New Capenna Commander - Out of the Box - 2/2
Welcome to the second and final article where we take a look at the new precons from New Capenna Commander (NCC) and give some feedback on where to make changes while still staying in the boundaries of the Battlecruiser (BC) powerlevel on our Discord.
This time I’ll be looking at Obscura Operation (Kamiz) and Riveteers Rampage (Henzie). If you’ve missed the first article which goes over Bedecked Brokers (Perrie); Cabaretti Cacophony (Kitt Kanto) and Maestros Massacre (Anhelo), find that article here.
Obscura Operation
What is the face commander trying to do:
Kamiz, Obscura Oculus allows you to swing in with unblockable damage while filling up your graveyard with potential reanimation targets. Her ability does a lot of work in regards to combat.
I feel a lot of time and effort went into wording this card correctly so that the connive part of the ability still works even if you’re attacking with one creature or with two same powered creatures… right? Judge?!
Reyemile
They couldn’t have it be “another target creature with less power” because then it would have to have lesser power before the connive, and they wanted you to be able to count the connive counter before you calculate the “lesser” power. Additionally, if you just attack with one creature or two creatures with equal power you will still connive.
Other subthemes in the deck:
Deathtouch; fear; flying; landwalk; ninjutsu; shadow - the deck has a lot of means of ensuring you can hit with two creatures to allow Kamiz to trigger properly and then capitalize on the fact you’re going to hit with unblocked damage. There are other connive cards in the 99 and there’s a theme of return from your graveyard to your hand/battlefield present so the cards that do end up in your graveyard due to connive aren’t lost.
Thoughts on the new alternate commander(s):
Tivit, Seller of Secrets opens up the potential for another artifacts matter commander in white blue black. While it’s mostly down to your opponents to decide on the outcome, extra artifacts on board will still provide you with value, be those clues or treasures. When Tivit resolves make 5 new artifacts, and do the same when he deals combat damage. With a haste enabler you just made 10 artifacts by casting your commander and hitting someone for 6 damage... Swiftfoot Boots is a card in the precon, by the way.
His vote ability gives me hope that we will see a new Conspiracy set someday. I’d welcome a bunch of extra vote and monarch cards! Definitely a commander to go with that Expropriate and Mechanized Production you forgot about in your trade binder ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
Most of the boxed precon plays well with Kamiz at the helm, though there are enough pieces in the 99 like Quietus Spike; Mask of the Schemer and Stolen Identity that would work quite well with Tivit too. He’s more expensive to cast but the BC powerlevel isn’t that fast paced, and there’s a potential you get some of his mana back in treasures. There are also enough low mana creatures to be relevant early on, which means you don’t need your commander for your deck to function. Try out both and see which one you like the most. From all the precons, this one felt like the most flexible in regards to commander choice.
Distribution and quality of overall cards (ramp, interaction, draw):
Out of all the precons, this one feels like it will have very consistent opening hands. The overall curve here is quite good with the amount of ramp provided. It seems to ramp a little less than some of the other precons in the set, but has access to a solid list of cheap early turn options. It will make up the difference in ramp with more card draw. A lot of that draw is connected to combat damage, but due to the creaturebase being evasive and difficult to block, and the addition of repeat connive effects, if left alone for too long this deck is going to draw through it’s library fast.
The response package is varied and comes with a mix of exile; return to hand; counterspell; destroy and phasing. I’d personally slot a little more instant speed interaction but that’s just how I like my decks - a Brazen Borrower reprint here would have been sweet!
New Card Highlights:
Smuggler’s Share was highlighted by Chief in our SNC/NCC Top 10 article and rightfully so. ‘New Smothering Tithe’ and ‘card that pushes the format again’ are terms I’ve seen thrown around on the Discord already. This is one of those cards that will be better the higher up you go in power level. It won’t trigger every turn rotation in BC, will trigger more in Low and will likely give you an even bigger advantage in Mid by the nature of the speed of the decks played there.
