Masters of Evil precon upgrade guide

Davros only makes a Dalek when an opponent has lost 3 life that turn, and three cards in the box can promise that without leaving the opponent a way to say no.

Davros, Dalek Creator costs {1}{U}{B}{R} and has menace. At the beginning of your end step he makes a 3/3 black Dalek artifact creature token with menace if an opponent lost 3 or more life this turn, and then each opponent who did faces a villainous choice: you draw a card, or that player discards one. The whole commander is that condition.

Ten other cards make an opponent face a villainous choice, and The Valeyard makes them face each one twice. The trouble is who decides. The opponent picks which half happens, and a player facing a villainous choice can always choose either option. Missy lets them take the card draw for you instead of the damage. This Is How It Ends lets them shuffle another creature away instead of losing 5. The Master, Gallifrey's End offers 4 life or a copy of the dead creature, and a table that doesn't want to lose life won't. The cards that take life with nothing to decline are Dalek Drone, Exterminate! and Delete, and the first two need a creature to destroy. Delete is an X spell that costs you life as well. Cyberman Patrol and Wound Reflection help too, but only once one of your artifact creatures is blocked or an opponent has already lost life.

So the box asks Davros to run on three cards, and the cheapest of them is three mana. It also makes a lot of creatures enter and die, and very little in it turns that traffic into damage. Eight swaps follow. Three supply the life loss (Bump in the Night, Terror of the Peaks, Syr Konrad, the Grim), two are removal and three are lands. Cuts are listed under what goes out.

What are the best Masters of Evil upgrades?

In buying order. Eight cards, $55.70 at the cheapest released printing of each, and the box's own cards total at least $173.76 (two have no price, so that figure is a floor).

1. Bump in the Night ($0.21). {B} sorcery, and target opponent loses 3 life. That is Davros's entire condition for one mana. It's the cheapest of the sources nobody can decline, and unlike Dalek Drone and Exterminate! it needs no creature to aim at. Flashback is {5}{R}, so there's a second cast waiting later in the game.
2. Terror of the Peaks ($25.38, and the cheapest printing is a Secret Lair). A flying Dragon for {3}{R}{R} that deals damage to any target equal to the power of each other creature that enters under your control. Every Dalek token is a 3/3, so every Dalek token is 3 damage, which is Davros's threshold. Spells that target it cost their caster 3 more life. It is the most expensive card here by a wide margin, and the colour cost is dealt with under the mana.
3. Syr Konrad, the Grim ($1.08). A {3}{B}{B} Human Knight that deals 1 damage to each opponent whenever another creature dies, a creature card goes to a graveyard from anywhere but the battlefield, or a creature card leaves your graveyard. The box mills (Death in Heaven mills a player for two, The Cyber-Controller mills each opponent for X), reanimates and wipes the board, and none of that pays out in life today.
4. Terminate ($0.29) and Go for the Throat ($0.29). Two instants for two mana that destroy a creature. The box's other instant-speed answers are This Is How It Ends at four mana, Snuff Out (which can't hit a black creature) and Ominous Cemetery at five mana plus the land itself. Go for the Throat can't target artifact creatures, so Terminate is the one that always works.
5. Watery Grave ($9.86), Blood Crypt ($8.68) and Steam Vents ($9.91). Three lands that enter untapped if you pay 2 life, in place of Smoldering Marsh, Sunken Hollow and Temple of Epiphany.

Cards I looked at and passed over. Sheoldred, the Apocalypse costs $81.44, and an opponent loses 2 life per card drawn, which on its own is short of the 3 Davros wants. Rhystic Study ($65.20) and Cyclonic Rift ($29.75) are both Game Changers, which would each put the deck in bracket 3 on their own. Torment of Hailfire ($35.78) looks like the clean answer, but each opponent can sacrifice a nonland permanent or discard a card in place of losing 3 life, so it's one more choice they can decline. Exsanguinate ($0.32) is the one I'd add next, since each opponent loses X life and gets no vote, and X=3 costs {3}{B}{B}. Impact Tremors ($2.51) is the other, at 1 damage per creature that enters.

