. And you'll get a really great service from a place that we trust when we buy our cards. So Card Kingdom has a ton of cards all in one place. When you're shopping, you can paste in a big list, maybe 10 cards perhaps from an upgrade and see how many of them they have in stock. You can check the printing and the version and the foiling and the condition all on the same page, hit buy, check out, and you're done. You don't have to think about it again. We just like how fast and easy they are. But also we know that they have a trusted customer service team. So if something does go wrong, you are shipping Cardboard all over the country. They've got a good team to take care of you. Plus they package it really well. And if it's the rainy season where you live, having somebody who can ship Cardboard safely is a big deal. So you don't get damaged cards in the mail. That's always super sad. So support the show and a really cool company at cardkingdom.com slash command. And up next, once those cards are in your hand, once you've purchased this pre-con, go to ultra pro dot com slash command to get the sleeves, the binders, the deck boxes, the play mats that you need. If you super identify with one of the commanders from this pre-con or any pre-con in the past, always check the Ultra Pro website because it always looks really amazing. Plus, if you haven't tried the new Manna eight or their apex sleeves, they're incredible. The shuffle feel is great. They last a really long time and they're super clear and represent like an individual color. I build a lot of monocolor decks, so I love them for monocolor decks. But if you're a blue gamer, a green gamer, a red gamer, you get to use the sleeves that really show off your pride. So check out the ultra pro website. They also have a ton of sales. If you haven't signed up for that newsletter yet, they'll let you know when things go on sale for 20 percent, sometimes more off. It happens at random times and whenever it does, I'm always bummed if I miss it. So ultra road dot com slash command, get yourself all the accessories you need. And a cool announcement. I guess we've announced this before, but if you haven't heard, we're going to be at Magicon in Las Vegas. Of course, we're going to be doing game nights live. That is on Friday. We're very excited to be back and we have a ton of cool upgrades for the show. We've got new surprises, new guests, big costumes. It's going to be a wild one. So if you don't have your passes already, make sure that you are going to this Magicon in Vegas with they gave us too much time to prepare because we're trying some wild stuff. We're doing some crazy stuff. I feel like if you're a fan of Strixhaven or even just like happy for some in universe moments in magic, secrets of Strixhaven is going to be like a good eating time. Oh, man. We've got our live show. We're doing obviously all these pre-con upgrades, all of our like normal content and then game nights. And it just feels like we have a lot of stuff coming up for secrets of Strixhaven. And I it's going to be a cool set. It's going to be a cool set. It's a really exciting time and we got a lot of cool things cooking. Yeah. All right. And if you want to support the show directly, you can go to patreon.com slash command zone, join our Patreon, get in our Discord, ask questions of me, Josh, Jimmy. You get access to game nights and extra turns a day early without ads. A lot of cool perks on our Patreon. Plus you get to be a part of our community, which is huge. And we shout out one lucky patron every single podcast episode. And this one is dedicated to Kevin Gudino. Kevin, you rock. Thank you so much for supporting the show. Okay. Let's get into it. We've got a lot to talk about with this deck. We're going to start with the reprint value. So that's what comes in the box when you buy it off the shelf. Keep in mind, everything we talk about in this episode is taken a time of recording, which is before this deck is announced. So these numbers will change. This is a relative number that you can use to compare it to previous pre-cons, which we're going to do right now. But currently this deck's MSRP is set for about $50. Hopefully you can find it for that or cheaper. But we have no idea what's going to happen to the prices once these decklists are announced. So that's the number we're working with. All of that being said, the total reprint value for this deck is 250 $8.25. Geez. When you sent me this outline and I saw that, I was like, what? Okay, that's kind of crazy. Kind of crazy. And I want to give you an idea of how crazy because in 2025, so last year, the average reprint value of pre-cons was $152.71. Still not bad for the record. Not bad. We're $100 above that average. I mean, we did see a price increase of pre-cons in Lauren. Went from $45 to $50 in the MSRP. But there's a $5 difference between those prices and a huge difference between these reprint values. So remember that is a time of recording. These will change. But that's a great number and means that we're getting even more value than we ever have in pre-cons in the past. Keep in mind that only represents the 67 reprints in the deck. It doesn't include the 12 new cards or the four main set cards or the 17 basic lands that also come in the deck. No information on those. I don't know. I don't know what those are going to cost. They seem cool. They do seem cool. I'm getting it. It has a boros horse in it. Yes. And a huge amount of reprint value, which I love. So if you buy it, we've been doing a second value that helps you compare their apples to oranges a little bit better because the pre-con prices have changed so much. They really have. So we've been doing a bang for your buck value, which takes the MSRP and the reprint value and it tells you how many American dollars you're spending for how much reprint value. And in this one, your bang for your buck value is $5.17 for your $1 cash spent. So you're more than quadrupling. You're septupling. Is that it? Pentupling? Pentupling. Not my area of expertise. I don't know. It's times five. It's way bigger. It's good. And the comparison here is the bang for your buck average in 2025 was $3.06. So a lot of value packed into this little box. And I know you guys are screaming at the screen, get on with it. Tell us what the reprints are if they're so exciting. And we're going to get into it right now. We're going to talk about the notable reprints in this deck. That's all the cards that are worth $5 or more at time of recording. There are 15 in this deck, a huge amount. And I'm very excited about some of these. Me too. This first one is the one that I am most excited about. I'll be honest. I'm most excited about the second one. So if you want to start it off. The second one's great. The first one on this list is Bitterthorn Nissa's Anomest. This is sitting at $30 right now for a three-mana legendary artifact equipment. It is a living weapon. And when this thing attacks, you put a land into play. It's a sort of the Anomest on a legendary equipment that comes in with the creature. This is great in this deck and pretty sweet. Yeah. Extremely sweet. Kind of hard to... It ends up being much like sort of the Anomest in a lot of my decks. I'm just like... Redundant suit. Yeah. If I'm playing more than 10 basic lands, which most of the time you are, I'm going to go ahead and be putting one of these in the deck. Pretty sweet. Yeah. And this card really hasn't been reprinted. So it's just that price has climbed to a ridiculous place. Yep. And I'm excited to see them taking this space to do this. And going into the card that I'm excited for, I do feel bad to kind of steal it from you. This one's great. But Emaria the Sky Ruin is going to be the next $30 reprint. Big fan excited to see this card coming back. Kind of all the same reasons. Feels like it should be reprinted a little bit more. It shouldn't really be $30. But happy to see it being included in this deck. It's really cool if you can get that card online. Sitting at $23, this card is also out of control. It's a wave of reckoning for an wide first sorcery. Each creature deals damage equal to itself, equal to its power. So all your creatures hit themselves and often die. So you like to put it in decks with have high toughness, low power. Yep. This is also funny. I feel like if it was printed nowadays, it would have such a more fun name than wave of reckoning. Yeah. A little sad that we've missed a chance to have a more fun name on wave of reckoning. Stop hitting yourself. Yeah, exactly. I agree. I think in turtles, that's what it would have been called. Absolutely. $23 are a wave of reckoning. Oh, and then we're going on to Moonshaker Cavalry. Eight mana and $19 for this card. Yeah. Let's bring that bad boy down. Pretty good. This is very powerful. Closer. It is a spirit. It is extremely expensive, but really good when you get it into play. This next reprint is one of my favorite cards. I think it's still quite underrated in Commander. And it's good with the discard on Quintorious. It's currency converter. Oh, this I've so the moment I'm flipping through these cards, I was like, oh, this is a great place for currency converter to be. It's exactly what you're wanting to be doing. It already is a card that gets put in so many decks because it is just like good all around just makes a ton of stuff. It's a one man artifact and it's whenever you discard, you tuck it under the currency converter and then you can put it into your graveyard for value. But the coolest thing about it is when you discard the