Battle for Baldur’s Gate - Out of the Box - 1/2
This is the first of two articles where we take a look at the new precons from Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate (CLB) and give some feedback on where to make changes while still staying within the boundaries of the Battlecruiser (BC) powerlevel on our Discord server.
Most other media in regards to precons you can find is about upgrading them to be ‘as strong as they can be’, or ends up cutting 60% of the deck where calling it a ‘precon upgrade’ doesn’t really work anymore. The focus here will mostly be from the perspective of our own BC powerlevel.
We’ll go over the face commanders, alternate new commanders, themes and card distribution, while also highlighting some of the new cards I expect will do well and stick around in homebrew decks.
In this article we’ll be taking a closer look at the Mind Flayarrrs and Exit from Exile decks. Draconic Dissent and Party Time will be in the second article which will be released on Friday, June 17th - expect a link to that article here when it gets published!
Mind Flayarrrs
What is the face commander trying to do:
Captain N’Ghathrod (one of my predictions in our CLB prediction article) has quite the wordy ability box. Horrors you control have menace, them dealing damage mills players, in your end step steal an artifact or creature from an opponent's graveyard and put it directly on your battlefield. Swing with horrors, mill cards, steal cards - he’s very black blue in that regard.
The card is also specifically worded to make N’Ghathrod have menace himself, where most of those types of abilities usually read ‘other <subtype> you control have/get’, like on Death Baron or Hordewing Skaab. He’s also a 3/6, a solid blocker that allows you to swing in with your board and hold your commander back to block the retaliation coming your way.
Other subthemes in the deck:
Mind Flayarrrs is pretty much all in on Horror tribal. The deck has 31 creatures in the 99 and all of those have the Horror subtype - this is quite rare for a tribe precon! Kaldheim’s Elven Empire deck broke theme to slot in a Boar; The Ur-Dragon precon had a Human and a Bird; Anowon, the Ruin Thief had Avatar, Kraken and Shapeshifters in them, and while all of those cards complimented the deck by the mechanics and abilities they provided, it seems whoever designed this deck really didn’t want to break theme here.
I support this design decision, especially from a new player's point of view. Not having to point out ‘that one card you just played isn’t the correct creature type so it doesn’t get the benefits’ is more information to process on an inexperienced player’s end, and not having to look at your creature types in a brand new precon because ‘all of them count’ is something we’ve rarely been able to do before.
For non-creature spells we see a mix of mill, discard and some minor graveyard reanimation, which all make sense looking at what Captain N’Ghathrod is trying to achieve.
Thoughts on the new alternate commander:
There is no two color legendary creature to replace N’ghathrod. For the first time ever we get to look at a creature and an enchantment in the command zone instead, due to the new ‘choose a background’ mechanic introduced in CLB.
Zellix, Sanity Flayer provides you with another mill payoff. He’s limited to one creature token per player per mill trigger, as an attempt to slow him down, but there are enough ‘each opponent mills’ cards present in the deck to not make it feel like it’s too slow. I’m happy his activated ability only targets one opponent and not each opponent so he doesn’t build a wide board simply by activating him once. Note how his abilities say ‘a player’ and ‘target player’ so you can self target and selfmill with Zellix to still get your tokens.
Haunted One is a power buff for all your Horror creatures and provides you with some good resilience on top. If you swing out and people block to kill your nontoken creatures, they’ll return to the battlefield bigger than they were before. There are some enter the battlefield (ETB) cards that destroy permanents or draw you cards so you have creatures in the deck you definitely don’t mind going down in combat to return to the field later.
Zellix has an activated ability that taps him down, so it’s not hard to get the trigger to go off. Other commanders with a black color identity that have a tap ability, or commanders that are tapped due to attacking often, and care about tribal support can definitely consider Haunted One in the 99, such as Lathril, Blade of the Elves or Strefan, Maurer Progenitor.
The deck plays somewhat differently depending on who you chose to put in the command zone. N’Ghathrod gives you a slower start but gives you theft possibilities, and Zellix//Haunted One builds you a wider board of 1/1s early on due to the lower mana cost.
Decide if you want to play theft or go wide and adjust your commander choice accordingly. The deck plays just fine out of the box regardless of who you decide to put at the helm.
