By: Chris Lorensen

How to scrape the bottom of the upgrade barrel with class

We’re all excited. We’ve got our fresh decks and fresh upgrades to tune our decks up. Some of us are keeping the main commander at the helm, others the secondary. Well, I’m here to tell you why you may want to dig a little deeper and

First of all, why choose a commander so different from the deck that it makes your first few weeks of upgrades difficult, cheap and quite frankly leaves you feeling behind the competition? Because no one sees it coming.

By a few weeks in, everyone will start figuring out how all the popular decks and main strategies are working and what to do against them. They may even be prepared for those strategies. But if you go off the beaten path, you can come at your opponent from an unexpected angle.

If you pick one of the tertiary commanders you do end up with a lot more cards in your starting deck that not only synergize poorly with your commander, but that are just plain bad on their own. I’m here to talk about what we can do to mitigate the ill-effects of an un-synergistic deck the first few weeks of the tournament or even late game if you want to change things up while there is still time.

First, don’t freak out, it’s only week one. Plenty of people are looking to replace those low quality cards. Also, even if they have less to fix as you they can still only buy so many high value cards. Maybe one or two at best. The odds of them finding those cards in a 100 card singleton format, kind of low. So we got that going for us.

Secondly, and most importantly, look at what you are both losing and gaining by switching commanders and apply that to the basic deck building of  bombs, removal, draw, and ramp.

In my case, by swapping from Anje Falkenrath to K’rrik, son of Yawgmoth I gained the ability to drop some serious bombs at a cost. With that in mind, I wanted to focus on cards that K’rrik allowed me to drop early to acquire a commanding board state.

One of my choices was Pestilence Demon. While Pestilence Demon is still good without K’rrik, getting to eight mana in mono black on the first week of upgrades is pretty rough. Taking my commander into consideration however, I can cast Pestilence Demon and activate it as much as I can pay life that turn I play it. Not a bad value.

In the magic community, we call things like Pestilence Demon a bomb. Bombs are cards that when you play them they make an immediate impact or, at the very least, have to be answered soon. Of course, one of these may be your new commander.

Bombs are a straight forward upgrade but the trick is finding ones at low monetary value. For example, with K’rrik if you don’t answer it by time I untap you are running the risk of me having a monster turn (at a cost of course). I can apply that idea to my bomb selection by finding cards that have powerful effects but are generally considered unplayable due to their high converted mana cost.

So try to find bombs that are bad on their own but work well with your commander. Of course, the downside here is if you don’t have your commander out you might not be able to use the bomb but hey, no pain no gain and no risk no reward. I mean, that’s why we’re cutting a color, right? Anyways, on average I would suggest having about five bombs throughout your deck and another five ways to reuse them should they get removed.

So big splashy plays is what my payoff was by switching but that only makes up a small portion of upgrades when trying to rebuild a precon with only $15. The real focus needs to be on what you are losing. In my case, I lost a lot of draw power because Anje drew me cards just by tapping. That’s some pretty decent filtering. I also lost some resilience in the form of losing the madness theme.

So aside from three extra pieces of graveyard recursion to buff the resilience, my main focus on upgrades was draw power. Which, let’s be honest, is just something any deck wants. Black and blue both have access to a fair amount of one off and consistent draw power even on a budget. If you’re out of those colors it means you may have to get a little bit more creative.

Cards like Fecundity are cheap and if you’re using it you are probably looking to abuse it more than your opponent. If you’re in red you have access to wheel effects like Dragon Mage and Magus of the Wheel. Plus the ever coveted Humble Defector. And if you’re in white, I’m sorry and may the Nicol Bolas have mercy on you.

For me, cards that were three mana or less that drew cards and were .50 cents or cheaper instantly made the list. Cards like Succumb to Temptation, Sign in Blood and Painful Lesson may not seem all that glamorous but the last thing I wanted to do was get tpo turn four and miss a land drop.

And finally, if you have 15 cards on your list that all cost a quarter and you still have room on your list you can focus on out valuing and outplaying your opponent. Best way to do this is grab some cheap single target removal or slam in an extra board wipe if you can find them under two dollars. I personally bought Murder and all it’s variations along with a damaged Plague Wind week one for under two dollars with my leftover budget.

…Oh yeah, ask for “moderately played” cards or worse if you don’t mind.

And there you have it, you have a deck that can limp it’s way to a week two victory. If you haven’t cut a color yet, I highly recommend it for something different. There is certainly still time. Follow the basics and remember that plenty of other people are still playing it slow and games may still go well past turn 10.

Plus, if you are truly worried, you could always play the stock deck for two weeks and switch after the second week of upgrades if you’re worried you can’t quite get there.

Bonus info if you made it this far. Did you read last season’s articles? You may want to consider both using and having ways of dealing with the following cards if they find your commander:Imprison in the MoonLignifyNevermoreAnd other such effects.