card, it goes to your graveyard and then becomes exiled under the currency converter. So it gives you a leaves the graveyard trigger. Pretty sweet in this deck. Exactly. And sitting at $17. Yeah. And yeah, let's bring that down, get you a copy of that card and have it be in a deck that it's great in. Yeah. Next, we're going on to Drum Bellower. Also a spirit, kind of an interesting reprint to come in here and a card that was sitting at $14. Yeah. I mean, an expensive card to be sure. This is usually more common when you have like a commander with a tap ability or you have a lot of things with tap abilities or you have a lot of mana creatures. And this deck doesn't really have a ton of those, but I guess you can untap your creatures and defend your commander a little bit better after getting some beats in. Absolutely true. And okay, I'm going to go and see this card because I'm excited about it. Lotus Field reprint, $9.50 at the time of recording this. Happy to see that get put back into circulation as well, because that is like a, if we're going even beyond the commander sphere of gameplay, an extremely important card that would, a lot of players I know would love for the value to be a little bit lower on those. Absolutely. Make this a little bit more affordable. It's such a sweet card and it's really good in white decks in particular. Up next is Guardian of Faith. This is a spirit that faces your board out. So it's board protection on a spirit. The next one is Mothering Tide at Home. It's monologue tax sitting at $8. Oh, Guardian of Faith is at $8.50. I had no idea that card was that much. Yeah, that surprised me as well. A couple more reprints. We're going to move through these a little bit quicker. We've got Angel of Indemnity sitting at $7.50. This one brings permanence from your graveyard back to the battlefield with a very cool on-core ability. I was going to say when I was looking for upgrades, I was like, man, this would be a good card in this deck. And then I saw that it was in the deck and I was like, oh, well, they've really thought they're so smart. Up next is a similar effect. It's Guardian Scale Lord. We have a dragon. It's a dragon. It's a backup dragon that gets stuff out of your graveyard when it attacks or when the thing it backed up attacks. Yeah, doing all the things you want to do going on. Sitting at $7. $7. Also at $7, the next card is Sarah Paragon. Also a sweet card. I had a lot of fun playing this card in Standard. So excited to see it get a little bit of a reprint. I don't know how many times do I have to be on this show where I go, I just like playing things that I played in Standard or Modern. Yeah, just cards I love. Yeah, just cards I like. And this is one of them. Up next sitting at $6.50 is Patchwork Banner. This is a three-man Iraq that gives an anthem effect to creatures that share type. So sweet. Or that or of the chosen type. Pretty good. Oh, and I loved this reprint as well. Patchwork Banner sitting at $6.50. Kind of absurd for a card that just came out in Bloomberg. And finally at $5 is staff of the storyteller with some sweet new art. Draws cards when you make tokens. And yeah, such a sweet card. Love that it's able to do so many different things. Yeah. A little bit of value. So I like this as an include in the deck a lot. Aside from it being a $5 card and it being a nice little value reprint for us. Yeah. All right. Those are the notable reprints in the deck. That's the value you're getting out of this box, not including the new cards, of course, and the playability of the deck itself. And we're going to get into that in just a moment, which means it's time to break down the... Stats. Okay. Give me the stats. All right. We're going to talk about the deck stats here. This is where we break down a deck and talk about its functionality. How much ramp does it have? How much card draw does it have? How much removal? And then we talk more about the pieces that make this specific archetype work and see how healthy it is. When what kind of changes we might want to make with this upgrade. Yep. So I'm going to start things off with we've got 15 pieces of ramp. Kind of makes sense when you're a boros deck, you're not going to have the most, but also 15 is not too bad. All things considered for a boros. 15 is a lot. It does make sense for both of the commanders being four drops, especially when I'm a four mana commander, I like having a lot of two mana ramp just to make sure that I'm getting that commander down a turn early. Not all of this ramp is exactly three two mana ramp. So that is something that you could change if you're playing at long term, but it does give you a lot, a lot of mana to be able to thrive in the late game. Yeah. Going on to 11 pieces of card advantage. I kind of wish it was a little bit more, but we'll get into that. When we get into some swaps that are going to be made, that'll be a reoccurring theme that you'll hear about. Yeah. Card advantage. We really like to hit 12 with that. You do have quentorious in the command zone, so it's a little bit more reliable than normal, but 11 is a little bit low. Yeah, absolutely. Um, eight pieces of targeted disruption. This also felt a little bit low for me for a red and white deck. It feels like you usually are going to have a lot of pieces of that. And then I think my issue with this one in particular is I was looking at some of the targeted removal disruption pieces and they're kind of niche. They're kind of, they're not as broad as I would like them to be. Um, and we'll get into that when we get into swaps as well. Yeah. Eight is lower than we typically recommend in targeted disruption. And especially when the removal you do have doesn't hit all of the permanent types that you want it to, uh, that makes it feel pretty low. I would say that I would hope the targeted disruption in this deck is stuff that you can reuse from the graveyard. You can bring back with sun titans, that kind of thing. That means that you could get a little bit more disruption out of the eight pieces that you do have only three pieces of mass disruption in this deck. We've already talked about one of the board wipes, but, um, not a ton. Not a ton. Yeah. And they're, yeah. The other two are also like white board wipes. Um, and I do think that they could be different ones. It's so hard to like be at this part and be like, I can't, I don't want to like spoil all the things that I want to change right now, but, um, lower, lower than you would expect, especially for a deck that can use its graveyard. Yeah. And I like that they are trying to go for things like reprinting, um, wave of reckoning and like, yeah, and moving away from just putting austere command in every single deck like they used to, though I do feel like this deck could benefit from an austere command. I'm not going to lie. And not something that I had as a swap, but something that you could potentially consider, uh, if you do pick up this deck. And finally, there are 37 lands in the deck, including 17 basics. A lot of lands. I look, I recommend 38. I think, uh, I think we're a little low, but, um, I like, if I was building this deck, I would want 38, but I would include a couple of MDFCs, which the debt doesn't have. Uh, so I would have a little bit more flexibility in my mana base and just have more lands to make sure you hit all of those land drops. I, how spoiled are we to live in a time of MDFCs? Um, actually has made such a difference in how I build every single deck. Yeah. I'm so, I want lands to do it all. Like you either have to be perfect fixing or you have to also be a spell. Get you a land that does both. Exactly. All right. Let's go into some of the things that are, um, specific to this one. Yeah. Especially cause, I'm sorry. No, please. Um, I just am really excited because it seems like such a wording that could have existed earlier. It's weird that it just exists now. Um, and that's the whole like leaving the yard or movement from the graveyard and what wants you to do that and what things enable you to do that, which we do have a whopping 26 leave yard. Yes. Movers and shakers. So these are cards that can move other cards from your graveyard elsewhere or that move themselves out of the graveyard or elsewhere. This checks a lot of different boxes. Like they've got, um, like squee is in here, which you can discard and then he leaves the graveyard back to your hand and will trigger your commander. That's sort of a weird unique, uh, ability for a deck like this one, but there's also like faithless looting was counted in this where it just has flashback and removes itself from the graveyard when you cast it. Yeah. Which I do think is the cool part about all of these new printed cards that care about things leaving or moving from the graveyard where we have so many key words that already do this movement from the yard thing. Um, and so I think it's really cool and leaves a lot of kind of open ended deck building down the line. Which I think is, is I love when they do something like that in a pre con. Yeah. I mean, you could absolutely build quentorious as like a spells commander and just use a bunch of flashback stuff or a bunch of recursion to get stuff out of the graveyard and back into your hand and be using quentorious's ability to fill, fill the battlefield. It's not necessarily how this deck is built because it also has Xcava, but like that is a direction you could go if you wanted to be, to really lean into the open endedness of this theme. The next category we counted up are the cards that benefit from other