Distribution and quality of overall cards (ramp, interaction, draw):
There are about 10 cards that help you get mana - I don’t want to label cards like Herald’s Horn and Black Market as ‘ramp’ - and I don’t feel the deck really needs much more.
While there’s interaction present to deal with creatures, there are very limited options to deal with non-creatures, something blue black just struggles with without specifically adding mana intensive colorless destruction options or ‘return to hand’ effects to then hopefully counterspell the recast later. Most cards that deal with threats on your opponents boards are however sorcery speed.
In my eyes the deck is lacking some card draw. I guess the idea was ‘N’ghathrod will take permanents from others so you don’t have to have a full hand to be relevant’.
New Card Highlights:
From the Catacombs takes the prize in this precon of ‘most Eldritchian Horror what on earth even IS that thing’. Thanks Ben Wootten, it’s absolutely terrifying. ‘A slightly weirder Dread Return that can target any creature in a graveyard’ with the brand new initiative mechanic on top.
The Initiative works ‘similar to Monarch’ and incentivizing people to swing their board to take the initiative makes for a fun new plaything in an EDH game. The Undercity being a ‘generic jack-of-all-trades’ dungeon where step one finds you a land and step two (depending on your choice) gives you a scry 2 was a smart design choice.
‘Get a land and get top deck knowledge’ are good mechanics regardless of your playstyle. I’m pretty sure people are going to want to take the initiative just as often as they want to take your Monarch crown.
Endless Evil provides us with yet another copy creature effect. Due to how the deck is built, the ‘when dies’ clause will never fail to trigger either since all creatures are Horrors. While the token is only a 1/1, you are provided with ‘more copies of an effect I can technically only have once’. If you’ve been reading my previous articles, I’m sure you’ve seen me talk about the strength of copying cards before.
They could have made this card a lot stronger by having it say ‘if that creature shared a creature type with your commander’ and I’m kind of happy they chose to make it Horror instead, providing us with a subtype-specific effect we’ll likely see in decks with Umbris, Fear Manifest or Grazilaxx, Illithid Scholar at the helm. Not every card has to be printed to fit in every deck, and seeing limitations like these often make me happy.
I’ve already talked about Aboleth Spawn in depth in our CLB top 10 cards article so I won’t get too detailed here. Is relying on your opponents to ‘do things’ for you to get an upside risky? Yes. Is it hilarious to copy someone else’s entire creature ETB plan with a singular card at instant speed? Also yes.
I feel Aboleth Spawn is here to stay and will likely find its way into many decks spread across several types and powerlevels. Give me my ‘in response, I too get value’-dopamine hit over and over, thank you.
Upgrades for BC:
The curve is a little top heavy and pip intensive and there are a lot of mid to late game cards of 5 mana and up here that I don’t think are all that good and can likely be replaced. Due to its dedication to the theme, there are also quite a few early game creature cards that provide almost no upside outside of ‘is a Horror’ so it shouldn’t be too hard to cut down on some of those in favor of some upgrades.
CLB gave us Elder Brain which is a Horror that plays with your opponent’s cards so compliments two themes of the precon nicely. It has nice synergy with Brainstealer Dragon too which is already in the 99.
Illithid Harvester, also from the regular set, provides you with ‘two uses on one card’ because of the Adventure mechanic. Tapping creatures so you can swing in with more Horrors is quite good - the fact it’s called ‘Plant Tadpoles’ is a big flavor win from a Mindflayer Horror point of view too. The creature part of the card acting like a ‘slightly weirder Ixidron’ is also a fun effect to see on a card.
It took me several rewrites of this part of the article in order to defend slotting in Ashiok, Dream Render. Ashiok exiles each opponent’s graveyard - this is in direct conflict with the graveyard theft and mill payoffs that come in the precon. The issue the deck currently has is that there is a very high chance of accelerating someone else's graveyard focused deck and it has little means to prevent that from getting out of hand. It’s good practice when you’re playing mill to also slot adequate graveyard hate ‘just in case’.
Soul-Guide Lantern, Lantern of the Lost and Relic of Progenitus can all fill this slot, but exile your own graveyard too. Due to the reanimation present in the precon, I opted to go with Ashiok instead. Simic/green often gets too much free range on ramping ahead by searching for lands and putting them directly into play and Ashiok prevents that from happening as well since your opponent’s can’t search their library for cards.
