(Due to a patch in our power levels for Mid and High Power on Sept 10 2021, some of these lists may no longer be Mid power as is and should upscale to High Power instead. This article was written several months before that patch came out. Do not run these lists as is in Mid Power)

We hope you enjoy reading the writeup about the changes made in the 4 decks for our ‘Start from Scratch’ Twitch stream series - where we take 4 precon decks and play them as is, then upgrade them for Battlecruiser followed by Low and Mid power.

These games are streamed live:
Sunday the 2nd, 9th, 16th and 23rd of May
14:00 UTC / 10:00 ET at https://twitch.tv/playedh.

With spoiler season starting, I thought it’d be cool to include the freshly spoiled Modern Horizons 2 reprints in the image gallery here where available.
~Exxaxl

Necronami - Lorehold

As expected, we’re switching gears this week by switching back to Osgir, the Reconstructur. The past three weeks have been a blast playing Alibou and I think she has legs to go the distance for anyone looking for an interesting way to play an artifact centered deck.
The amount of cards we were able to see in a game was a whopping 32 in the last two, although we didn’t run into any of our card draw engines, it’s still nice to see so much of your deck in any game, let alone when playing Lorehold colors.
The main reasoning behind the switch to Osgir is that I want to play a different game plan this week to mix things up for my opponents and hopefully eke out a win. This Commander swap comes with a whopping 36 card changes so bare with me as we dive into it.

Out with the Old

Artifacts:
I’m taking out Thran Dynamo and Commander's Sphere which we’ll replace with faster ramp. Retrofitter Foundry and Strionic Resonator were a nice fit for Alibou, but we won’t need it in Osgir. I liked the design of Cursed Mirror but in the last two or three games I just haven’t wanted to cast it. Let’s also take out Trading Post which is too slow for our overal game plan.

Creatures:
Feldon of the Third Path feels too slow and we’re on much less creatures in the finished deck. Palladium Myr is not necessary anymore since we’re adding much better ramp. The same can be said for Gold Myr and Iron Myr.

Bronze Guardian, Losheel, Clockwork Scholar, Loyal Apprentice, Myrsmith, Pia Nalaar and Thopter Engineer won’t work with our new game plan as we switch from Alibou to Osgir. Sanctum Gargoyle is somewhat slow and we’re not really wanting to bring cards back from the graveyard without activating Osgir. Duplicant is slow for removal - despite it’s synergy with Osgir, we’re adding better options.
I really really wanted to play with Audacious Reshapers but never drew it in the previous games and now I’m afraid it's just a bit too slow for Mid Power. I’m also cutting Leonin Abunas - removing this card might end up being a mistake, but I’m having to make sacrifices somewhere to fit in all the new tech. And finally Alibou, Ancient Witness, our old Commander, will no longer serve a purpose in our general game plan.

Enchantments:

Ghirapur Aether Grid will lack synergy with Osgir and Monologue Tax feels like a vastly overhyped card and I don’t think we need it much anymore.

Instants:

Semester’s End - essentially budget Teferi’s Protection - will only protect our creatures and one planeswalker, we’re not running enough of these to make this card worth it anymore.

Sorceries:

Giving our opponents the optional wheel is less good than regular Wheel of Fortune, plus I don’t really want to wheel as much now that we’re playing Mid Power to not give my opponents too many cards, so let’s take out Wheel of Misfortune. Rout seems like a lackluster board wipe, Saheeli’s Directive is a sweet card but a bit too slow, as is Reconstruct History.

Planeswalkers:

Daretti, Scrap Savant … I could have found a place for Daretti maybe, but ultimately the cuts were so tight he had to go.

Lands:

Let’s take out Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion, Forgotten Cave, Secluded Steppe, Slayer’s Stronghold, Myriad Landscape, Rogue’s Passage, Temple of Triumph and 1 Plains.

In with the New:

Ramp:

Let’s add some faster rampy mana rocks via Mox Opal, Mana Vault, Chrome Mox and Mox Amber. We’ll find some basic lands with Land Tax, and fall back on Dockside Extortionist for big mana, and a potential three card combo in the finished deck. Rings of Brighthearth and Basalt Monolith will make us infinite colorless mana to sink into Osgir.