cards leaving the graveyard. So like quentorious, we would consider a payoff for leaving the graveyard. And in the deck, there are eight. So some, but not an overwhelming dedication to this outside of your commander. Yeah. And I think it's, it's hard when you're again, this is kind of a new, it's weird to say mechanic because it doesn't have a keyword, but it is still a mechanic. Yeah. Um, and there haven't been a lot of things that have this specific wording in the past. They have, um, some amount of things that are kind of similar, but this is kind of the first time that especially in boros, we're getting something that cares about it in this exact way. Um, and all of them are pretty much new cards. So it, it's weird to be like, oh, we're going into this new space that hasn't been explored and I can't really work with more than the eight cards that are provided. But I think that means that like you're really focusing on these eight cards that they printed that have that care about this. Right. Uh, fire. The next category is a little low. And this is the enabling that we talked about at the beginning. It's cards that fill your graveyard. I have so many thoughts about this. So self mill, rummaging, discard from your hand, those kinds of things, anything that you can do to actually get cards into your graveyard to have them leave later. Uh, and that's why we, we've been talking about Quintorious as the primary commander because he just. Helps you do that. Yep. Every time I was either gold fishing or playing this deck, it was, okay, I'm playing Quintorious turn three, turn four, like as soon as I can play Quintorious, I'm playing Quintorious because. Nine other pieces that fill the yard in a deck where all of my cards care about things moving from the graveyard. I guess I just like have no other choice other than like get Quintorious onto the board as soon as possible. There is an upside to Quintorious being a planeswalker then as well. You have a little bit of like either people are going to throw damage at Quintorious or you're going to be able to activate it multiple times, which is a little bit helpful, but it is again, the reason that we're not presenting you with Excava, we're presenting you with Quintorious is because this number is, I think, lower than it should be. Yeah. Only having 10 cards that do this just means that you're only going to hit maybe one of them in the game if you don't have it in the command zone. And your deck is full of cards that bring stuff back from the graveyard. I mean, Excava brings stuff, but grab back from the graveyard. We also have like Venerable War Singer, the dragon that we talked about earlier. We have the literal factual sun titan. Karmic guide, sun titan. Like we have so many ways to bring things back from the graveyard you need to make sure, and so many ways to get things out of the graveyard that you need to make sure that you have a steady stream of to get stuff in there. So filling the yard is going to be a huge priority, I think, in upgrading the stack, making it more functional, just consistent. Yes. And I think consistency is kind of like the key thing that I'm looking for when I'm upgrading a pre-con a lot of the time. And that's also kind of going into the whole lower than mana curve. And then also what is this deck's main function or goal and how do I add cards to it that are going to help do that? And so we're going to be talking about a lot of things that are going to be either rummaging or getting things into our yard. And then hopefully if you see the changes that we made and you go, actually, I really like Excava, hopefully some of the changes that we want to make will help you also put Excava in the command zone instead of Quintorious if you decide that that's the direction you want to go. Because you won't need that graveyard filler in the command zone. Finally, there is a spirit sub theme that I was like, OK, how supported is this actually? And fairly, there's 25 spirits in the deck. So it's strong enough to call it mostly a theme. We usually recommend 30. But you have your commander that makes spirits or you have Excava that is a spirit itself. So, you know, there's not a ton of spirit payoffs other than Quintorious, but there's a few. So if you're into the spirit thing, that's definitely part of how this deck works. I was going to say, it feels kind of like they were like, if we're going to reprint patchwork banner, we have to have enough of a thing that you have a creature type that you can name. Yeah. And in that case, yeah, it is spirits. There's some weird stuff going on. So there's like, we have this this leaving the graveyard theme, which can be executed in a lot of different ways. Then we have the spirits theme. And then there's cards that are in here that are like token themes. And so it is does go in a lot of different directions. It works fairly well. I mean, you've played this thing out of the box. It's a functional deck. It definitely is functional. And I definitely was able to be swinging and doing some like pretty cool things. I definitely was like threat number one. Sway. Yeah, which feels like that. The boros deck. Yeah. Which then obviously like feels good until it doesn't feel good. And I think like the downside to pre cons is there a lot of the times they're going to struggle to rebuild. The nice part about this deck is that if you're bringing back from the graveyard, that's like the name of the game with rebuilding. Yeah. So I think that it is functioning in a way that works really well for kind of trying to come out of the gates blasting as quickly as possible. Oh, okay. Finally, this deck has an average mana value of 3.22 in the medium end, I would say, especially for a deck that has so many things that care about bringing small things back to the battlefield. I would expect this curve to be a hair lower. Yeah. When all of my, a lot of the things care about CMC three or less coming right. And so for our average mana value to be above three feels a little wrong to me. I agree. I mean, you've got like Excava and Sun Titan and the dragon that cares about stuff that's less than power. Like a lot of these things, you can only bring back your little stuff. So filling the deck with five and six drops, especially when most of those are like your threats doesn't work as well. Yep. All right. Let's talk about these upgrade goals. We've talked about a few of them already. I think we've made it pretty clear we're going to go with Quintorious in the command zone for this upgrade, which makes sense. Quintorious is sick. He's the star of the show, but we do love Excava, but we love Excava. We're just going to take Excava and build a whole deck around that. And it'll be your baby. Yeah. I'm going to need two copies because I also need one for the Pony deck. There's a lot of things. I was going to say, I feel like you're needing more than two copies of Excava. I got one for the command zone and another one for the Pony deck. So a big thing that we talked about already is making sure that your graveyard is full and you have the capability to refill it. Yes. And then once you have your graveyard full of things, what are ways that you can move things from your graveyard? Is that going to be spells that are in your hand that you're going to cast to bring things back? Is that going to be spells that have abilities where you can recast them from the graveyard? All of those things work. Just picking which ones kind of suit your fancy for how you want to go about executing your game plan. Yeah. We're going to interrogate the spirits sub theme and make sure that is like necessary. And there's a few cards that we already mentioned in the high reprint values that are like, sure, that's a spirit, but I don't know if it's actually synergistic with the rest of the deck. It just sort of seems to be a spirit. So we'll pull a couple of those things, try and tighten up some of the screws. And yeah, starting off this deck feels like it's for somebody who loves a side quest, but I'm just trying to reign in the side quest lovers a little bit. You got to make sure that you're still on like the main storyline too. That being said, there are some really sweet new cards in the deck that we want to talk about before we go into the swaps. So I want to take a second to talk about the best new cards that they printed that when they're in your hand, you're like, okay, I understand what we're doing. Everything's working and I have exactly what I want in this moment. Starting with Excabba, the pony. It's so good. It's so good. I, I think this card is so sweet. I love that it has, as an enchantress player, I've done a lot of things of making my enchantments into creatures in my time. Yeah. I love that there's a little bit of that. I love that you're getting more than just creatures back from the yard. It just is really doing all the things that I want to do. And I like made my little note that this horse would probably be best friends with Shadowfax. Yeah. I just, I'm loving it. What a good, what a good card. What a good lad. Yeah. Excabba is really sweet. And when you have it in play, you've got flyers to protect Quintorious. You've got a way to make things leave the graveyard. You've got spirits that are really sick to give double strike. It's a, everything sort of really meshes together when you have both of the commanders on the battlefield. I do want to mention in this section, because there's a very cool new land cycle that's in these decks. It, this one is Turbulent Step. So this is a fetchable land. It's a