Paying for what the deck already does

Several cards in the box make creatures in bulk. Genesis of the Daleks makes one 3/3 on chapter I, two on II and three on III. Doomsday Confluence makes a token for each time you choose that mode, and Davros makes one at every end step it can. Terror of the Peaks turns each of those into 3 damage. Across the saga alone that's six tokens and 18 damage to any targets over three turns, and because a chapter triggers after your draw, the damage lands before combat. Aim that damage at an opponent and they've lost 3 that turn, which is Davros's condition, so the token he makes at end of turn comes in under Terror too.

Genesis has a cost you should know before you cast it. Chapter IV makes a target opponent choose between destroying all Daleks, which costs each opponent life equal to the Daleks' total power, and destroying all non-Dalek creatures. Davros is an Alien Scientist, so the second half kills him and Terror along with everything else that isn't a Dalek. I'd still play it, but I wouldn't count on the first half.

Syr Konrad pays for the cards that otherwise clear a board for nothing. Blasphemous Act deals 13 damage to each creature and its cost falls by 1 for each creature on the battlefield, so on a crowded board it's often cheap and it kills nearly everything. Each death is 1 damage to every opponent. Delete is quieter. It deals X damage to each nonartifact creature and each player, and the list keeps 12 artifact creatures besides Davros, so it's close to a one-sided sweeper by construction. Every creature it does kill is a Konrad trigger.

Missy deserves a mention for the opposite reason. She returns any other nonartifact creature that dies to the battlefield under your control as a face-down 2/2 Cyberman artifact creature, so each of them is a new creature entering. That's 2 damage from Terror and another artifact creature for her own end-step trigger, where each artifact creature you control deals 1 damage to an opponent who picks that half of the choice.

Twelve lands that arrive tapped

Ten lands among the 37 always enter tapped. Two more, Smoldering Marsh and Sunken Hollow, enter untapped only if you control two or more basic lands, and the box runs six. On the play you've seen 11 cards by turn five, and two or more of the six basics are among them about 13 percent of the time. They have to be played as well. In practice that's twelve tapped lands, a third of the mana base.

The swaps take out Smoldering Marsh, Sunken Hollow and Temple of Epiphany and put in the three shocklands, which leaves nine lands that always enter tapped and none that wait on basics. The cycling lands Fetid Pools and Canyon Slough stay. They enter tapped but cycle for {2} when you'd rather have a spell, and Smoldering Marsh and Sunken Hollow have no such exit. Creeping Tar Pit and Lavaclaw Reaches stay for their own reason, which is that they become creatures. Creeping Tar Pit is a 3/2 that can't be blocked, for {1}{U}{B}.

Colour sources don't move, because each shockland replaces a land that made the same two colours: Blood Crypt for Smoldering Marsh, Watery Grave for Sunken Hollow, and Steam Vents for Temple of Epiphany. The count stays at 31 black, 26 blue and 25 red. The shocklands also have basic land types, so they count for Drowned Catacomb and Dragonskull Summit and they satisfy the reveal on Foreboding Ruins, Choked Estuary and Frostboil Snarl. The lands that left had the same types, so that part is a wash.

Red is the colour to watch. {R}{R} is asked for by Delete and Ensnared by the Mara, and Terror of the Peaks makes three. With 25 red sources the chance of having two by turn five on the play is about 82 percent, against the 90 percent the calculator treats as reliable. I kept Terror anyway, because of what it does with the tokens. If you find yourself holding it with one Mountain, that's the mana base and not the card. Blue has the same issue with {U}{U}, though the three cards that ask for it (Cyber Conversion, The Cyber-Controller and The Flood of Mars) cost two, three and four mana.

If $28.45 is more than you want to spend on lands, buy these last. They improve tempo and not power, and Star Trek reprints all three on 13 November 2026, so those prices may move.

What goes out, and four cards that stay

Hunted by The Family costs seven. It makes up to four creatures' controllers choose between a 1/1 Human with no abilities and giving you a copy of the creature, and none of that makes anyone lose life. Auton Soldier costs {4}{U}{U} and enters as a copy of any creature on the battlefield, plus myriad and an artifact type. It's the cut I like least, because it's good when there's something worth copying, but it gives the life-loss plan nothing. Zygon Infiltrator is a 3/2 for three whose only ability costs {2}{U} more, works at sorcery speed, and lasts only while the creature it copied stays tapped.

