Summary
Commander decks inMagic: The Gatheringtook a turn for the terrifying with the release of Duskmourn: House of Horror. Four preconstructed Commander decks joined the game, each one more terrifying than the last.
If you’re wondering which of the four decks are the best, or which ones have the best cards in it, we explored as much of the cursed plane as we could reach to give you all the information you need to survive even the longest Commander game. Each deck has its own strengths and weaknesses, with one clear powerhouse among them.
4Death Toll
The Golgari Delirium
A lot is going on with the Death Toll deck, a green and black deck with a focus on getting various card types in the graveyard to fuel multiple delirium triggers. The main one is on your commander, Winter, Cynical Opportunist. This four-mana commander is a 2/5 with deathtouch, a mill trigger when they attack, and a delirium trigger that happens on your end step.
You can exile any number of cards with different card types with Winter until you hit four different types. If you do, you get to take a permanent card from among them and put it directly into the battlefield with a finality counter.
That’s not too bad of an effect, but you need to have something good to bring back, make sure you’re not exiling so many cards as to turn off other delirium effects, and then make sure you’re not exiling something you’d want to bring back later.
If that form of reanimation comes with too many strings, you can use some of the very good cards in the deck to do so, including:
The alternate commander in the deck is Rendmaw, Creaking Nest, a super interesting Scarecrow that sows chaos among all the other players with an army of goaded Birds, making for a very fun game.
3Jump Scare!
The Simic Dread
The Jump Scare! deck, is a green and blue deck that combines your classic land synergies with big beefy creatures and even bigger spells. You have your commander, Zimone, Mystery Unraveler, who has just one ability. With her landfall trigger, you get to manifest dread the top cards of your deck if that’s the first time it has triggered this turn.
If it isn’t the first time, you can turn one of your face-down permanents back up for free.
The deck seems to be pulled in two different directions here, with your classic land-based ramp synergies in Tatyova, Benthic Druid, and Scute Swarm. But at the same time, you have some face-down mechanics that seem to get in the way a bit.
The sheer amount of power in the deck makes it a huge treat, and with some tweaking, you may make use of all that power and land ramping by just ramping into those bigger creatures.
2Endless Punishment
A New Type Of Pain
Though smaller than the Valgavoth found in the main Duskmourn set, Endless Punishment has one of the strongest single commanders in the precons in Valgavoth, Harrower of Truth. This red and black Elder Demon has some built-in protection with a ward cost of two lives, not the strongest, but can still add up over time.
More importantly, Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls’ ability makes it so that anytime an opponent loses life for any reason, it gains a +1/+1 counter, and you get to draw a card. There’s a limit to this effect though. It only triggers once during each of their turns.
That stipulation won’t be too much of a problem though, with all the different effects that cost life in Magic, you’ll sure to be able to trigger it fairly regularly without doing much else. Thankfully, the deck comes loaded with a few ways to start pinging your opponents, punishing them for doing everything from tapping lands for mana from Barbflare Gremlin, to having creatures die from Blood Artist.
Since it is a red and black deck, you have access to a ton of great removal, with classics like Blasphemous Act and Decree and Pain, as well as new ones like Sadistic Shell Game and Suspended Sentence.
1Miracle Worker
Enchantments Work In Mysterious Ways
Enchantress decks are incredibly strong, as enchantments rarely have effective removal spells to worry about, even in Commander. The Miracle Worker deck works primarily with Aminatou, Veil Piercer, a white, blue, and black commander that lets you both surveil the top two cards of your deck at the start of your upkeep, and then gives all your enchantment cards in your hand miracle, while also reducing their miracle cost by four generic mana.
You can cast a card for its miracle cost when you draw it so long as its the first card you’ve drawn each turn.
With such a huge reduction in cost, if you cast an enchantment for its miracle cost, you’re able to bet that there are all sorts of high-cost enchantments in the deck. There’s also a fair amount of deck manipulation in here, which makes sense considering you need to be able to make sure you hit those enchantments regularly.
Here’s the thing with Aminatou though. You can use the legendary creature to get around timing restrictions with your spells, drawing cards on your opponent’s turn to get chances to play cheap enchantments out on your opponent’s turn.