land mountain plains. And it says this land enters tapped unless your opponent's control eight or more lands. That's opponents collectively. So this thing, it's kind of like a slow land for multiplayer. Okay. Like in one view one, it's going to be tapped basically always. Yeah. But in commander, as long as it's like three, three and two. Okay. This is going to come in untapped a lot of the time and it's fetchable. So pretty huge, a really nice new cycle and a good reason to pick up these pre-cons is just getting a copy of this guy. Yep. Let's talk about the next one. Okay. This one I think is a weird one, but it kind of has the sub theme of us talking about a new mechanic called Paird. And the one that I think is the most interesting is this Naktamoon Lorspiner. Yeah, Naktamoon Lorspiner. A little bit of a Amonkhet getting in there. Yeah. And it says at the beginning of your upkeep, if a player has one or fewer cards in hand, this creature becomes prepared. And then it's prepared spell that you can cast is Wheel of Fortune. Fill your graveyard. Come on. Yeah, exactly. This seems like the hardest prepared to have to me. At least when I was playing the deck, it felt like I was trying to... Maybe this is like value brain. Sure. I was just trying to make sure that every time I was drawing cards or discarding cards, that I was also like drawing that many. Right. And with the higher CMC of the deck as a whole, I feel like I wasn't running into situations where... Harder to dump your hand and get cards out of your hand. Yeah. But I do think this card is cool. And I think in a world where you're planning your deck around something like this a little bit more, this is going to be a really useful card in a lot of decks. Like I can think of three decks that I have that would love to have this card in it. This card's super sick. And it's one of the... So some of the prepared spells enter prepared and can't be re-prepared. Some of them enter prepared and can be re-prepared. This one enters not prepared and can be re-prepared or can be prepared. But it can be prepared multiple times to cast its prepared spell multiple times. So as long as you can dump your hand, you could cast Wheel of Fortune every turn. Yeah. Which seems obviously insane. And then this card becomes a must remove. Yeah. But sick. Yeah. It does seem really cool. And it's like, to me, again, I'm naming this one in particular compared to some of the other prepared spells. Are the other prepared creatures or can be prepared creatures? I don't know how, like, what verbiage I'm supposed to use to do that. Yeah. They're... Because usually, like, we... What is the name of the... Are these just their prepared spells? Is that what they're called? You may copy of its spell doing so unprepared. So yeah, yeah. The only mechanic charm we really have is... Is prepared spell. But prepared being past tense is like a weird verbiage. Anyway, somebody who knows more about English, help. What do we call this? So I was, like, mostly looking at the Lore spinner because I'm like, I feel like this is going to end up being put into so many other decks. Whereas the other ones are good with this deck and have very lore-holdy care about things leaving your graveyard abilities, but are less like... Yeah, they're less like, I'm trying to put this in other decks. If I'm getting a copy of this card, where am I putting it after I decide that maybe it doesn't work so well in Quintorious in particular. So that's kind of why I was like, we got to talk about this little guy for a second. He's cool. All right, we've got one more on the list. Okay, and I think that it kind of plays into another card that I'm going to mention, but I was most excited about Spirit of Resilience and Relic Retriever cards. Yeah, these are sweet. And they're cards that care about things leaving your graveyard, and they're low mana cost. Right, they're payoffs for stuff leaving their graveyard. Exactly. As well as being things that are easier to reanimate if they get taken care of. Spirit of Resilience in particular being able to copy something that you bring back for a turn, as well as gets plus one with plus one counter. So sometimes you just copy a bigger thing that you get back. Yeah. And just do a little punch. Whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard, put a plus one counter on this creature, then you may have that creature become a copy of an artifact or creature's card from among those cards until end of turn. Whoa. So like if you bring back selfless spirit, then your Spirit of Resilience can be a copy of that and gets bigger. I mean, this is sweet with Excavah who can bring this back as a one one, and then it grows as a threat. Yeah, so I think that that card is like one of the cards that... I'm always a little hesitant about three mana cards. It's like just starting to be three and four mana cards. I feel like I'm the most scrutinizing of because like those are the turns where I'm really trying to like, okay, our game plan has to start moving at this point. Let me see what is going to do this. And I think that this is a great card to start off. Has a high chance of like being removed when things start to get like a little too difficult, but it's also a good copy to get back later down the line. Cool. And then Relic Retriever is just a good little monkey that helps make treasures, which is never something I'm going to complain about doing. He's a monkey. Yeah, he's into it. And a spirit, spirit monkey. Spirit monkey. Everything's a spirit something here in Lorehold. It kind of is, yeah, which I'm cool with. All right, we have got an upgrade for you that we're going to get to in a couple of minutes, but before we take a quick break, what do you think of this pre-con? Let us know if the Lorehold ones you're excited about, if you're more excited about the other pre-cons down the line, we'll be upgrading all of the pre-cons as we normally do for Strixhaven. But before we get to that upgrade, we got to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. This message is sponsored by Raycon. Hello, dearies. It's your favorite old auntie. 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Protein never tasted so good with Starbucks new protein cold foam. Subject to availability while stocks last. You know my favorite thing is about architect how easy it is to build decks. When I'm brewing for game nights my first draft comes together super fast because I can drag and drop cards straight from ETH rec or scryfall. An architect even sorts them into categories like ramp or card draw automatically but I can always add new ones or move things around based on my strategy. It's quick intuitive and it just makes deckbuilding fun. 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 A R C H I D E K T dot com slash command zone. All right welcome back everybody it is time to upgrade the law hold pre-con. We've given you some of our goals with this upgrade but you'll have to let us know how we do. Of course the rules are we've got $50 for this budget to spend however the upgrade would like but we don't tend to touch the mana base it's usually a fine pre-con mana base. So let's jump into the cards to add here starting with something we've alluded to we just need to get stuff in the graveyard. And I would love to do it a little bit consistently and that is going to come usually at least in boros colors in the form of creatures. So starting things off with Ben and the returners leader. This is just going to be able to yeah let's read ban it real quick. So we've got a red and a white for a legendary creature human cleric rebel. He's a one three with prey once during each of your turns you may cast a creature spell from among cards in your graveyard that were put there from anywhere other than the battlefield. This turn sick anywhere sorry and then whenever you attack you may pay one and discard a card if you do draw a card so we're rummaging and we have a way to get cards to leave the graveyard. Seems like a slam dunk. Yep and two mana so it is doing the thing that I'm interested in doing which is lowering that mana curve and making it easier to bring back from the yard with some of those things that care about creatures that have a lower converted mana cost. So I'm just always surprised when I'm looking for upgrades and I'm seeing all these final fantasy cards and I'm just like yeah you do have a lot of words that are doing really good things. And they're pretty cheap because they got bought a lot. Because when I was like Rachel was like you have a $50 budget and then I was like oh no I'm a budget lover so everything that I'm going to look at is going to be cheap. So cheap. And I first came to Rachel and I was like my upgrades cost $5. Nope we got to do some cool ones. We got to do a few cool things we did find I think some cool things but I do think that like this card in particular just like checks all the boxes. Oh yeah and he's only 50 cents I mean that's like that's so worth it to get something that that definitely overlaps with a lot of different categories. Absolutely only way it could possibly be better same with the next card that we're about to talk about if they were spirits randomly. Even then again I kind of feel like the spirits something would be something I would eventually change from the deck but we're not going to hit on that too early. I agree. Okay the next one is Joshua Phoenix's dominant again in the final fantasy. This is one red white for a legendary creature human noble wizard. When Joshua enters discard up to two cards then