Interaction:

Let’s increase our removal somewhat by including Lightning Bolt, Wear//Tear, Ethersworn Canonist and a Soul-guide Lantern. Knowing we want to execute combos ourselves, a Silence and Grand Abolisher will give us some board control so we can try and combo off unhindered.

Utility/Synergy/Game plan enhancers/Combos:

Let’s slot a Karn, the Great creator to turn off our opponents mana rocks and altars/equipment. We’ll slot a Karn combo further down the line too. Zirda, the Dawnwaker will make Osgir cheaper to activate. Battlemage’s Bracers from the precon and Lithoform Engine will both give us an additional Osgir trigger. Scroll Rack allows us to sculpt our hand some more.
Chromatic Star provides some card draw, and is cheap to reanimate with Osgir and Goblin Welder will allow us to put artifacts in our graveyard at will, which will be important for our Commander’s ability. Scrap Trawler in combination with Goblin Welder will allow us to recast important artifacts that may have been destroyed before we got a chance to use them.

Mycosynth Lattice, Nim Deathmantle, Ashnod’s Altar, Nevinyrral’s Disk, Vandalblast, Darksteel Forge and Krark-clan Ironworks will be added to provide us with some combo lines in tandem with some of the synergy upgrades made above.

Let's go over the actual combos I’m including in the deck - not all of them lead to a game ending state, but we can lock out our opponents from untapping or having resources entirely.

Mycosynth Lattice + Vandalblast (overloaded)
Turn all permanents into artifacts, then destroy all artifacts I don’t control - this destroys all of our opponents' permanents, including lands.

Mycosynth Lattice + Darksteel Forge + Nev’s Disk (+ Unwinding Clock)
Turn all permanents into artifacts, darksteel forge makes our artifacts indestructible. Activate Nevinyrral’s Disk to destroy all artifacts except ours because they’re indestructible due to Darksteel forge. Unwinding Clock is an additional include here which allows us to repeat this loop every untap step.

Mycosynth Lattice + Karn, the Great Creator
Turn all permanents into artifacts, deny our opponents to activate abilities of artifacts they control, which with Mycosynth Lattice on board includes their lands.

Nim Deathmantle + Krark Clan Ironworks + Wurmcoil Engine/Myr Battlesphere
Nim Deathmantle + Ashnod’s Altar + Wurmcoil Engine/Myr Battlesphere
Both of these allow for infinite colorless mana and infinite creature tokens on board via sacrificing creatures to make 2 generic mana, which we can use to pay for Nim Deathmantle’s trigger to return the sacrificed creature back to the battlefield.

Dockside Extortionist + Lithoform Engine + Clock of Omens
This one is a bit more convoluted - our opponents will need a combination of 7 artifacts or enchantments for this combo to work. Have Clock of Omens and Lithoform Engine on the battlefield - cast Dockside Extortionist - copy Dockside Extortionist on the stack with Lithoform Engine - resolve the copy, which enters and creates at least 7 treasures - do not resolve the original Dockside cast yet - activate Clock of Omens tapping two of those treasures to untap Lithoform Engine - copy the original Dockside Extorionist on the stack which hasn’t resolved yet - repeat. This combo will give us infinite colored mana, infinite artifacts, infinite treasures, infinite enter the battlefield triggers and infinite Dockside Extortionists … situationally and occasionally.

Lands:
We’re further increasing our colorfixing and speed by including Needleverge Pathway, Plateau, Clifftop Retreat, Rugged Prairie, Arid Mesa, Ancient Tomb and Sunbaked Canyon.

After all that - I ran out of space for cards in the deck. I know I said Triplicate Titan was coming back for Mid Power last week - I simply didn’t have the space for it. Goodbye Triplicate Titan, I’ll find a deck for you one day.

Deck with sideboard for cuts and considering for includes:
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/NYzpfIKFrUWRuwU-j4c0xQ
Deck as a 100 card list:
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/DBqhjZcymEWD3IJvZXIR1g

Smerz - Silverquill

The final week for this series is here! This week is both our biggest yet smallest upgrade for the Silverquill deck. We’re closing some open loops and adding some more consistency boosters while cutting some of the last few political cards and the last of the high mana value cards that come in the precon.