Day of the Moon is a three-mana saga whose chapters each choose a creature card name and goad every creature with it. That's usually one more creature goaded each turn. Don't Blink is two mana to stop creatures entering from exile for a turn. It answers a blink deck specifically, and cycles for {2} when nobody is blinking anything.

Four expensive cards stay. Wound Reflection costs six, but at the beginning of each end step each opponent loses life equal to what they lost that turn, so Terror's 3 and Konrad's pings from earlier in the turn are doubled on the way out. Cybermen Squadron costs seven and gives every nonlegendary artifact creature myriad, which for a menace Dalek token is a copy attacking each other opponent. The Master, Multiplied is the one I nearly cut, and the ruling is why it stays. Myriad exiles its tokens at end of combat with a triggered ability, and his text stops your triggered abilities exiling creature tokens, so the tokens myriad makes stay on the battlefield. They copy a creature with myriad, so they have it too, and every attack leaves more attackers behind. The Beast, Deathless Prince looks like a cut, because it enters tapped with six stun counters. The part you cast it for is the cast trigger, which gains control of a creature until end of turn with menace and haste. Send it at its owner and the damage untaps The Beast, removing a stun counter, and draws you a card.

The curve after the swaps

Average mana value falls from 3.74 to 3.65. Seven-drops go from three to two, six-drops from seven to six, three-drops from twelve to ten, and five-drops rise from five to seven because Terror and Syr Konrad both cost five. The two-mana slot goes from 14 to 15 with Terminate and Go for the Throat in and Don't Blink out, and one-drops go from three to four with Bump in the Night.

The upgraded decklist

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FAQ

Which cards in Masters of Evil take life from an opponent with no way to refuse?

Dalek Drone, Exterminate! and Delete. Dalek Drone and Exterminate! each destroy a target creature and its controller loses 3 life, so both need a creature to aim at. Delete deals X damage to each nonartifact creature and each player, which includes you. Everything else that costs an opponent life leaves them a choice, depends on combat, comes down to a random mode, or doubles loss that already happened. The upgrade adds Bump in the Night, which makes one opponent lose 3 life for {B} with no target other than the player.

Why does The Valeyard matter to Davros?

Davros makes each opponent who lost 3 life face a villainous choice, either you draw a card or they discard one. With The Valeyard out, an opponent faces that choice twice, and can pick the same half both times or different halves. Both outcomes are good for you, which is why The Valeyard is worth its five mana in this deck.

How many Dalek tokens does Genesis of the Daleks make, and is it safe to play?

Six across the first three chapters, one on chapter I, two on II and three on III, each a 3/3 with menace. With Terror of the Peaks out that is 18 damage to any targets over three turns. Chapter IV is where it can turn on you. A target opponent chooses between destroying all Daleks, which costs each opponent life equal to the Daleks' total power, and destroying all non-Dalek creatures, and Davros is not a Dalek. If your table is likely to choose the second half, hold the saga until Davros has already paid for himself.

Are Smoldering Marsh and Sunken Hollow really tapped lands in this deck?

Almost always. Both enter tapped unless you control two or more basic lands, and the box has six basic lands in 100 cards. On the play you've seen 11 cards by turn five, and the chance that two or more of the six basics are among them is about 13 percent. They also have to be on the battlefield to count. That makes them tapped lands that carry no upside, so they go out in favour of shocklands that carry the same basic land types.

Would Rhystic Study or Cyclonic Rift fit, and what would they do to the bracket?

Both fit a blue-black-red deck, and both are Game Changers, so either one alone would put the deck in bracket 3. Rhystic Study costs $65.20 and Cyclonic Rift $29.75 at their cheapest printings. The upgraded list carries no Game Changer, so it keeps the floor the box has.

What does the Masters of Evil upgrade cost?

$55.70 for eight cards at the cheapest released printing of each, and for two of them that printing is a Secret Lair or a The List reprint. Terror of the Peaks is $25.38 of it. The three shocklands are $28.45 and the easiest part to skip, because they fix tempo rather than add power. All three are being reprinted in Star Trek on 13 November 2026, so expect those prices to move.

Should I use Go for the Throat or Terminate against artifact creatures?

Terminate. Go for the Throat can't target an artifact creature and Terminate can. Both are in the list because the box's other instant-speed answers are This Is How It Ends at four mana, Snuff Out, which can't hit black creatures, and Ominous Cemetery at five mana plus the land.