InMagic: The Gathering, the most powerful element isn’t fire, air, or water, but the element of surprise. Your opponents can’t defend against something if they don’t know what’s coming.Duskmourn: House of Horrors' Jump Scare! Commander deck is all about keeping your opponents guessing by ensuring they never know what they’re going to face.
Naturally, the best cards in Jump Scare! are ones that enable the deck’s core theme of manifest dread, which places cards face down on the table so your opponents don’t know what’s underneath. It could be anything from a cute puppy to a giant monster ready to eat your enemies' life totals.
10Zimone’s Hypothesis
My hunch is that this card will bounce creatures.
For whatever reason, Jump Scare! will sometimes concern itself withwhether a card has a quality that’s either an even or odd number. This seems to provide some quick delineation of which cards are affected and which aren’t that’s relatively simple to implement in a game with lots of numbers.
Zimone’s Hypothesis is one such card. The benefit here is that youplace one +1/+1 counter to ensure that at least one of your creatures won’t get bouncedback to your hand. It’s also possible to place this on an opposing creature if it gives you more bounce for your buck, but then you’d lose that counter.
9Disorienting Choice
The choice is probably more clear than this spell implies.
Ostensibly, Disorienting Choice is a mass-removal spell that targets artifacts and enchantments. The fact is, most opponents are probably going to want to keep their enchantments or artifacts and would happily provide you with a bunch of lands instead. So Disorienting Choice islikely to be a spell that just plays a bunch of lands.
That said,playing as many lands as you have opponents is pretty great. This card gets better the more opponents you have, so try to play it as soon as possible before opponents get knocked out of the game.
Andif you’re playing Jump Scare! one-on-one, consider replacing this card with something better than grabbing one land for four mana.
8Shriekwood Devourer
Souls are a nutritious part of a tree’s diet.
The problem with manifesting cards(whether that’s with dread or otherwise) is thatthey’re often very expensive. Cards further up on this list will help with turning some of those manifested cards face-up without paying for them, but in the meantime, we have Shriekwood Devourer.
This tree is relatively simple: the bigger the creature you attack with, the more lands you get to untap. The more lands you have untapped,the more mana you have to flip over manifested cards. It’s a simple strategy, but sometimes simply bashing your opponents with a Worldspine Wurm is the best course.
7Glitch Interpreter
Deja vu is usually means a glitch somewhere.
It used to be that placing a card face down on the table would cost you three mana. Glitch Interpreter still costs three mana toensure a card gets manifested, but after that, you can cast it again to gain the useful ability todraw cards every time a colorless creature deals damage to an opponent.
With Jump Scare! producing manifested 2/2s by the score, getting one or two to do damage to an opponent islikely to net you a few cardsin the long run, making Glitch Interpreter a worthy addition to any manifest-themed deck.
6Experimental Lab / Staff Room
You’ll find very different kinds of work happening in both places.
Rooms are a new enchantment typeadded in Duskmourn: House of Horrors. Playing one side of the card doesn’t mean the other remains permanently out of reach—it just means you have topay the mana cost of the other side to ‘unlock’ that room later.
Either side you choose, both Experimental Lab and Staff Room providean incremental boost to Jump Scare!’s game plan. Either you get to start turning creatures face up, put +1/+1 counters on a creature, or you get to manifest dread with additional counters and trample. It’s a win-win whichever room you pick.
5Giggling Skitterspike
Thanks, I hate it.
Indestructible is probably the most desired keywordfor any creature in Magic Commander. Having a permanent blocker that can (almost) never die makes for an excellent defensive tool, and one that can eventually become a significant offensive threat later.
Giggling Skipperspike offersa clear path from defensive wall to offensive threat. You first play it to keep enemies from attacking lest they bounce off this indestructible demon Toy and take one damage for their trouble. Later, pay five mana and suddenly this Toy turns into a real monster, dealing six damage whenever it attacks, blocks, or becomes targeted by a spell.
4They Came from the Pipes
Someone has a fear of showers.
Even if They Came from the Pipes lasts just a single turn,you get two manifested 2/2 creatures and you draw two cards. Everything after that is just an extra card every time you cast a face-down creature.
For a deck that’s focused almost entirely on casting creatures face down, that’sa great deal that will pay dividends in the future. And it only costs five mana to ensure at least two drawn cards and probably a few more later on.
3Curator Beastie
Not every monster under the bed wants to eat you. Sometimes, they just want a new dinette set.
Even an army of 2/2s are still just 2/2 creatures—not exactly the most threatening thing in Magic.But what if those manifested 2/2s could be 4/4s? And what if you could make a lot of 4/4s? Enter Curator Beastie.
Every time this Beast attacks or comes into play, you get to manifest dread. Every time you play a colorless creature, it gets two +1/+1 counters. It also has reach, but really, Curator Beastie is there tomake lots of manifested creatures and make them bigger. A must-have for Jump-Scare! and any deck with colorless critters.
2Kianne, Corrupted Memory
A mathematical ghost.
Another creature that cares about evens or odds, Kianne, Corrupted Memoryoffers flash-speed casting to creatureswhen she has an odd powernumber, andflash casting to non-creature spells when she has even power. She also gains a +1/+1 counter every time you draw a card.
Flash is a great ability and Simic colors often like to do shenanigans with +1/+1 counters, but Kianne really doesn’t fit in a deck as interested in manifesting cards as Jump Scare! is.A good Kianne deck would have a better mix of creature and non-creature spellsandways to draw cards to gain the type of flash you wantKianne to provide at any given moment. That said, Kianne is a great potential commander who totally deserves her own deck.
1Zimone, Mystery Unraveler
The solution is to play lots of lands.
Of course, Jump Scare!’s box-topper is going to offer some serious firepower. With Zimone, Mystery Unraveler, every second land played per turn turns a face-down card face up. This not only lets yousneak expensive creatures into playway earlier than their mana cost would allow, but it also lets youflip up cards that would otherwise remain face down because they’re not creatures.
All you need to do ispair Zimone with cards that take land from your deck and put ‘em into play. Every Rampant Growth, every Cultivate, and every Sakura-Tribe Elder suddenly takes cards from your deck and puts them into play for free. If that’s not a winning strategy, I don’t know what is.
