Eldrazi Incursion precon upgrade guide

53 of the 62 nonland cards in this box are colourless, which makes Eldrazi Incursion a five-colour deck that spends most of its games ignoring four of them.

That number is why this deck is easier to fix than it looks. Ulalek, Fused Atrocity asks you to cast Eldrazi spells and then pay two colourless mana to copy things, and almost everything the deck wants to do runs on generic and colourless mana. The five colours in the identity are close to a rounding error on the mana base, and a real cost on the card quality: the box spent a lot of slots on expensive bodies that never interact with the commander at all.

My changes pull thirteen cards, keep the land count at 38, and cost about $47. Most of the work happens at the top of the curve. The box runs 13 nonland cards at mana value 7 or more, and about half of them are the wrong kind of expensive.

What are the best Eldrazi Incursion upgrades?

If you only buy a few, buy these, in this order.

1. Urza's Incubator (about $20). Name Eldrazi and every creature spell in the deck costs {2} less. That is generic reduction, so unlike Morophon it applies to the devoid Eldrazi that make up most of the list.
2. Skullclamp (about $6). Twelve cards in the box make 0/1 Eldrazi Spawn tokens. Equipping one kills it and draws two, which turns the deck's ramp into its card draw.
3. Thought-Knot Seer (about $5). A four-mana Eldrazi that strips a card. Cheap Eldrazi are what let you trigger the commander twice in a turn.
4. Lightning Greaves (about $5). Ulalek is a 2/5 that does nothing the turn it lands. Haste and shroud fix both halves of that.
5. Conduit of Ruin (about $4). Tutors your best threat to the top and makes the first creature spell each turn cost {2} less.
6. Matter Reshaper (about $1). A three-mana Eldrazi that replaces itself when it dies.

The rest of the list, and the thirteen cards I would take out to make room, are further down.

White and red are three cards each

This is five colours on the box and two colours in practice. Green appears on 10 spells, blue on 8, black on 6. White and red appear on three apiece.

Run the mana through a hypergeometric check and it reports white 6 sources short of casting on curve 90% of the time, and red 6 short. Both numbers are true and neither is worth acting on, because the cards behind them are Angelic Aberration, Eldrazi Displacer and Crib Swap in white, and Hideous Taskmaster, Kozilek's Return and Titans' Vanguard in red. Missing white on turn three costs you a Crib Swap. It doesn't cost you the game plan.

Colourless is the number that matters, and there the box is quietly well built: 28 of its 38 lands produce it, including the whole painland cycle. Ulalek's cost is five hybrid pips, every one of which can be paid with colourless mana, so the commander is castable off lands that make no colour at all. The two colourless for the copy ability come from the same pool.

So I have barely touched the mana. One swap: Temple of Silence enters tapped and produces white and black, the two colours this deck asks for least, and I would rather have Sanctum of Ugin. It enters untapped, taps for colourless, and sacrifices itself to tutor an Eldrazi whenever you cast a spell with mana value 7 or greater. That takes the always-tapped land count from 4 down to 3.

Ulalek copies the trigger, not the spell that made it

This is the sentence that decides which expensive cards are worth keeping, and it's easy to get backwards.

Ulalek reads: whenever you cast an Eldrazi spell, you may pay two colourless, and if you do, copy all spells you control, then copy all other activated and triggered abilities you control. Cast World Breaker and two objects go on the stack: the creature spell, and its own "when you cast this spell" trigger that exiles an artifact, enchantment or land. Ulalek's ability sees both. You get a token copy of the creature and a second copy of the exile trigger.

What you don't get is a third trigger off the token. The official ruling on Ulalek is explicit that abilities of copied spells reading "when you cast this spell" won't trigger, because a copy put onto the stack was never cast. The value is in copying the trigger that is already sitting there.

Which makes the stack order yours to control, and you should. Ulalek's ability and the Eldrazi's cast trigger go on the stack at the same time and you own both, so you choose the order. Put the cast trigger down first and Ulalek's ability on top of it. Ulalek resolves first, sees the cast trigger still waiting underneath, and copies it. Stack them the other way round and that trigger resolves before Ulalek ever looks at it.

Seven cards in the box carry a cast trigger for this to double. They're the reason a seven-drop can still be worth its cost here.

The cheap Eldrazi the box left out

Ulalek costs five and then asks for two more mana every time you want the payoff. The box's answer was 21 ramp pieces, well above the 8 to 12 a Commander deck usually wants, and that ramp is genuinely good. The trouble is on the other side: once the mana is there, too little of the deck is cheap enough to spend it on.