draw that many cards rummaging. And then three red and a white and you exile Joshua and return him as a saga on the other side which is a very good saga. It deals damage it gains life and it brings stuff back. Brings stuff back from the yard. Hey it does all the things and it's three mana. And it's three mana and on a three mana three four body which is nothing to really shirk at. That's pretty good stats at the very least. Again just kind of checks all the boxes and is a way to kind of like sink your mana which I think is also important in pre cons or a lot of pre cons don't really come with a way to like sink your mana into something. For sure it gives you somewhere to put it especially it does have a lot of ramp naturally in this deck. 50 cents for Joshua Phoenix is dominant pretty good. All right next I love what Wizards of the Coast is doing with everything about pre cons except for I don't know why this card wasn't included in the deck. Shot it wasn't included honestly. It has his name on it. It really does. Quintorious is literally the flavor text on thrilling discovery a rummaging card a good rummaging card that is a red and white sorcery you gain to life then you may discard two cards if you do draw three cards. Yes thank you. Yeah Wizards please. Look at him it's him in front of a giant elephant. Why not in deck. Why not in deck. They're like well his possibility is basically this spell it's a reference but this card should be on the deck. It's great it belongs here and it's only 25 cents so it's very easy to add. And it's a lore and flavor win. I definitely check twice to make sure that this wasn't already in the deck because they did put like a lot of the Quintorious in the deck there is a lot of lore hold flavor going on so it was just sort of a weird exclusion. We put lately a blade we're forged in and why not thrilling discovery. She's a spirit. Anyway not to be like I genuinely am a lot of time very happy with a lot of things that are happening in the Freakons this one I was like. Strange I agree. Going into next in the theme of like adding rummaging abilities to the deck because I think that it is allowing for card selection which I think is very important and a reason that I cut certain cards as well. I like a little bit of agency I like to draw the cards or like start by discarding and at least have some amount of idea of what is like kind of filtering from deck hand graveyard and so to also continue with that theme I'm going with cathartic pyre because I also just mentioned agency and this card also has the ability to deal three damage to a creature or a planeswalker and an instant it just is a great card. I think if you're playing any deck that really cares about discarding this is one of the top things that I would recommend because it just gives you options. I mean we talk about the power of overlap in commander games in a recent podcast episode and this is a great example of that where it's like yes it gives me a way to fill my graveyard discard two cards and draw that many cards incredible and it's removal that's efficient and can make sure you can pick off things that are coming at your commander when you need to. So cathartic pyre seems like a slam dunk in this deck and again it is only 25 cents. Yeah again sorry I really like some budget cards. Yeah I mean it checks a couple of boxes we're tightening up the screws here it doesn't need to be splashy to improve how the deck works. Yeah and I do think like when going through this deck the things that I really felt like it needed it has a lot of splashy things already and I was like you just need things to be more consistent and going into that this is kind of just a cathartic pyre on a bigger stick is Mishra's command speaking again about agency this is a modal spell so it's going to allow you to kind of pick what are the things that I need I can think of a situation where every single one of these would be applicable at some point so I think that this is just a great spell that allows you to at the very least start cycling cards through your hand. Yeah I mean Mishra's command does a lot you can choose two of these so you choose a player they discard up to x cards and they draw that many cards. It can be you. Nice this then this spell deals x damage to target creature so you can you can rummage and kill a thing or you could deal x damage to target planeswalker in the niche case that there's another one around and target creature gets plus x plus o and gains hasten talent of turn this is an interesting one because I could totally see it mattering on a turn where like quentoria skips your spirits double strike and you've got a big flying spirit that you just want to come in for like you know nine damage ten damage in the air that'd be pretty sweet. I do think the planeswalker one is the most niche on the card but it's always good to have a bargaining chip at the table when you're like hey somebody's got a another maybe a planeswalker stop looking at quentorious somebody else is a planeswalker that's proving to be a little bit difficult for everybody to get through say I could do something about that. Again having options is kind of great and I think that I wish more people would kind of hone in on because it's something that we're getting a lot more of in magic. Something we've talked about a lot is that the way that you have like the way that many players have the most fun is by just making the most choices and you have the least fun when you don't have any cards in your hand you don't have many options to do because you're like I guess I just recast my commander and pass and like that's that's less fun so playing spells that do more things for you that have make that encourage choices and can interact with the game's date as it is is a big deal. And we're giving you a lot of pieces to do that one. Oh yeah 50 cents for mischievous command a great ad here this next one is some cool little tech that I did not know about so I again this is a card I was excited about from its draft format actually. Yeah so it is going to be Fleeting Spirit it is one in a white fits in our weird spirit. Spirit theme. We looked at a lot of spirits actually trying to figure out what would fit as a good inclusion and there are like some fun honorable mentions that we'll maybe get into maybe not. Yeah but this one also has the ability to discard exile Fleeting Spirit return it to the battlefield under its owners control at the beginning of the next end step so it has weirdly for a white card a lot of words that work with what you're trying to do as well as being a spirit. Yeah there's a lot that's going right here this is a two mana three one so it's a great thing to give double strike too it's got two different activated abilities one of them exiles cards from your graveyard and to give this thing for a strike who cares but like triggers all your things gives you another token with commander you can do this at instant speed uh you do it in response to a bajukebog and do it multiple times and then the other ability is discard a card to exile this and bring it back to the battlefield it checks so many boxes this card's 25 cents and is like sick like so much overlap going on here. Yeah I'm just kind of excited about weird random uncommons um if we can't tell. It's sweet here I like more often I found that with in my graveyard decks I just want a free discard outlet yep and then you've got even more discard going on. All right this next card I picked is loyal retainers at 275. This card is one of those that like if you did come into this video and you're like oh I'm gonna buy whatever gets mentioned um it's like for the collection just like a good way to like punch these up a little bit this is also just like a good card to have because it has a place in a ton of decks it is a three mana two and a white for a one one before you get a little worried it does say sacrifice loyal retainers return target legendary creature from your graveyard to the battlefield activate only during your turn before attackers are declared but kind of a four free for free obviously not super free but a way to get something big back from your yard which there aren't a again a ton of ways we have a lot of things that are we have hoops to jump through and CMCs are really kind of gated behind certain things right and we have a fair amount of legends in this deck uh Excava is a great thing to bring back with loyal retainers obviously I would most times be like where's Excava if I have a way to get Excava back it's top of the list pretty much every time I'm doing a count right now so I'll let you know in a moment of how many legends just come naturally in the deck but it is a fair amount and we're adding to with this upgrade here and I can hand you a few from my side over here yeah please thank you um so we've got a ton of a ton of different legends that you could bring back with the slow retainers and it's itself is a three mana permanent that you can bring back and keep recurring your stuff that isn't necessarily uh less than three mana or three or less yeah again we'd be kind of trying to get Excava back and then Excava could bring loyal retainers back and then you can have that loyal retainers get something else later down the line so a nice like obviously not infinite combos I mean if you're looking at this card you're probably like this probably combos with a lot of things and yeah uh if you built a deck around it it totally can yeah but at the very least you're getting some dang good value out of this card being in a deck like