How to build Chief Magistrate of Mercadia

Chief Magistrate of Mercadia copies every creature token you already control, once per upkeep, for as long as the crown stays on your head. So the ninety-nine behind it are not really a token deck. They are a deck about surviving one turn cycle at a time.

The plan is three sentences long. Land the commander, hold the monarchy through one opponent turn cycle, and let the upkeep trigger do arithmetic that no single removal spell can undo. Every other slot exists to make one of those three sentences more likely.

One doubler takes the board from double to triple

The upkeep line does two things and the order matters. It creates a 2/1 red Goblin with haste, and then it looks at every creature token you control and copies each one. With nothing else on the battlefield that is a clean doubling. Two tokens after the first upkeep, six after the second, fourteen after the third, thirty after the fourth.

Put Anointed Procession out and the shape of the arithmetic changes. The Goblin arrives twice, so the number the copy clause reads is two higher, and the copy clause is itself an effect that creates tokens, so it runs twice as well. The board goes to three times what it was rather than two. Six, twenty four, seventy eight, two hundred and forty across those same four upkeeps.

The part worth being precise about is the second doubler, because the intuitive answer is wrong. It does not take you to six times. It takes you to five. Two doublers make the Goblin arrive four times and the copies arrive four times, but the board you started the turn with is still only counted once. Three give nine. The rule is one plus two to the power of however many are out, and Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation is a bigger step than the others, because it triples creature tokens instead of doubling them and so reaches four on its own.

White owns all five multipliers and this list runs every one

Red has no card that multiplies tokens. Not one. Every printed effect in this colour pair that makes a token creation event bigger is white, and there are exactly five of them: Anointed Procession, Mondrak, Glory Dominus, Elspeth, Storm Slayer, Exalted Sunborn and Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation.

Five is a small enough pool that the question is not which to run. It is whether running all five is greedy, and for this commander it is not, for a reason that does not carry over to other token decks. Elsewhere a multiplier drawn late is close to a blank, because the deck has already made the tokens it was going to make and doubling nothing gives you nothing. Here the copy clause guarantees a token creation event on every upkeep left in the game. One drawn on turn twelve still has work on turn thirteen.

The bill is that four of the five want two white pips. Anointed Procession is the exception at , and it is also the one card in this group the budget rung cannot afford to keep.

The clause copies your best token, not your Goblin

Read the wording once more. For each creature token you control, create a token that’s a copy of it. It never asks where the token came from or what it is.

Court of Grace makes a 4/4 white Angel with flying on your upkeep while you are the monarch. Skyline Despot makes a 5/5 red Dragon with flying on your upkeep while you are the monarch. Both are creature tokens, so both get copied, and what comes back is another Angel and another Dragon rather than another 2/1 Goblin.

Divine Visitation is that idea taken to its end. It replaces every creature token you would create with a 4/4 white Angel that has flying and vigilance, so the Goblin is an Angel, every copy is an Angel, and a board that was thirty ground creatures with one toughness is thirty fliers with four. Vigilance is the word doing the most work, because this is the only card in the list that lets the board swing and still be standing at home when an opponent goes looking for the crown. At it is the strongest five drop in the list, and almost none of that is about going wider.

This is also why the deck runs fewer token makers than a token deck normally would. Quantity is the commander’s department. What the remaining slots buy is quality, so that the thing being multiplied is worth the multiplication.

Six triggers, one upkeep, and the order is yours

Court of Grace, Court of Embereth, Skyline Despot, Assemble the Legion and Outlaws' Merriment all trigger at the beginning of your upkeep. So does the commander. Triggers controlled by one player go on the stack in whatever order that player picks, which means every other token maker in the deck can be made to resolve before the copy clause counts anything.

Sequence it properly and the Soldiers from Assemble the Legion, the Angel from Court of Grace, the Knight from Court of Embereth and the Dragon from Skyline Despot are all on the battlefield by the time the commander asks how many creature tokens you control. Sequence it the other way and each of them arrives a full turn late. At this growth rate that is not a rounding error. On the fourth upkeep it is the difference between thirty tokens and fourteen.

Secure the Wastes and Grand Crescendo are in the list for the same reason approached from the other side. Both are instants, so they can be cast at the end of the turn before yours, or in response to a removal spell aimed at the commander, and either way the bodies they leave behind are counted the next time the clause resolves.

Court of Ardenvale is the odd one in that window. Its trigger returns a permanent rather than making a token, and while you are the monarch it returns that permanent straight to the battlefield instead of to your hand. It is in the deck because it is a fourth Court, which is to say a fourth way to be wearing the crown. The recursion is what you get for free.