Stock, there are 13 Eldrazi spells at mana value 4 or less. A turn where you cast two Eldrazi and pay for both copies needs those badly, and needs them more than it needs a fourth eight-drop.

So most of what comes in is small. Eldrazi Mimic at two, Matter Reshaper at three, Thought-Knot Seer and Kozilek's Predator at four, Reality Smasher and Emrakul's Hatcher at five. None of them is exciting alone. All of them are a second commander trigger in a turn you had spare mana anyway, and the two Drones pay part of their own cost back in Spawn tokens.

Two of the adds do something the box never attempted.

Urza's Incubator is the first thing I'd buy, and it's worth saying why it beats the card the box already included for this job. Morophon, the Boundless reduces coloured mana only. 17 of this deck's 33 Eldrazi spells carry no coloured pip anywhere in their cost, so Morophon does nothing at all for them. Of the 16 that do, 12 have a single pip, so it saves exactly one mana. Urza's Incubator reduces by {2} generic, which every creature spell in the deck can actually use.

Skullclamp is the draw engine this list was one card short of. Twelve cards in the box make Eldrazi Spawn or Scion tokens, and a Spawn is a 0/1. Equip it for one, the toughness penalty kills it, and you draw two. Those tokens were going to be sacrificed for mana anyway; this gives you a second use for them.

The last three are maintenance. Titan's Presence and Spatial Contortion are colourless removal, castable off the same lands as everything else, in a deck that shipped with six pieces of spot removal. Lightning Greaves protects a commander with 5 toughness and no evasion, and hands it haste, which matters because Ulalek does nothing the turn it arrives.

All thirteen come to about $47. I left three obvious cards out on price. Eye of Ugin is around $59, Ancient Tomb around $135, and Cavern of Souls around $49; none is proportionate to a $150 deck. If you already own them they beat anything on my list, and they're what I'd buy fourth, after the cheap Eldrazi and the two engine pieces.

What leaves, and four that only look like filler

Thirteen out. Six of them are one cut repeated: the top of the curve is too heavy and too passive.

Ulamog's Dreadsire at ten, Artisan of Kozilek at nine, Ulamog's Crusher and Eldrazi Conscription at eight, Twins of Discord and Skittering Invasion at seven. Ulamog's Crusher is an 8/8 with annihilator that has to attack every turn, which in a four-player game is a card that picks your fights for you. Eldrazi Conscription is eight mana on an aura, and if the creature it's attached to gets removed in response you've lost two cards for nothing. Skittering Invasion makes five Spawn for seven mana, which reads like ramp but lands on a turn you already have plenty.

Artisan of Kozilek is the one I feel worst about. It does have a cast trigger, and reanimating a creature twice is real value. Nine mana is just past what this deck can pay while also holding up the two for the copy.

Four more leave for being narrow rather than expensive. Ulamog's Nullifier needs cards in opponents' exile and this deck barely exiles anything. Suffer the Past is graveyard hate in a list that otherwise doesn't care about graveyards. Bismuth Mindrender and Inversion Behemoth are four-mana bodies whose abilities need a board the deck doesn't reliably build.

Ugin's Insight goes for a mana reason rather than a card-quality one: it wants two blue in a five-colour deck with 17 blue sources, which comes together on curve about 60% of the time. It's the only card in the box demanding a doubled pip this mana base can't support. Dreamstone Hedron is the last one out, because six mana for a rock is slow next to 21 other ramp pieces.

Four cards look like obvious cuts and are staying.

All Is Dust costs seven and draws no cards, which makes it look like exactly the top-end I've just spent three paragraphs removing. It's a one-sided board wipe here. Only 3 of the deck's 49 nonland permanents are coloured, and they are Awakening Zone, Garruk's Uprising and Imprisoned in the Moon. Everything else you control is colourless, and stays.

Selective Obliteration is the same argument two mana cheaper. Each player names a colour and exiles everything that isn't colourless or that colour, and your board is almost entirely colourless.

Morophon, the Boundless is off-type, costs seven, and I've just said it does nothing for half the Eldrazi here. It stays for what it does to the commander. Ulalek's cost is five hybrid pips, and the ruling on Morophon is that you pick which half of a hybrid symbol you're paying before the reduction applies. Pick the coloured half on all five and Morophon covers the entire cost. Ulalek becomes free to cast, every time, however high the commander tax has climbed.