this fits with everything that you're trying to do and uh yeah I'm still counting but we can move on to the next one okay um the next one I was interested in going for some targeted removal that was also permanent based um mostly because we have things like Excava again I was trying to keep in mind ways for you to hopefully play Excava too if you wanted to um and so I was like okay what's a good o-ring effect yeah and Aang's Iceberg I think is kind of the best o-ring effect that we currently have you could go for some cheaper ones there's pretty good ones but I think this was in my head the one that is the best on its face value and has it having flash is a really big deal so it's two in white it's got flash when it enters you can hit a target non-land permanent which is great ton of flexibility until Aang's Iceberg leaves but it also has this water bend ability that lets you sacrifice it put it back in there your graveyard so you can hit another thing later or you can get a token with it sacrifice it bring it back hit a real card with it there's a lot of different cool tricks you can do in a deck that can bring back permanence from the graveyard uh one two three four five six seven eight nine ten legends naturally in the deck and we're adding to uh that is not including Squee who you just don't want on the battlefield it's not a reasonable thing for you to bring back with loyal retainers but especially with like Hofre and the five mana quentorias and like it's sushi's really good dragon in there yeah yeah some some cool options with loyal retainers and interested in yeah discarding expensive legends and i think that like once you put loyal retainers in the deck set you have a pet legend that you want yeah in the deck too something that allows you to get it onto the battlefield just like a little bit easier maybe cheat on some mana as a result and i like that is kind of the name of the game with these value engines as you're trying to make everything cheaper by cycling it through your graveyard and put Vilmaakus in here there you go there you go there's the big big laurel dragon uh all right let's talk about this next one this is this card me too i angseis broke only 50 cents uh this next card is four dollars so we're spending a little bit more budget here but i it's basically i put it in every red deck um and certainly every red deck that has a planeswalker in the command zone oh yeah it's disrupt decorum two red red for a sorcery go all creatures you don't control so we can't attack me you can't attack my planeswalker stay off my lawn yep and uh you're playing a red white deck so anything that is going to push damage onto your opponents uh and also open up the battlefield for you to attack because the way that most precons are built yeah you're winning with combat damage so anything that is going to open up those lanes so that you can continue to kind of shmove and drive down them is going to be uh an a plus a win for you so disrupt decorum i think a great include even though it doesn't play on some of the other accesses it is kind of a okay i'm at the point where i'm trying to like win the game i'm trying to make it so that people start getting knocked off the table this is going to be the card that's going to help you do that yeah it also ups that mass disruption number which we know from the beginning was a little bit low yep speaking of uh the next card is a master's disruption spell as well sitting at a dollar fifty it's divine reckoning yeah i wanted to include a mass disruption spell that was going to have a flashback cost um just trying to yeah play into the things that care about things leaving the yard again and so this plays into that as well as well as being four mana which is a little bit nicer to your mana at least up front each player is going to choose a creature they control destroy the rest um you are typically after you do master disruption trying to go wide again so people having one or even two kind of things after they rebuild and you then get to attack um not the worst and so i think like in the world of you have a ton of white master disruption um and master move will to be looking at this is kind of just the one that i would be uh fixing my my goggles zeroing in on yeah for sure it's um i like having a little bit of a an over abundance of board wipes in this deck mostly because you're really good at bringing stuff back from the graveyard so hypothetically you're better at building you're like i'm going to blow up everything but i'm going to keep my son tight and attack with my son tight and bring a thing back yep you're just in a really good spot after that and you have a planeswalker as a commander that makes tokens so if you can protect your planeswalker when things start getting dicey that means you get to keep your engine that like refills your graveyard that kind of thing going um yeah okay so divine reckoning sitting at a dollar fifty which brings the total budget to eleven dollars you saved a little bit of money you can spend that on some foils or an extra scava for your pony dog yeah there you go uh well we've added ten cards uh the ten cards are sweet we're going to have to cut ten cards because that is how commander works so let's get into those all right starting with one of the big reprint cards oh no i yeah please don't get mad at me i did want to cut two of the big reprint cards i'm happy that they're reprinted but i think they're i think their home is in a different deck your princess is in a different castle i'm sorry moonshaker cavalry eight mana is more mana than i ever want to pay um yeah because you're kind of casting this the old-fashioned way right like this deck isn't going to cheat an eight mana creature into play and it doesn't ramp that hard even if it has a fair amount of ramp in it um so yeah i just i don't know and you have to think about it in a way of like okay i am a on-board deck for the most part and by the time we get like if you're being really hopeful and you're casting this somewhere between turn six and eight that's like prime somebody else is casting a board wipe turn and you're gonna have to do some amount of reset up and the yeah the deck doesn't really have a great way to bring back an eight mana creature on its face it's really again things they care about things being three cmc or less i can think of angel and dominating cares about four that's gail or dragon probably isn't getting up to eight power no it's not bringing this thing back so there's just like a few too many hoops for a card that i'm probably discarding and it's just like getting exiled from my yard and i'm never really using this ability again happy to see it get a reprint i think there are certain places where this card is going to shine you'll be happy to have it in your collection but i don't think it's quite right for this deck i agree all right let's move on to this next one we added a board wipe we're taking one out and a weird one at that it's wave of reckoning yeah i just again i this is a great card happy to see it reprinted each creature deals damage to itself equal to its power and we make a bunch of three two spirits so that's not that blows up all your stuff like wave of reckoning is best in decks that are like wall decks like zero fours or you all your tokens are two threes and that you're going to keep like this becomes more of a one-sided board wipe that's why this card is expensive in this deck it is a five mana wrath of god yeah that sometimes doesn't kill your opponent stuff yeah in fact when i was playing one of the games yeah two of the other commanders in the other pre cons have a higher toughness than power so i was just like okay i can cast this wave of reckoning and my opponents get to keep their commanders oh no so bad yeah so again just move this card to a different deck get yourself that little bit of value move it into a deck where you got some bigger booty creatures yeah not in this one for sure uh up next we did mention we're cutting down on some of the spirit stuff uh going on starting with the moonshaker cavalry but uh continuing with a o the dawn sky i it's hard because i do kind of like this card i just don't like it in a deck where i don't get to control when it dies if it's dying in combat and then i'm just like having a few less choices um if i'm paying five mana for something it it better give me like a little bit more agency yeah and this one is just a little bit too difficult and i know that some people are going to be like okay you're taking out aio why are you leaving it at sushi at sushi um at sushi for mana that just fits into the mana curve a little bit better i was trying to get rid of some of these more expensive things and so aio felt like the natural like at least at sushi with a dice trigger for mana also has good stats i mean this has good stats too but it does i mean there's like literally a card that only brings back four drops in here and the dragon can bring back stuff that's four drops or less so there are options to bring at sushi back aio is just sort of on its own um the other thing is like we're not going to pay five mana for a five mana for a five four with flying and vigilance that's a good body but that's not necessarily a card we put in decks all the time so if you are not driving when this thing dies you're just not getting all of the text below the keywords uh on aio and it's good text but um generally if you have a dice trigger you want to be in control of when it happens absolutely and i think yeah unfortunately that's why aio is getting cut out of