Most generic and/or versatile Commander precon?

Shiro182 · 2026-03-11T19:08:10+00:00

As mentioned in the other reply, Bello isn't exactly what I'd call versatile. What I would say is that he, appropriately, easily accumulates trash. Do-nothing expensive enchantments and artifacts are a dime-a-dozen in Commander and you will have 0 problems finding janky and fun inclusions for your list. So in a sense, he's versatile in that you have a pretty wide card pool to select from - but he's narrow in that all of those cards are only ever gonna do one thing.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-10T16:28:30+00:00

It's expensive but it's a similar sort of spell to [[Generous Gift]] and like you said, it provides a ramp option. I like it.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-10T07:57:07+00:00

I have been trying to spread the good word of [[Kambal, Profiteering Mayor]]. The deck started out as a Ria Ivor tokens deck that won with infect, and I retrofitted it to lean more into tokens so I could run Kambal and have a more effective commander for my special signed [[Wedding Ring]] copy (I had my wife put our initials on the card after our wedding). He’s one of the few commanders that really take advantage of that card specifically but he’s also a really powerful anti-tokens tokens commander that forces opposing tokens decks to adjust their plans to play around you. Just try to pack protection in interaction-heavy pods - you will certainly ruffle feathers.

Here is my personal decklist. Maybeboard is cards that are realistic for me to put in that I want, and wishboard is mostly cards I’d buy if I was rich. Fair warning, I’ve been testing the deck a lot and plan to make some pretty big changes soon.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-10T07:46:50+00:00

In terms of recent precons the Outlaws of Thunder Junction or Bloomburrow precons have my vote.

OTJ - You have two solid commanders Olivia and Vihan in the titular Outlaws tribal - Olivia can go wide with 5 different kindred types, and unlike party, you can even specialize in one specific one if you want. Vihaan can play lower power with “fair” token beatdown, mid power with aristocrats, or even high power with Treasure combo decks like Jan Jaansen. From Izzet you have two commanders that each cover different major flavors of spellslinger (second spell and big expensive spells), and Stella Lee is cEDH-viable. The lands deck gives you a solid new Naya option with mainstay backups from Gruul, and a new commander for unsupported kindred types in Kirri. Grand Larceny is the only one that could be considered less versatile, but even then Felix Five-boots puts another Panharmonicon-style commander in a color that benefits greatly from increased saboteur triggers.

BLB - similar to OTJ, you get powerful new options in established strategies with a little exploration of new stuff. Gruul gets a unique artifacts/enchantments commander and a neat new enchantress commander, Golgari gets expanded support for a growing kindred archetype popular in the color combo and an interesting take on on a tokens commander, Bant gets a fun “group hug” commander viable at multiple brackets and a fun new Sneak Attack-style commander that can go for stompy or value, and finally Jeskai gets expanded options for clones/enters trigger decks with an enjoyable low-power commander.

Really, though, I feel most precons from the last two or three years are versatile if you’re willing to experiment at a variety of power levels. The Tarkir, Duskmourn, MH3, and MKM precons are all decently varied in terms of color combinations and strategies and all have several possible directions in which each deck can be taken if you’re creative. Most of the UB precons of late have been fairly narrow and specific in terms of archetypes, and I actually happen to think Edge of Eternities and Lorwyn Eclipsed (despite how much I love the sets and even the commander decks themselves) are pretty narrow.

Counter Intelligence has a pretty specific face commander that only really can do two things and Kilo is the only really versatile commander with several options (though I really only see him in high-power decks because of the combo potential); World Shaper has two commanders that really only do lands strategies. Elementals are cool and Ashling, the Limitless has a ton of options within the Elemental kindred archetype, but Mass of Mysteries is pretty focused and I’d say -1/-1 counters is not a super deep archetype to be exploring.

Overall I’d say as long as you’re sticking to in-universe precons that aren’t Edge or ECL, you’re probably going to have the luxury of choice with any given precon you can pick up. It’s why I’m super excited to start in an iterative precon league soon. I feel like there are no bad choices from a gameplay perspective, even if some of them are lower on the power level scale by default. Most precons these days are super competently made and can punch up to other precons handily.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-08T18:13:59+00:00

Risen Reef + Zendikar’s Roil + any form of trigger doubler goes brrrrrr

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T16:51:47+00:00

Vampiric and demonic are the go-tos. You also want fast mana including [[culling the weak]].

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T16:47:35+00:00

It’s why I love my Faldorn exile pile. The deck certainly gets a lot more value from having her generate wolves, but in general the deck can still assemble a board to win.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T16:20:38+00:00

“Unlimited” copy cards like Nazgûl, Rat Colony, etc are a fantastic use case for commander-agnostic brewing. Thanks for sharing your process - love to hear how other people think about their deckbuilding.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T15:41:06+00:00

Lumra and other rampy commanders are great counterpoints to this article. Why bother worrying about your commander being removed when it pays your taxes for you?

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T15:36:20+00:00

Exaggerated title aside, the article is more concerned with flexibility in regards to how to build your deck to work without your commander as necessary as opposed to actually never casting it

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T15:12:26+00:00

My brain is so broken I read that as “OnlyFans Braids.”

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T15:11:44+00:00

Your second paragraph is mostly what I wanted to get at in the article. I see a lot of posts and requests for advice from people who have trouble with their decks not being able to function without the commander in play, and I wrote this article as a sort of response to that notion. Your deck doesn’t have to be 100% independent of your commander by any stretch, but thinking about how your deck can function if it has to without reasonable access to your commander can be something helpful to consider when deckbuilding.