Hideous Taskmaster and Benthic Anomaly are seven-drops I'm keeping, and they're the payoff for the stack-ordering rule above. Taskmaster steals a creature from each opponent with haste and annihilator. Anomaly copies the biggest thing on the table. Both are cast triggers, so the commander doubles them.

Name Eldrazi, and know what you're giving up

Five cards in the upgraded deck make you choose a creature type: Morophon, Herald's Horn, Secluded Courtyard, Unclaimed Territory, and the new Urza's Incubator. Name Eldrazi on all five.

It isn't close. Counting the commander, 30 of the deck’s 31 creatures are Eldrazi, and the one that isn't is Morophon, which has changeling and counts as an Eldrazi whatever you name. There's no version of this deck where another choice is right, which is unusual: on most typal precons the choose-a-type cards leave something behind.

What's worth knowing is what those two lands don't do. Secluded Courtyard and Unclaimed Territory only make coloured mana for creature spells of the named type. They won't help you cast Kozilek's Return or Rishkar's Expertise in a colour you're short on, and they don't produce the colourless mana the copy ability wants either.

The deck after thirteen swaps

Average mana value falls from 4.43 to 3.89. Nonland cards at mana value 7 or more drop from 13 to 7, and among Eldrazi spells specifically the count halves, from 12 to 6.

The bottom of the curve is where those slots went. Cards at mana value 2 go from 8 to 11, and at 3 from 13 to 16. Eldrazi spells at four or less only tick up from 13 to 14, which understates the change: six of the Eldrazi I cut were ones you couldn't realistically cast alongside anything else.

Land count is unchanged at 38, always-tapped lands down from 4 to 3. Card draw holds at 8 pieces, and it only holds because Skullclamp replaces what Ugin's Insight and Dreamstone Hedron were doing. Ramp stays at 21, still well above the usual ceiling, and I've left it there deliberately: this is a deck whose commander charges two mana for every payoff, so the normal limit doesn't apply.

The bracket floor doesn't move. None of the thirteen adds is a Game Changer, so the upgraded list sits exactly where the box does.

The upgraded decklist

The full 100 with my swaps applied. Hover any card name to see the card.

Load into the deck builder Copy decklist

“Load into the deck builder” opens this list in your account, pinned to the printings the box shipped, ready to edit or save. “Copy decklist” gives you plain text for Moxfield, Archidekt or Arena — no account needed.

FAQ

Do I need all five colours of mana to cast Ulalek, Fused Atrocity?

No. Every pip in Ulalek's cost is hybrid, so five colourless mana casts it. The box has 28 lands that produce colourless, which is why the commander is reliably castable on turn five even though the deck spans five colours.

Should I keep Morophon, the Boundless?

Yes, but for the commander rather than the creatures. Morophon does nothing for 17 of the deck's 33 Eldrazi spells, because those carry no coloured pips for it to reduce. It stays because it reduces all five of Ulalek's hybrid pips, which makes the commander free to recast however high the tax has climbed.

What bracket does Eldrazi Incursion sit in after these changes?

The same one as the box. None of the thirteen adds is a Game Changer, so the floor doesn't move. The deck gets faster and more consistent without changing the kind of game it wants to play. You can check any version of the list with the bracket checker.

Is casting All Is Dust safe with my own board in play?

Close to it. Only 3 of the deck's 49 nonland permanents are coloured: Awakening Zone, Garruk's Uprising and Imprisoned in the Moon. Everything else you control is colourless and survives, so it's a one-sided sweeper rather than a reset button. Selective Obliteration does the same job two mana cheaper.

Which creature type should I name?

Eldrazi, on all five cards that ask. Counting the commander, 30 of the upgraded deck's 31 creatures are Eldrazi, and the exception is Morophon, which has changeling and counts as one anyway. Just remember that Secluded Courtyard and Unclaimed Territory only make coloured mana for creature spells, and never make the colourless mana the copy ability needs.

In what order should I put Ulalek's trigger on the stack?

Put the Eldrazi's own cast trigger on the stack first, and Ulalek's ability on top of it. Ulalek copies triggered abilities still on the stack when it resolves, so stacking it second is what doubles the cast trigger as well as the spell. The other way round, that trigger resolves before Ulalek can copy it.

What do these upgrades cost?

About $47 for all thirteen, at market prices for the default printings. Urza's Incubator is roughly $20 of that. The other twelve average under $2.50 each, and six cost less than a dollar.