You can’t have a Mindflayer captain without a ship! Nautiloid Ship gives you another graveyard exile effect - but this one allows you to use the cards exiled by it, making it a nice card for both its mechanic and its flavor. This card also works well when you choose to play with Zellix at the helm since you’ll have expendable tokens to crew the ship more reliably.
Diluvian Primordial and Sepulchral Primordial add two more ‘your cards - hand them over’ effects to the deck. They’re not Horrors, but their effects can be quite strong and effective. Enchant them with Endless Evil which I highlighted before and they become some sort of ‘build your own Captain N’ghathrod’ replacement.
Limits for BC:
It’s time to address the several elephants in the room. This precon comes with a lot of cards that in combination with one extra inclusion become an issue.
Mindcrank means you shouldn’t slot Syr Konrad as that’s an interaction we monitor for several power levels already and it’s not something we’d approve of in BC. Zellix has some equally ‘gets out of hand’ interaction with Altar of the Brood that functions in relatively the same way. Both will keep going until someone whiffs, and the likelyhood at a four player table for the entire table whiff is relatively small.
And… then we got the Hullbreaker Horror part of the article. Mind Flayarrrs joins the Atraxa; The Ur-Dragon; Prosh and Sefris precons as ‘having combos out of the box’.
Hullbreaker Horror + Sol Ring + Everflowing Chalice makes for infinite colorless mana.
(Tap Sol Ring, generate two colorless mana, cast Chalice for 0, bounce Sol Ring to hand, cast Sol Ring taking one colorless mana from your mana pool, bounce Everflowing Chalice to hand, have one colorless mana left in your pool. Loop to generate infinite colorless mana).
Once infinite colorless mana has been achieved, you get to return all nonland permanents your opponents control to their hands, choosing to use Hullbreaker Horror’s secondary option.
Add an Arcane Signet or Dimir Signet to this comboline to turn it into infinite black and blue mana (tapping them to generate colored mana then returning it to hand with Hullbreaker horror) if you need colored mana instead.
If you have a Consuming Aberration on the battlefield during this combo, this will cause your opponents to mill their entire library due to you continuously recasting Sol Ring and Everflowing Chalice.
You can bounce Ravenous Chupacabra to hand to recast it to destroy everyone’s creatures, dig very deep into your deck with Phyrexian Rager or turn everyone’s board into 2/2 slimes with Sludge Monster with this colored mana comboline too, though none of those truly ‘end the game’.
This is a perfect example of ‘fine in the precon it came in, not something you should homebrew in the hopes we’d allow it in Battlecruiser’. If you’re looking to upgrade the deck, Hullbreaker Horror would be the first card that comes to mind to take out of the precon, allowing you to have more breathing room in regards to what you can add to improve your deck. It’s just one of those cards that allows for a lot of ‘oops that combos by accident’ type situations, some of which you may not even be aware of as you’re making upgrades to the deck.
If you’re making big changes to the creaturebase and adding more impactful beatsticks or enter the battlefield effects, Reflections of Littjara is likely also a card to be aware of as being potentially ‘too much’ to keep around. The precon gets away with having this card because a lot of the Horror creatures just aren’t that great. Dauthi Horror; Hunter Horror; Dross Harvester; Plague Spitter - there are plenty of creature cards in the base precon that simply aren’t that threatening to have twice.
Conclusion:
Mind Flayarrrs is a very on theme deck with a lot of flavor wins inside. Due to wanting to stick to the theme, there’s quite a few unimpactful creature cards present. The mana curve is somewhat top heavy and pip intensive so ensuring you have ramp and/or colorfixing in your opening hand is quite important. It’s light on draw, and hopes to combat this by taking things your opponents control - a very Dimir approach to the game.
I think most people that get this precon will want to brew the deck to be way faster and more consistent, and potentially focus on the combo present in the deck already. Zellix allows for a go wide approach which is something we rarely get to see in blue - the fact you can change out the background card for something that suits your playstyle more means people will get to personalize their homebrew deck even further.