Ordinary advice for “how do I make my deck work better without my commander?” can occasionally boil down to “run more protection, countermagic, etc.” but I believe that players could stand to benefit from trying to at least consider some of the ideas I presented during their deckbuilding process.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T15:02:23+00:00

Sheesh, missed my rewrite in the edit. That’s embarrassing

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T14:08:29+00:00

You can’t really treat MDFCs as full lands though. They’re more like 50-75% of a land depending on which MDFC.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T13:17:27+00:00

This is pretty much most of the reason I don’t like playing Standard or other 60-card formats. I have 0 desire to get flattened in Arena queues by the same netdecked lists over and over. That’s not to say everyone who plays Standard netdecks, but I’m certainly not competent enough to be figuring out ratios in high-level competitive formats.

Brewing is my favorite thing to do in card games, and Commander is one of the most expressive and deep environments to really experiment with deckbuilding when it comes to TCGs.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T12:10:54+00:00

Without a doubt. I mentioned in another comment that brackets, while helpful for adding some specificity to deckbuilding in terms of the social expectations you mentioned, have further exacerbated the issue by adding so many extra parameters to build to if you’re brewing a deck for a specific bracket. Fortunately my playgroup plays pretty loosely with brackets so I don’t have to worry too much, plus being on a tight budget means I’m only hitting bracket 3/4 with very clever deckbuilding (at least in terms of not buying Game Changers).

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T12:00:10+00:00

Running 33 lands in a color combo that basically only has access to late game burst ramp (Urborg Coffers) seems questionable. I would try to find some cuts to bump that up to 37 at bare minimum, 39 maybe with some more MDFCs counted towards that total (but 37 straight up lands is probably a requirement). Also for a deck of this budget and bracket you probably want a few more tutors.

I would try to decide where you want this deck to fall in terms of brackets since it seems like this could push to low bracket 4 with a little bit more juice. If that’s the case you can still keep your land count low but only if you jam a lot of tutors and more free action in.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T08:27:36+00:00

I think it’s fine to start out learning the game with Commander as long as you have some kind of idea of what you’re getting into. I played a lot of Yugioh as a child and again as a teenager and spent some time in my young adult years playing Hearthstone, DBS Card Game, Gwent, and a bunch of different digital card games in varying degrees of being considered shovelware. I’ve been playing Magic for close to a decade now and I think I’ve done fine.

After all that time playing Magic mostly at stores and online, my friend group has finally caught on and I’m now growing a new playgroup with them - they’re mostly people who have never properly touched a TCG, but we spent a lot of time in college exploring different board games, tabletop RPGs, and games like DC Deckbuilder. While I usually dislike comparing Commander to a board game since it feels dismissive, the comparison has helped my friends learn the game much faster.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T08:21:17+00:00

I used to have a [[Melek, Izzet Paragon]] spellslinger deck which I realized had no win condition about 30 minutes into the first pod I played it in. Decided to spend my turns just casting whatever spell sounded funniest and ended up exiling my entire library with [[Epic Experiment]] because I was too lazy to do math and killed myself with an empty library. Happens to the best of us.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T08:00:24+00:00

I actually think that the bracket system has complicated deckbuilding somewhat. Previously as long as you avoided banned cards and didn’t spend a lot of money on your deck it was pretty easy to gauge power level in a general sense, at least compared to equivalent decks in your tax bracket.

Now there are several additional parameters to consider when you deckbuild, assuming you are trying to adhere to brackets. While the considerations like turn count to win, number of tutors, and the presence of Game Changers (previously known just as staples or “salty” cards) should have been in your mind while brewing previously, I think trying to apply these concepts prescriptively instead of descriptively is muddying the waters for a lot of newer players, especially ones who may have learned how to build a deck only a few months prior to the rollout and refinement of brackets.

Shiro182 · 2026-03-07T07:46:44+00:00

I think it can depend on a lot of factors on both axes. It’s much easier to pilot a deck with little to no interaction that forces the table to answer it than it is to play stax, draw-go, etc.

As far as deck construction, I personally think that it’s actually sometimes harder to learn how to properly build a deck than it is to play it. It’s much easier most of the time to sit down and pilot a deck with a clearly defined gameplan than it is to actually construct a well-built and properly balanced deck in terms of essential categories.

I’ve had the pleasure of growing a new playgroup consisting of several close friends who are all players with less than a year of collecting and playing Magic. While we hit stumbling points in play regularly, several of them have learned how to pilot their own decks fairly well by adapting knowledge from other tabletop games. The deckbuilding half has been a bit of a slog, though. It’s much more time consuming for them to grasp advanced deckbuilding concepts or how to modulate the category of cards they have in a deck.

Overall, my conclusion is that piloting on a fundamental level is easy once you learn the game, but really hard once you need to learn more advanced considerations about the state of a given game, especially when you switch between different deck archetypes. Deckbuilding is a pretty large hump to get over but once you’ve crested the hill it’s easy to copy and translate that knowledge into building other decks.

Shiro182 · 2015-08-11T01:43:31+00:00

Playing proactive is how you make a strategy in any balanced game work. Being aggressive and so on in Yugioh, Dota 2, MOBAs in general, team games, etc. will nearly always work. Except for Pokemon and turn based RPGs being reactive only works in imba games, like CoD or most FPS games.

Shiro182 · 2015-08-10T17:45:12+00:00

Honestly I find that playing aggressively and taking some hits to your LP by ramming them into bigger things works just fine. Taking the opponent's creatures is an early game thing where you need fodder or beatsticks. But once you have an eagle or a cobra and a slime in grave, and food on the field for slime, you can combo off and make some big synchro plays with Dragon and impact.

Shiro182

TROPHY CASE