Out with the old:

Creatures:
Many of our cuts are going to help bring our curve down so we can go quite a bit faster and be more consistent. Some of these cards are great engines if we were trying to play a little slower, more grindy game with some dedicated stax to help lock down the table, which is not the playstyle we’re going for.
Author of Shadows, Elite Scaleguard, Magister of Worth, Necropolis Regent, Sunscorch Regent, and (sadly) Thalisse, Reverent Medium all fall into this part of our cuts. You’ll notice that we had actually added Thalisse in an earlier upgrade. She just doesn’t fit with what we plan to do here in Mid power but is an absolutely amazing value engine for the other power levels - she’s just a little too slow for my Mid power game plan.

Bold Plagiarist, Combat Calligrapher, Keen Duelist, Nils, Discipline Enforcer, Stalking Leonin and Windborn Muse are all coming out because they are highly dependent on our opponents which we don’t want to do in Mid Power. Windborn Muse also is far less impactful in our Mid build than the BC and Low build. Knight of the White Orchid is being trimmed purely because we have much better ramp available to us at this point and doesn’t provide much value outside of that.

Enchantments:
Citadel Siege, while being a card that eventually let us leverage out the win last week, is yet another card that’s just too slow for what we’re planning on doing. Ghostly Prison is getting trimmed because it doesn’t do nearly as much in Mid power as it does in Low power or Battlecruiser. Together Forever is a great value engine but with our Mid build we don’t plan on trying to put creatures back into our hand so the card seemed less effective.

Sorceries:
Promise of Loyalty and Tragic Arrogance are both getting replaced with better, more efficient board wipes.

Lands:
Out go 6 Plains, 4 Swamps, Tainted Field and Temple of Silence. We’re squeezing the most value out of each land we have so we’re making a few upgrades to the land base as well as going down in total land count with the boost to how quickly we’re planning to be online.

In with the new:

Ramp:
Dark Ritual, Lotus Petal, and Lion’s Eye Diamond are all coming in to help us be a bit more explosive with our mana as well as to help us deploy some of our threats through specific chains of tutors.

Interaction:
Damnation and Toxic Deluge are our new board wipe upgrades. Less conditional and less mana! It’s a win/win there. Tormod’s Crypt is a great way for us to shut off players' access to their graveyards when we want to while also being free to cast, so we can get that out at the same time we’re developing our board. The final piece of interaction that we’re adding here is Silence. We are running several combos and Silence protects us from interaction the rest of the table can have or it can let us shut down someone else mid combo.

Utility/Synergy/Gameplan Enhancers/Combos:
The only real value upgrade we’re including is Dark Confidant to help us get things going by drawing cards and being a body we can easily sacrifice later in the game.

Let’s get into the meat of most of our upgrades. Those of you who are familiar with what you can do with plenty of sac outlets and creatures that make tokens when they die will very likely recognize what we’re doing here.

We’re adding Pitiless Plunderer and Nim Deathmantle to close the loops that we had set up last week. These are our primary combo pieces along with our Commander and Cathars’ Crusade.

Altar of Dementia/Ashnod’s Altar/Phyrexian Altar + Nim Deathmantle + Cathars’ Crusade + Felisa
Sacrifice any non token creature with a +1/+1 counter on it into one of the altars - trigger Felisa and trigger Nim Deathmantle - resolve Felisa’s trigger, make tokens, resolve Cathars’ Crusade’s trigger which puts an amount of +1/+1 counters equal to the tokens that entered on each creature we control - sacrifice some of the Inkling tokens to an Altar until we have enough mana to pay for Nim Deathmantle - return the originally sacrificed non token creature to the board. Loop for infinite mana, infinite ETB/LTB triggers and infinite Inkling tokens which will all grow infinitely large due to Cathars’ Crusade. Combine with The Ozolith for infinite +1/+1 counters, or with Pitiless Plunderer so we have to sacrifice less creatures to get the mana to loop more quickly.

To support this we have quite the tutor package. First we have our more generic tutors in Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, and Enlightened Tutor. These can all find almost any of our combo pieces.