Losing the crown does not slow this deck, it switches it off

The load bearing word in the upkeep line is “then”. Create a 2/1 red Goblin with haste. Then, if you are the monarch, copy everything. The Goblin is unconditional and nothing else on this page is. Any opponent takes the crown by connecting once with any creature, and a 1/1 does it as well as a dragon does.

So the core list carries eleven ways to put the crown back on. Palace Sentinels, Palace Jailer, Court of Grace, Court of Embereth, Court of Ardenvale, Emberwilde Captain, Archon of Coronation, Queen Mother Ramonda and Skyline Despot all hand it over as they enter. Forth Eorlingas! takes it back through combat damage. Throne of the High City is a land, so that eleventh copy of the effect costs the deck no spell slot at all.

The build deliberately refuses to answer this with a pillowfort. Ghostly Prison and its relatives tax an attacker, and taxing is the wrong tool when a single unblocked creature undoes your turn regardless of what its controller paid to send it. Blockers are the right tool, and this deck makes blockers faster than any table makes attackers. Queen Mother Ramonda is the one taxing effect that survived, because stopping creatures with power two or less from attacking you at all is a different sentence from making them pay for it.

Palace Jailer earns a warning. Its exile lasts only until an opponent becomes the monarch, so the creature it took walks back onto the battlefield on exactly the turn the deck was already having its worst turn. That is a fair price for a four mana monarch source. Just do not point it at something you cannot afford to see again.

Nothing in the kill asks you to attack

The section above is the reason. Attacking taps creatures, and untapped creatures are the only thing between an opponent and the crown that runs the deck. A build that wins through combat has to choose every turn between advancing its clock and protecting its engine, and it has to make that choice on the turn its board is largest and most worth attacking.

Seven cards remove the choice. Impact Tremors, Witty Roastmaster and Molten Gatekeeper each deal one damage to every opponent for every creature that enters. Warleader's Call does that and anthems the board while it does it. Purphoros, God of the Forge doubles the rate. Terror of the Peaks and Warstorm Surge deal damage equal to the entering creature’s power, which is the moment Divine Visitation stops being a defensive card and becomes the kill.

The numbers are worth doing. On an unanswered board with no multipliers at all, sixteen tokens enter on the fourth upkeep, and those four upkeeps together put thirty damage on each opponent through Impact Tremors alone. Purphoros makes it sixty. Every one of those creatures is still untapped, still blocking, and the crown has not moved.

Goblin Bombardment and Hour of Reckoning are the two outs for when the board stops being the answer. Bombardment turns the whole pile into direct damage at instant speed, which also beats an exile wrath cast in response. Hour of Reckoning destroys every nontoken creature, leaves your side untouched, and lets the creatures it is not going to kill pay for it through convoke.

Two pips on the white half, two on the red, thirty seven lands for both

The multipliers are white and want two white pips. The payoffs that convert the board are red and want two red pips. That is an awkward bill for a two colour deck, because most Boros lists lean on one colour and treat the other as a splash.

The core list runs thirty white sources and twenty seven red across thirty seven lands. Measured on the play at ninety per cent, two white by turn three wants thirty six sources and two red by turn four wants thirty three, so the deck is six short on each. Sixteen of its lands make both colours, which is close to everything Boros has printed, and the base still does not get there.

What makes that playable is which cards sit behind each shortfall. Exactly four demand two red: Court of Embereth, Krenko, Mob Boss, Skyline Despot and Terror of the Peaks. The cheapest is a four drop and the dearest is a seven drop, so a measurement taken on turn four is stricter than the game ever is. The white side has fourteen cards behind it and that is the genuine constraint. It is why City of Brass is in the list paying a life every time it taps, and why an average mana value of 3.16 against a six mana commander matters, because it usually means the first double white pip gets cast on five or six lands rather than on three.

Three cards that read as automatic here and are not

Goblin Assault is the trap. Two mana, a red Goblin every upkeep, and it looks like it was printed for this commander. Its second line is that Goblin creatures attack each combat if able, and this deck’s board is almost entirely Goblins. Playing it sends your blockers away every single turn, which hands the crown to whoever still holds a creature, which switches off the copy clause. It is not a marginal include here. It loses the game.