this this bad boy all right all right going into uh next one might surprise you a little bit but it's going to be seize the spoils um if i'm trying to rummage things out of my deck i just want it to be a little bit cheaper uh this one is three mana and a sorcery which i think is where it died in my heart um i just yeah really don't want to uh pay three mana sorcery speed for a rummage spell that is also we just have better versions of this exactly and we added them yeah exactly we told you some better versions that are cheaper and give you a little more uh flexibility so just yeah slide this one out slide those ones in be happy be healthy this card is this card is fine but i mostly like this card in a deck where i can um play it for cheaper or for copy it or copy it or something like that yeah um okay the next one is from the mainset i believe the kami of the ancient law yeah unsure exactly yet let's let's read let's read this one for the people who haven't heard of it sure so kami of the ancient law is one and a white for a creature spirit that is a tutu and it says sacrifice this creature destroy target enchantment this fits with the spirit theme this has a sacrifice that you can control but i personally don't like that it only targets an enchantment i think if i'm trying to play something that is a two mana tutu or do things with my deck i want things that are a little more open-ended yep and having to only target an enchantment this is just like a little two meesh of a card for for me personally especially when the spirit payoff isn't as prevalent like giving this thing double strike isn't really going to change the math all that much uh so kami of the ancient law catching the axe here up next is a card that i've seen so many white decks uh it is secret rendezvous one white white you and target opponent each draw three cards i might be secret rendezvous biggest hater um when i get targeted for this i'm like really really me i'm trying to kill you i'm gonna kill you with those uh the cost of giving someone three cards is insane so high i yeah i'm not giving my opponents things in this economy there will be one winner and it is not going to be me in this opponent um so secret rendezvous again also maybe i just don't like three mana sorceries um i don't want to spend three mana to do something that isn't like impacting the board um so it's got to be a dang good three mana sorcery if i'm putting it in my deck and this one just like not getting there also it's not filling my yard i guess unless i'm going to over seven cards um so this one just is like yeah sorry not sorry you're not the card for me also like don't give me seven three cards i won't i will use them against you i didn't want to even put i wanted to take out path of exile and rachel was like you can't don't take out path of path exile has to say and i was like i don't want to give my opponents mana but just so you all understand the facet that like i'm coming at this from um i wanted to take path of exile out this next card we sort of alluded to cutting this is drum bellower a great reprint i'm glad it's here uh it is not doing much in this deck other than sort of giving your creatures vigilance and being a spirit yes we added cards that give you a lot more value um and uh it's like an easy cut for me yeah i you said it when we were talking about drum bellower earlier it is at its best when you have creatures with activated abilities there simply are not those in this deck so drum bellower is not allowing you to activate a creature yeah it doesn't three times as you go through turn order um he gives your spirits vigilance like it doesn't even give them vigilance so it's weird yeah it seems like this was just a place for them to reprint the card thank you wizards of the coast we'll take it but uh drum bellower put it elsewhere yeah exactly maybe put it back into that walls deck the walls also usually have cool activated abilities yeah it's a weird one uh this next one is cool in the deck yeah once we get into like these last three like they were kind of hard picks to take out of the deck um and i think that i ended up deciding to cut these three because they're also not new cards i think there are some new cards that as people play with them more as i start to get a better understanding of them they might have been the correct cuts but these were kind of the cuts where i was like people are gonna want to play with the new cards yeah like you could take out the wheel of fortune jackal maybe um there's also this advanced reconstruction that's like a formant enchantment class we were talking about oh yeah class we were like class class different kind of now they're so clever um and this card seems like it's another like side questy card that could have been correct to cut but again i was like people probably want to play with as many of the new cards as possible i felt already bad for cutting commie the ancient law um so i kind of went to some cards that like you've probably played with before and like at least i have more data to back up sure in past games them being this is the kind of play pattern that they fall into and maybe that's not what we're trying to do yeah and that puts us at squee goblin nebob getting cut from the deck gabin babab um yeah squeeze squeeze a super sick card and it's cool in this deck because you can discard it and then it goes back to your hand and that sort of turns rummaging into card advantage and it gives you the leaves the battlefield or leaves the graveyard trigger so there's some cool stuff going on with squee but having your commander be a bigger threat than it already is um is a little risky and they're with even with the amount of rummaging that we added there's not like that much rummaging where you definitely can be like discarding squee every turn and getting it back to your hand every turn yeah that would be incredible but like that involves keeping a four man a planeswalker around that's giving you tokens which you're at least my opponents are gonna let me do yeah they're trying not to anyway and i think that like squee does this thing where you're putting it in because you're afraid of disc you're putting it in your deck because you're afraid of discarding cards that are like valuable um and i think that's just like a bad mentality to get into with a deck like this you want stuff in your graveyard yeah and so i think that you kind of need to cut a card like this to start getting used to the fact of i'm discarding cards because it is value for me in the end not putting a card like this in your deck because it gives you a little bit of that value on your hand yeah in the way of being like oh i'm scared to discard something valuable yeah you have to put those valuable things in your graveyard to get them back and that is the value that those valuable cards are going to give you yeah that's a really good point uh up next we cut uh this is very good in the deck it is a little weird uh it's it's five mana i don't tend to run these effects because they're just so expensive but it's bail fire it's two hybrid uh boros boros boros so five mana all together uh it says it's a spirit order uh other red creatures you control get plus one plus one other white creatures you control get plus one plus one whenever you cast a red spell bail fire leech deals three damage to target player or planeswalker and whenever you cast a white spell you gain three life so you can burn face you could burn planeswalkers you and then it pumps all your spirit tokens yeah is kind of the main positive here yeah it just isn't doing anything with the graveyard something which i think rachel i've kind of agreed is the more exciting part of the deck yeah um it's just kind of an anthem effect it just sort of says your tokens get plus two plus two yeah uh and then specifically your three two tokens not your one one white flying right no those are just white those get plus one plus one so this also is coming down to i don't know i think you end up being either a fan of this kind of card or not a fan of this kind of card um five mana setups are tough i mean you can play this after like if you're have quintuaries on the board and you made like three three twos and then you cast this thing this gives you an extra six power on the battlefield yeah which is like could be sweet but is also like not a huge improvement it's not necessarily going to win you the game that turn and it's also like assuming assuming i have micwander and assuming i've done the thing already then it'll be a little better yeah so it feels a little bit more win more yeah and i feel like not to sound like a broken record again five mana a little bit more difficult to get back with the cards that are currently in the deck and so and at five mana uh i'm just trying to bring that mana cost down yeah you want cooler stuff at five yeah like it's not that exciting at five but if somebody was like i just didn't agree with you two sitting on that podcast i wanted to keep male phyloge in my deck i'd be like cool if there was a card i was gonna keep that would probably be one of them that's a tough choice and maybe down the line we find out that some of these like new cards are not as good as male phyloge but i was like again exciting all right the final card that we're cutting is perpetual timepiece and i cut this one for the simple fact again of we're putting things that give you more choice than this card does into the deck right we put in a lot of different uh rummaging tools so you can tell exactly what cards are going to your