Exit from Exile
What is the face commander trying to do:
Faldorn, Dread Wolf Herald has a triggered ability that wants to turn your casts from exile into Wolf tokens. Red green has access to a lot of different type of effects to make that happen: exiling cards from your library until next turn, suspend, foretell, adventure, cascade, etc.
The activated ability uses a mechanic we haven’t seen often before. Discard a card: Exile the top card of your library, you may play it this turn. Chandra, Heart of Fire and Magmatic Channeler play around in this design space, but it’s not an effect that’s been utilized often yet. This makes me wonder if this is something we’re going to see keyworded in the future - just like looting and rummaging. ‘Impulse N’, for example - it’d be interesting to see!
Other subthemes in the deck:
There’s a decent amount of token creature generation and a small subtheme of +1/+1 counter generation to ensure your 2/2 or 3/3 tokens can grow enough power and toughness to be relevant throughout the course of a game. To ensure those tokens are relevant early on there are several haste enablers and creatures with haste in the deck as well.
Thoughts on the new alternate commander:
Lemmy Kilmister Durnan of the Yawning Portal feels like the Legendary Creature version of Vivien, Champion of the Wilds, and provides you with top deck filtering and the ability to pick and choose what you put into exile. I’m a big fan of ‘for as long as that card remains exiled’, because if someone destroys your commander, it doesn’t get rid of the ability to cast the exiled card.
Durnan reduces the cost of the exile cast with undaunted, a mechanic we haven’t seen since Commander 2016! With the increasing popularity of Commander, I’d have expected to see this mechanic return way sooner.
Passionate Archaeologist provides you with a damage bonus for casting spells form exile. We often see ‘damage tied to things happening’ on cards like Impact Tremors and Warsturm Surge but this card seems quite unique. The closest thing that comes to mind is Rage Extractor. I can see this putting in a lot of work in Maelstrom Wanderer; Averna, the Chaos Bloom and Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder where this card would just mean ‘whenever you play your deck, shoot down your opponent’.
From playtesting, I’d keep Faldorn at the helm. Durnan having to attack to get his trigger makes him a little awkward to trigger at times, where Faldorn’s effect is easier to pull off because the card just has to be on the battlefield. The precon does come with big beatsticks, and Durnan will allow you to cast those creatures for way cheaper in a normal 4 player pod situation. Where Faldorn will build a wider board full of expendable blockers, Durnan//Passtionate Archeologist will have the threatening 5 6 and 7 drops on board faster.
Distribution and quality of overall cards (ramp, interaction, draw):
I was pleasantly surprised to see a minimal amount of artifact ramp in a red green deck - green has a lot of options of putting lands directly into play and it was nice to see the deck was designed to do this properly. There’s 10 dedicated ramp cards (search for a land and put on battlefield or manarock that taps for mana) and a few ‘put land from hand on the field’ effects.
The average manavalue is somewhat on the high side - 4.18 without lands - but the quality of the ramp present in the deck and the option to play extra lands from your hand doesn’t make the deck feel like it struggles to get the mana to cast its more expensive spells.
Interaction is a mix of instant and sorcery speed removal, some of those damage based, others straight up destroy target permanent. Blasphemous Act is notably missing, likely because the deck wants to go wide and shooting down your own board is not desirable.
The deck doesn’t immediately ‘draw a lot of cards’ but it combats this by exile filtering several cards per turn that you then get to pick and choose from. While your hand might not be full, it’s not uncommon to flip through the top 6-7 every turn cycle without much effort, giving you the option to play several of those cards.
New Card Highlights:
Delayed Blast Fireball - which is an amazing name for a red card by the way - got highlighted by Chief in our top 10 article earlier, and I agree that this card is great. For three mana at instant speed you take out everyone’s early game plans. Say goodbye to your Birds of Paradise, Esper Sentinel, Noble Hierarch, Deathrite Shaman, Viscera Seer or Scute Swarm.
Red has some options available to cast this card from Exile without needing the Foretell to happen to get it’s 5 damage effect - think of cards like Jeska’s Will and Light Up the Stage (both present in the precon by the way). Casting this due to someone counterspelling me with Tibalt’s Trickery is very high on my ‘EDH interactions I want to happen at least once’ bucket list.