Cathars' Crusade is the second. A +1/+1 counter on each creature you control for every creature that enters is, on paper, the most unfair thing you could do with a board that multiplies. In practice the fourth upkeep asks you to place counters on thirty creatures sixteen separate times, and no table is going to sit through it. A payoff that cannot be resolved at the speed of a real game is not a payoff.

Martial Coup and Blasphemous Act round it out. Both read like the wrath a token deck wants, and both destroy the board you spent four turns growing, Martial Coup including the tokens it makes on the way past. Hour of Reckoning is in the deck instead, because its wording spares every token on your side of the table.

The core list

Ninety-nine cards plus the commander. Hovering any card name on this page brings up the card itself, and every price beside one is the cheapest paper printing rather than whatever a bare name happens to resolve to.

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The engine is cheap and the multipliers are not

The commander costs nothing to acquire and the crown package is close to free. Palace Sentinels, Palace Jailer, Archon of Coronation, Queen Mother Ramonda and Throne of the High City come to about a dollar between them, and Impact Tremors, the card that actually ends games here, is under three. Nearly all the money in the core list sits in two places, and neither of them is the engine: the white multipliers, and the generic staples any deck in these colours would want.

That is why the budget rung can keep the engine whole and give up only the scaling. It runs one multiplier instead of five, so the upkeep triples rather than reaching the five times any two of them would give, and it swaps four of the better lands for tapped ones. It is slower and it is smaller, and both of those are on the table rather than hidden. What it does not give up is the reason to build the commander in the first place.

The bracket 4 rung goes the other way and buys speed rather than size. Ancient Tomb, Chrome Mox and Smothering Tithe exist to cast a six mana commander before turn six. Enlightened Tutor and Gamble fetch whichever multiplier the game is asking for. Mother of Runes, Grand Abolisher, Teferi's Protection and Ranger-Captain of Eos all guard the one permanent this deck cannot replace. Six of those cards are Game Changers, which is what puts the floor at four, and it is worth saying plainly that this rung and the budget rung do not belong at the same table.

FAQ

What happens to my tokens if I lose the monarch?

Nothing happens to the tokens you already have. They stay on the battlefield and they keep their copies. What stops is the growth. The copy clause checks whether you are the monarch each upkeep, so while the crown sits elsewhere you get one 2/1 Goblin a turn and nothing else. Take the crown back and the clause starts copying the whole board again from wherever it left off.

Do token doublers multiply the copy ability as well?

Yes. The copy clause is an effect that creates tokens, so Anointed Procession and the rest apply to it exactly as they apply to the Goblin. That is why one doubler takes the upkeep from double to triple rather than adding a flat amount, and why two doublers give five times rather than four.

How big does the board actually get?

With no doublers out it is two tokens after the first upkeep, then six, then fourteen, then thirty. With one doubler it is six, twenty four, seventy eight and two hundred and forty. Both counts assume nobody removes the commander and nobody takes the crown, which is where most of the ninety-nine is spent.

Can I play Chief Magistrate of Mercadia right now?

Not yet. It is printed in Mystery Booster Commander Edition, which releases on 9 November 2026, and it becomes legal in Commander that day. Card databases report it as not legal today, which reads worse than it is and only means the set has not shipped. Every other card in the core list is legal now.

Is this deck too strong for a bracket 3 table?

The core list runs no Game Changers, no fast mana and no tutors, so its computed floor is bracket 1 and it sits at bracket 3 on the strength of what it does rather than what it owns. Two things should stop you reading that number as settled. Nothing previewed this month can be flagged as a Game Changer yet, because that list gets rewritten on its own schedule and never on a release day, and a commander that multiplies an entire board every upkeep is the sort of card that lands on it later. The second is speed rather than card choice: if this one survives four upkeeps with a multiplier out, the game ends without a combat step, which is worth saying in the pre-game conversation. The bracket 4 rung is a different deck.

Can I build this for less than the core list costs?

Yes, for roughly a quarter of it. The money in the core list sits in the white multipliers and in generic staples, not in anything the commander needs, so the budget rung keeps the whole crown package and every damage payoff and gives up the scaling. It runs one multiplier instead of five and its lands enter tapped more often. It still does the thing.

Does the deck do anything once the commander is removed?

Less than it wants to, which is the standing risk on a six mana commander. Assemble the Legion, Outlaws’ Merriment, Court of Grace and Skyline Despot keep making tokens without it, and the damage payoffs never ask where a creature came from, so the deck still builds a board and still drains the table. What it loses is the multiplication. Recasting at eight mana is a real turn, and that is why Lightning Greaves and Swiftfoot Boots are in the list.