MTG Commander precon upgrade guides

Every official Commander preconstructed deck in one index — 163 decks across 45 releases — and upgrade guides that argue from the list in the box.

A precon is the cheapest way into Commander and the most common thing to want to improve, so upgrade advice for them is everywhere. Most of it is the same dozen staples with a different commander pasted on top.

These guides work the other way round. Every number on one of them comes from resolving the decklist the box actually ships — the curve, the land split, the colour sources each spell demands, the bracket the list can honestly claim — and the swaps are argued from what those numbers say about that deck. It's also why the swap counts differ page to page. A precon padded with filler supports a deeper cut list than a tight one, and padding to a round number means recommending cards I don't believe in.

Published guides

What's in a guide

Every one covers the same ground. The arguments are the deck's, not a template's:

• What the box is built around — the typal split, how many cards make you name a creature type, how much of the deck is legendary. Counts, not adjectives.
• Whether the mana works. Each coloured cost is checked against the sources the deck actually runs, on the same exact hypergeometric math as the mana base calculator. Precons fail this more often than they fail on card quality.
• The lands, classified properly. A land that enters tapped unless you control two basics is not a tapland in a deck with sixteen basics, and a shockland is not one at all. Getting that wrong is how an upgrade list ends up recommending a downgrade.
• The bracket floor — which bracket the list can claim out of the box, and whether the swaps move it.
• What comes out, and what stays. Including the cards that look like obvious cuts and aren't, with the reason they survived.
• The full upgraded decklist, copyable as plain text or loadable straight into the deck builder.

Every Commander precon

All 163 official preconstructed Commander decks, newest release first, with the commander and the colour identity you're committing to. Collector's Edition printings sit on the deck they reprint instead of taking their own row — the hundred cards are the same, only the treatments differ.

Guides are being written a set at a time and 4 are live so far. The rest of the index is here anyway, because a deck's commander and its colour identity are most of what you need to decide whether to buy it.

FAQ