graveyard when milling two is kind of like oh i milled my spells and that isn't really going to do anything for me um and really i don't know when the last time i saw the second ability of her perpetual timepiece activated yeah it's mostly there to mill to every turn which is big fine um but i just want something with a little bit more selection yeah this is a little bit too wild card it it feels very pre-con card to me yeah um like okay we need something that is going to be a cheap to turn two thing that's going to enable your game plan and i think that's also why it gets cut if you're playing this on any turn that isn't like turn one through three i'm feeling bad about this card it's it feels like a card a dead card in your hand in the late game it's just too slow yeah two mana to get two cards two random cards in your graveyard is like yep okay well uh that's what i have so i'm going to cast it whereas the two mana rummagers actually feel like okay later in and mana sinks and yeah all kinds of stuff uh okay those are the 10 cards that are getting cut it definitely was hard we talked about this a lot but i think we landed on a pretty good spot so obviously you can make the changes that feel good and right to you that is the upgrade we've taken 10 cards out we've added 10 cards but we're going to take a couple of minutes in uh in just a moment to talk about how the deck plays some strategy ideas what to keep in mind when you're playing it because becky has played it a few times but before we get to that if you want to pick up this pre-con or any of the cards that we talked about um any maybe you want some cards from your other deck maybe the new singles that we talked about are exciting you need a you need yourself a jackal go to card kingdom dot com slash command and you're supporting the show when you're shopping they've got a huge selection of cards especially after a new set comes out i like to keep a list of all the cards i need for for my decks and then i paste it all into card kingdom and i order all the versions that i want for each of my decks and they all show up at one time and i get to have a big dex swap party so nice so fun it's nice getting it done all in one spot and they've got a huge inventory especially of new cards when when they come out so if you're excited about any of the cards in the pre-con if you need two ex-comas like me go to card kingdom and you're supporting the show with that affiliate link at card kingdom dot com slash command and then go to alter row dot com slash command to get all of the accessories you need you've got a new deck you need sleeves you need a deck box you need a play mat to match they have a brand new product it's called the patch craft binders and deck boxes they're super wild but you can take velcro patches and just put it right on the front of your deck box or of your binder super easy to customize if you collect patches i know that's a thing that's really big in the military right now it's like is patches but they also have different like patch things that you can put right on the front there's like a velcro thing that you can put your commander in and stick on the front of your deck box pretty cool they look really clean pretty cool so you know which deck boxes which because you can see your commander you're showing it off on the front so check out those patch craft uh products they're pretty sweet and don't forget you can see us at magic con los vegas for game night's live we're going to be on the main stage on friday we've got some very cool guests we've got some very cool surprises for you and i can't wait because it's all strict saving themed and this set is sick yeah um you better be there yeah i'm very excited uh for so many reasons obviously excited for stricts haven excited for the surprises that i can't talk about which is making it so i know it's going to be such a fun show yes uh we again they gave us too long to think about it so we're trying some wacky stuff uh but let's wrap up this episode i want to talk about how the deck plays what you noticed about playing it and what how you would um describe it to people who want to pick up this deck okay um so i would say that the idea behind especially quentorious in the command zone because that's what i've played is you're using quentorious as a way to kind of start this engine of getting value over your opponents by being able to bring things back from the yard as well as get other value from some of the cards because a lot of your cards are going to say bring something cmc three or less back from the yard also have this other effect that continues to do other things um and you're really just trying to get as much value as possible from things like that yeah you're turning discard into value right so you're like okay sure i'm discarding a card to quentorious's ability but i'm going to bring that back with another card so it's like i didn't even discard it it's like i you know i drew it instead of i got to keep it exactly um there's a nice little mention of quentorious as a planeswalker and sometimes your opponents are going to throw a lot of creatures at quentorious and your health your life total gets to stay nice and high because a lot of damage got thrown at quentorious yep um haven't played with a ton of planeswalker commanders personally so that was like a nice little upside even though i do spend a lot of the time dreaming about excaving the command zone um again me too again a lot of the things that i decided to add to the deck or hopefully to make it more possible for excavate to be the commander and so you're kind of spending the first turns one through three setting up trying to ideally get some of those pieces of ramp onto the board and then getting quentorious onto the board as soon as possible because the sooner you have quentorious on the board the sooner you're going to start being able to make three twos the sooner you're going to start being able to fill your yard with quentorious's ability which is the main recursive piece of filling the yard that this deck has access to it turns on so many of the cards in your deck when you don't have anything in the graveyard you're like okay half the cards in my hand don't do anything right now so making sure you have that enabler going is a big deal it is interesting there's not a lot of planeswalker commanders that i like rush out because usually you want some kind of defense for them but quentorious does provide a decent defense at least on the ground yeah um if you're able to cast it on turn three two like again five loyalties kind of a lot if you're coming out with quentorious on turn three with five loyalty most people don't really have something on the board that's going to be able to do all of that damage in one swing so there was never a time like obviously there could be a time but there was never a time in my play testing where somebody was able to do all five damage or hypothetically six because you're ticking him up the moment that you play him right yeah um nobody was really able to deal six damage in that next turn order so i pretty much always had quentorious at least for two turns nice um i'm curious uh how often did you minus him never um that was my that was my expectation i'm not expecting you to minus quentorious hardly ever it seems extremely niche but that's kind of how planeswalkers are they usually have one ability that's like most the time you are casting this ability this is the bread and butter thing that this planeswalker does and then it has some other things that have a niche moment but you're mostly playing quentorious for that passability and then that plus ability that enables you to cycle things into your graveyard and then is a card that cares about things coming out so he kind of does he really does do a good job of being what the deck wants to do great uh any final words for people piloting the lorehold spirit deck so i think you just have to think of it as how can i outvalue my opponents as much as possible i think when you're looking to make this deck your own i would be looking to a lot of keywords that exist in magic already i know to like embalm i wrote in tomb and then exhumed and then i was what is this card and it's eternalized eternalized one of those uh on core things like even delve that is sure yeah exile things from your yard i mean delving a spell with quentorious on the field and getting up like five cards to leave your graveyard yeah i don't think it all triggers it at once one or more cards like so you still only get one one token but still gets a little cheaper yeah get rid of some lands get a three or two um and flashback just to name a few so like be on the look for even if you're like oh this doesn't specifically say that it cares or does those things anything with those kind of keywords play nicely with an ability um and the care about movement from your graveyard like quentorious and some of the other new cards in this precond all right well uh we're going to wrap up this episode like we said lots more strict saving preconds to go so before we go we want to say thank you to our team for making this episode and all of our episodes possible thank you to Karina Cruz Josh Diaz John Schneider Grob Galati Jamie Block Jordan bridge and Jake Boss Eric Lam mason lung Josh Murphy Evan Limburger Sam Waldo Joshly quiet Jimmy Wong and of course to Becky Bell for taking the time today thanks for doing the upgrade of course i mean this was a lot of fun it was hard i don't envy you having to do these every single time all right bye everybody