Skyway Robber is the first ever card printed with escape that cares about which cards you exile with the escape cost and seems like a cool bit of design space for WOTC to play around with in the future. I hope this is a preview of what Escape can be when the mechanic eventually returns outside of ‘escapes with a +1/+1 counter’ which is what we saw most when it originally released.
Writ of Return makes for some nice repeat graveyard recursion. The creatures coming in tapped is somewhat of a downside, but reanimate decks that care more about enter the battlefield (ETB) than utilizing their creatures to swing won’t care about that. Gray Merchant of Asphodel; Shriekmaw; Vile Entomber; Archon of Cruelty - if these sound like cards your deck runs, consider adding Writ of Return.
Upgrades for BC:
Changeling Outcast makes for a great low mana creature that’s unblockable. It starts at 1 power which means he’s a good target for the attack trigger on Kamiz, both for connive to turn him into a bigger beatstick every turn rotation or for ‘lesser power’ and giving him doublestrike until end of turn.
Lazav, the Multifarious would give you access to the creature cards you discard with connive without having to draw into actual reanimation cards and gives you a way to spend your mana when your hand isn’t great. If your opponents had to spend effort and resources removing a threat from your board, pseudo-reanimating it through Lazav can provide you with a good advantage.
Raffine, Scheming Seer from the new standard set would grant you more connive while also being an evasive creature. I’m confident the deck with Raffine at the helm would work quite well too.
Kaito Shizuki either gives extra unblockable attackers or draws you one extra card per turn. When you’re in a situation where you can’t attack or have no creatures out, he will also put more cards in your graveyard to reanimate later. Activate his +1 before combat so you can discard a creature card, then swing in with your Writ of Return ciphered creature to bring it back to the battlefield makes for a nice line of play too.
Unbreakable Formation can be used in response to (your own) boardwipes, or in your main phase puts a +1/+1 counter on each creature and grants your board vigilance until end of turn. This gives you a chance to take some of your lower power creatures and provide them with additional +1/+1 counters on top of the connive potential already present in the precon.
Limits for BC:
To keep the game balanced, other people have to be able to meaningfully interact with your board. Out of the box, a lot of the creatures in the deck already come with several different types of evasion. You should likely not add an abundance of cards to make the creatures even more difficult to block or interact with.
Cards like Cover of Darkness or Odric, Lunarch Marshal that are going to ensure your entire board can’t be blocked, which in turn guarantees you that Kamiz will always get the full trigger at every combat opportunity you get should likely be avoided when making big changes to the deck already.
Obscura Operation draws a lot of cards as is. More go-wide combat draw effects like Bident of Thassa or Reconnaissance Mission will likely speed up the deck too much, due to also having access to several repeatable reanimation effects - if you’re going to add way more draw, you’ll also discard more in your end step which in turn makes the reanimation cards more powerful.
About Strionic Resonator:
With the release of new precons we usually see an increase in interest for BC and an influx of new MTG or EDH players that find our server to play boxed precons. Kamiz’s ability can be weird to resolve to begin with, and the precon came with a Strionic Resonator which can further convolute things, especially if you haven’t played cards with similar effects before. I expect this questions to come up the next few weeks in the #battlecruiser_lounge chat channel so… Judge?!
Reyemile
Kamiz’s entire ability is a single trigger. That means you go through the entire process - target a creature you control, connive, pick another (non-targeted) creature, double strike - and then activate Strionic Resonator, with all of Kamiz’s ability still on the stack.
Remember that the stack is last-in, first-out, so the target of the copy will get its connive boost first. This may affect your legal choices for double striking on your original trigger, after the copy has resolved.
Thanks Reyemile! If you manage to activate Strionic Resonator to copy Tivit’s trigger, do let me know in the #battlecruiser_lounge how that turned out - outside of the table dealing 30 damage to your face before your next turn.