Green Slime is this decks ‘in response Flash creature’ of which each precon got one. Magic has had Ooze creatures destroy artifacts before, like Corrosive Ooze in Dominaria. Green Slime also dealing with enchantments certainly makes it more versatile - it also has foretell, giving green it’s second instant speed foretell option ever.
I really like this card. Flash out Green Slime in response to your opponent equipping a Sword of Hearth or activating a Sunforger. Countering the ability of an Aetherflux Reservoir, meaning your opponent is down 50 life but they don’t get to shoot the damage. A solid response for a Sensei’s Divining Top, which is notoriously hard to remove. It also deals with Mystic Remora without having to pay since it’s a creature - I’m all for it!
Do let me know what type of situations this card has gotten you out of in our Discord - I’m always interested in ‘so in my last game, you wouldn’t believe what happened!’ stories.
Nalfeshnee feels like an easy inclusion in most cascade decks. It seems like a nice redundancy piece for Maelstrom Wanderer, in case your commander is too expensive to recast. ‘Cascade creature Sneak Attack with a hint of Kiki-Jiki but make it weird’ - at least that’s how I processed the card when I first saw it. This card might feel underwhelming at times, but in the right deck it could likely lead to a game finishing situation depending on what creatures you’re copying. Make a few copies of Nalfeshnee with Mirror March and may your Terror of the Peaks raze fire upon your opponents life totals.
Upgrades for BC:
I don’t feel this deck needs upgrades to be comfortably relevant at a BC table, so treat the following cards as a ‘you could consider this, maybe’.
March of Reckless Joy from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty ticks several synergy boxes in the deck. It allows you to dig deep late game in case the board stalls as well, something the deck is currently lacking.
Nature’s Chosen would give you a ‘relatively safe’ way to activate Faldorn twice per turn - it’s limited to sorcery speed so it has less potential to get out of hand than say: Saryth, the Viper’s Fang from Midnight Hunt, which adds (conditional) deathtouch and hexproof to your entire board. I’m always happy to highlight more fun Alliances cards - please slot Scarab of the Unseen in more aura voltron decks!
Sylvan Anthem would allow for some top deck manipulation which most of your exile effects care for. There are a lot of green tokenmakers in the deck, so it’s going to have plenty of opportunity to trigger - just be aware that having to scry several times per turn will add to your already sometimes complicated process of snap decision making.
Limits for BC:
Containment Construct; Library of Leng; Conspiracy Theorist and similar type cards all strip away the downside of your commander - I’m not entirely sure they’re ‘too strong’ to add to a minimally upgraded boxed precon but they feel quite powerful. Running one is probably fine, running several for redundancy likely less so.
You just negated the one downside your deck had - the ‘randomness’ of what you exile from the top of your library, and while it’s true that Sylvan Anthem also does this, you still have immediate access to the card you discarded. You don’t lose your discard card with the other examples mentioned above. These are certainly interactions you should be careful with adding to your deck if you’ve made several upgrades already.
I wouldn’t add more haste enablers and as always in BC: ‘getting twice the value’ is often (too) strong, so token creature doublers like Doubling Season and Primal Vigor should likely not be your first picks when looking to upgrade and still stay within the boundaries of Battlecruiser.
Conclusion:
Exit from Exile is a mixed bag of several exile effects that plays around in a space your opponents won’t be able to easily deal with. You’re interacting with cards from exile and your opponents often times will just have to ‘sit there’ while you play the game.
The deck may seem a little bit durdley at times, and your turns may take longer than you thought they would. It also plays very ‘trigger, trigger, exile, tap, draw, exile something else, cast from exile, trigger, bonus’ if it’s given enough time to grow a sizable board.
Make sure you have room on your playmat to house several ‘exile piles’. Exile until the end of turn, exile until the end of your next turn, suspend, on an adventure, the list goes on.
If you’re someone that enjoys playing more complicated decks you will likely enjoy this precon, due to how some cards synergize with one another.
And that’s all for today! Friday June 17th I’ll go over the Draconic Dissent and Party Time precons and I’ll close out that article with some end thoughts about this sets entire precon lineup.
A reminder that all of the regular preconstructed decks (Commander decks printed outside of specialty products like Secret Lair) are Battlecruiser by default on our Discord server and don’t require a deck check to get played.
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