Next we get into some more specified tutors in Razaketh, the Foulblooded and Stoneforge Mystic. These both let us find combo pieces or just get generic value. Stoneforge Mystic will find us Nim Deathmantle for the combo or it can get us Skullclamp to try and get value card draw.

Razaketh however is both a sac outlet as well as a tutor. This is a bit harder to get out by hardcasting it so we’ve got a few ways to cheat him out. We have Entomb and Buried Alive to help us dump Razaketh or other creature combo pieces into the graveyard.

After we get them there we need to get them out though! To do this we have Reanimate, Animate Dead, and Necromancy to help us get a combo piece out of the graveyard or Razaketh into play. We can even use them to grab a cool card from our opponent's graveyard to deny them from having access to it or so we can get our own value off of it.

Lands:

We’re squeezing some of the last value we can out of our mana base by adding the remaining fetch lands in Arid Mesa, Bloodstained Mire, Flooded Strand, Polluted Delta, Verdant Catacombs, and Windswept Heath. We’re missing a great target for them in Scrubland so we’re adding that in. Finally we add in a Cabal Coffers, a Mana Confluence and a Tarnished Citadel to let us generate a pile of mana if the game goes long in the form of Coffers or to provide some great fixing with rainbow lands.

Deck with sideboard for cuts and considering for includes:
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/BSD_Ga3cVkaoG7rka9uJdg
Deck as a 100 card list:
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/cQY-4njM9UWKoZ0MlMaAvw

Alchmyst - Prismari

My Mid upgrades actually had the least amount of changes for any of my upgrades made sofar, with only 18 cards moving around. Unlike my previous upgrades I actually swapped out quite a few cards that I had previously added in. This is because as I moved from Low Power to Mid Power I wanted to take focus away from the token strategy which, while fun, is incredibly fragile and prone to fall apart to a few board wipes.

I’m moving the focus to more of a storm strategy. Essentially, we are shifting away from playing our magic on the battlefield and focusing on playing it on the stack. Therefore, most of our token generators and combat damage draw effects have been cut out, as have some of our expensive and clunky copy effects. In their place we have finally added the spells we avoided for the past three weeks - the final combo pieces to the core that the Prismari Performance precon provided.

Dualcaster Mage will get his Twinflame, Rootha now gets copy spells to target, the list goes on! While some of these combos are a bit fast, we balanced this out by not adding a ton of extra tutors or fast mana. This limits the speed at which we can fire these various lines off at. In addition to combo finishers, we have also added various stax pieces to capitalize on our advantage over our opponents. With a grand total of 24 basic lands in the latest version of this deck, we are in an excellent spot to slap Blood Moon or Back to Basics on the table in order to grind everyone else to a halt.

Out with the Old:

Artifacts:
Primal Amulet and Pyromancer’s Goggles are a bit too top heavy here. We do not want to wait to cast them before we start spellslinging. Bident of Thassa also gets the axe here as we are no longer looking to generate tokens that we would draw off of.

Creatures:

Murmuring Mystic and Talrand, Sky Summoner no longer have a place in our deck as we move away from our BC and Low strategies. Guttersnipe and Electrostatic Field can pressure life totals a bit, but we are more worried about getting to our combo than we are dealing incremental damage.
Uvilda, Dean of Perfection//Nassari, Dean of Expression also got cut as this card was originally more of a flavor add, and it’s a bit too clunky in our new list.

Enchantments:
As we are no longer focused on making tokens, Metallurgic Summonings is way overcosted here. For similar reasons Reconnaissance Mission and Storm the Vaults have to go.

Instants:
Aetherize is a bit too limited and unnecessary in our deck once we hit Mid Power, as we have much greater concerns than one of our opponents swinging out. Reinterpret is also much too expensive for us to want to cast here.

Sorceries:
Surge to Victory supported the token creature strategy we moved away from, and doesn’t really have a use outside of that. Mind’s Desire is a bit too pricey for our low-to-the-ground gameplan.

Lands:
Frostboil Snarl, Rogue’s Passage, and Study Hall were cut to reduce our chances of being hurt by our own stax effects we’re adding in the upgraded version.