Conclusion:
This deck swings often and most of those swings will hit. It’s not too hard to develop a board, but there are many triggers, draw and discard going on in one turn. You will have to get used to having to process new information quite quickly. This can make your turns take somewhat longer if you haven’t played the deck often or if you’re new to MTG/EDH and that’s ok - don’t rush things.
There are several ‘catch up’ cards in the deck that will punish your opponents for drawing more, ramping more or wiping the board - don’t feel like you have to rush your hand to the field and try to delay your big plays until the mid to late game. If you’re ahead in boardstate, there’s no need to add another 4 creatures on top. Wipes will happen and you may need those creatures later.
If you’ve played the Zendikar Rising Commander deck ‘Sneak Attack’ with Anowon, Ruin Thief at the helm and would like a precon with a similar playstyle that focuses more on developing their own board over … ‘borrowing’ cards from your opponents, you will likely enjoy Obscura Operation.
Riveteers Rampage
What is the face commander trying to do:
Henzie “Toolbox” Torre wants to haste out big beaters at a reduced cost. His second mechanic is a new way of turning commander tax into an upside, which is an interesting new bit of EDH design and feels safer than previous mechanics we’ve seen that tried to change things involving the Command Zone (Eminence and Commander Ninjutsu come to mind).
Other subthemes in the deck:
Riveteers Rampage is ETB and combat value town. Lifegain, targeted removal, token generation, impulse draw - it’s not too focused on a singular theme but this deck will want to punch your life total, and when it does it wants that punch to hurt a lot.
Thoughts on the new alternate commander(s):
The Beamtown Bullies is going to make some people build ‘mean’ decks. In the precon it mostly gives big bodies to your opponents so without further changes I’d stick with Henzie. I think we’ve all made the connection between this card and cards like Leveler; Inverter of Truth or Eater of Days. Somehow this card attracted less hateful comments online than Lord Xander, the Collector and in my eyes The Beamtown Bullies can be built to be a whole lot meaner.
Distribution and quality of overall cards (ramp, interaction, draw):
While there’s enough ramp present in the deck, the mana curve is quite out there - 24 cards at 5 mana or more, that’s near 1/4th of the entire deck. Most turn 2 plays will be ramp and the deck does need that ramp to get going.
Out of all the precons in NCC, this one felt like the slowest, which is likely also why they let it get away with a little more value in the creature department. Temur Sabretooth; Thragtusk; Inferno Titan; Noxious Gearhulk, Deathbringer Regent and Avenger of Zendikar in the same precon? Ok?
Most of the interaction is stapled on creatures which makes the deck as is quite susceptible to cards like Hushbringer or Hushwing Gryff or similar effects. While these cards shouldn’t appear often in BC, having a creature interaction-based deck comes with another downside - if the board gets wiped, you’re now also losing large portions of your interaction package. This will sometimes make Riveteers Rampage feel sluggish or unimpactful.
New Card Highlights:
Industrial Advancement will be a card we’ll see show up more over time. Plenty of commanders will want an effect like this. Chainer, Nightmare Adept; Marchesa, the Black Rose; Olivia, Crimson Bride or Purphoros, Bronze-Blooded or decks with cards like Sneak Attack should consider running this to turn their creatures into some impulse-value.
Mezzio Mugger is ‘Etali-lite’ with the upside of having Blitz and being able to play lands you exile and the downside of those cards not being free. I don’t think many people will run this card but it’s nice to have another ‘similar’ effect in red that does this.
Rain of Riches definitely has my attention. SNC and NCC gave us access to several new treasure generators and this seems like the type of card that will easily get out of hand if not dealt with soon enough. Another card to make Dockside Extortionist better and more impactful - we obviously needed more excuses to run that card.
Red is my least played color in EDH and I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of red cards in a precon that appealed to me - maybe it’s time to finally build a Grixis deck after all.
Upgrades for BC:
Seeing a curve that resembles a city skyline instead of a rollercoaster with an incline at the start makes me nervous. If you’re looking for cuts I’d work on lowering the later part of the curve somewhat. While you want enough impactful creatures to blitz out in the mid to late game, there’s a high chance of having a hand of all 5 drops or more, even after you’ve already taken a Mulligan.
Ignoble Hierarch is at a very low price right now compared to last year. Due to the heavy casting costs in the deck you’ll often only be swinging with one creature because you simply can’t afford to cast more than one hasted creature per turn. This card will ramp and colorfix you and make your blitzed out creature a little more powerful.
Druid of Purification can potentially come out for 1 mana here and I’m always in favor of running choice and politics cards where possible. While there are other creatures that already deal with permanents on the board, they’re quite out there in mana value, and I’d likely replace one of those with this card instead.
Atsushi, the Blazing Sky seems great with the new blitz mechanic and if you’re able to reduce that blitz cost enough you will actually go mana positive after Atsushi dies. One of the things that make Atsushi ‘great’ over ‘ok’ is having a way to ensure Atsushi dies on your terms - and blitz does just that.
Cauldron of Souls allows you to keep your creatures when you sacrifice them in your end step. Make sure you’re not adding too many additional impactful ETB effects when wanting to slot this card though as you’re now getting twice the amount of payoffs if you cast an ETB creature with blitz.
Ziatora, the Incinerator provides you with a lot of value in this deck. If you blitz a creature, it will die in your end step - tying some damage and treasure generation onto the loss of your creature is a nice added bonus.
Limits for BC:
What keeps this deck in check is it’s steep mana curve and it’s limited amount of ‘extra’ cheating on top of what Henzie already provides. I think it’s quite obvious you shouldn’t add more ways to cheat in the already scary creaturebase to the field. Sneak Attack; Feldon of the Third Path; Ilharg, the Raze-Boar - you get the type of mechanic I’m talking about. Ways to ensure you get double the value for whatever you’re cheating into play like Panharmonicon should likely be avoided too, especially if you’re reworking the deck to be more ETB focused.
Conclusion:
NCC: Thoughts on the entire precon cycle
I was quite happy to see every precon come with their own Charm and Confluence ‘family’ card. I like it when precons try to be in theme with the plane/set they are released in where possible.
Several of the NCC decks came with free/fast creatures to the field, be that through reanimation from the graveyard or hasted/reduced/free from your hand. I often notice people go back to other precons to deal with situations like these. The Spirit Squadron deck having Windborn Muse and Ghostly Prison in the same deck would actively hinder decks like Obscura Operation or Riveteers Rampage, for example.
I expect the people who frequently play in BC to look at these precons and adapt accordingly. With the release of the Ranar the Ever-Watchful and Millicent, Restless Revenant decks we saw a lot of flying specific removal or hate getting slotted in homebrew decks to try and keep those decks at bay. When Anowon, the Ruin Thief released, more decks showed up in deck checks with Bojuka Bog or Soul-Guide Lantern to deny that deck its graveyard payoffs.
I’m sure you’re bored of ‘power creep’ talk at this point so I’ll try to keep it short. Not all precons release equally strong out of the box and that’s alright. A power level isn’t a flat line or number you assign to a deck - it’s a curve where decks can be on either side of the spectrum.
The NCC decks felt more powerful than several older decks and I hope that the people who design the precons will keep making them to be roughly the same in terms of speed and synergy compared to older ones, so that people who aren’t that invested in the format can still play their 10 year old deck with friends who just started playing, and don’t feel like their decks are too weak or slow in comparison.
There is a difference in game plan, speed and quality of cards if you look at all precons ever made. I hope the precons we got now are not the new ‘low end of the curve’ WOTC aims for with their out of the box experience and they’re aware that this cycle of decks is quite strong. For now, all regular preconstructed decks are still automatically BC. I hope we can still have this rule on our Discord 5 or 10 years from now…
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