“Hit the light as my blade struck to no use.”
Art:Terra, Herald of Hope
by Marta Nael=
Precons are an amazing introduction to the format and a lot of fun to play out of the box, but with so many different cards and commanders present in the format if you arent playing at a table full of other precon level decks your precon can feel extremely outpaced and it can almost give you a feeling that you cant win, luckily for us we have five budget upgrades that can cut the chaff and improve the deck greatly! While this won’t allow you to sit at CEDH tables, it should make your experience against custom lower power decks a lot smoother! This article is mostly meant as a quick and easy list to grab some easy and cheap pickups to improve the deck immediately. Without further ado, let’s get it!
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The base precon list:
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Revival Trance precon base list!
Terra is a very fun Mardu deck that focuses on first and foremost filling up our graveyard as much as we possibly can as well as re-animating and re-ETB’ing our low power creatures, there are a ton of really strong cards that have low-power and can have a big impact in the game, in my first look at the deck I see that there are a lot of cards that are very situationaland really don’t do much too aid in the overall gameplan cards like Interceptor, Shadow's Hound
just feel like they don’t belong and while they do technically provide some reanimation I don’t think they are worth including in the deck, for our budget upgrades I think improving the spell base and creature base is a good way to make the deck considerably stronger. We can absolutely upgrade this deck without breaking the bank. Let’s get straight into it!
Add:
Most copies of Aurelia range from 5-10 USD, depending on the version.
Cut:
Aurelia has been a staple in Mardu and other red and white focused strategies for a really long time, in my opinion her value is still super high in this deck, while we do put a lot of creatures in the graveyard they pretty much always come back because of our commander and we are easily able to fill up the board enough to make her worth it. Aurelia is an amazing finisher for the deck and can allow us to easily close out games in combat. Angel of the Ruins is a fine card, but something that, overall, I don’t think its worth a slot within the deck.
Add:
Most copies of Alesha range from 1-3 USD, depending on the version.
Cut:
Alesha is a very strong card for this deck, not only are they great in combat, they continuously get bigger, and they can also reanimate creatures, including our bigger ones! Alesha is a powerhouse in combat, and if we are able to drop them on turn three, we can get an absolutely ridiculous amount of value out of them. This is just a perfect creature for our deck, it’s especially good that they have first strike, making them strong in combat even on those early turns. Now we get to Interceptor, a card I am a generational hater of. I think the card is pretty cool, but I think there are so many better cards to reanimate and better ways to achieve that. Interceptor just isn’t worth it for a 4/3 with menace. It’s an extremely easy cut for me.
Add:
Most copies of Buried Alive range from 1-2 USD, depending on the version.
Cut:
While I do think that Legions to Ashes is a pretty good card I think its usage is really narrow and unless you know you are going against a token deck I just don’t think its that good, Buried Alive does one thing that Legions to Ashes doesn’t do and that’s further the overall gameplan, we love reanimating and re-ETB’ing our creatures and Buried Alive sets us up to get our biggest and best creatures into the graveyard and back on the field, its a really cheap card and truthfully I’m surprised that it wasn’t added in the precon originally.
Add:
Most copies of Damn range from 1-3 USD.
Cut:
While we are a pretty strong deck overall we can fall behind especially in combat against really fast decks because of that Damn allows us a nice and easy reset button, being able to reset our opponents boards while keeping ours intact is really strong, this card is pretty good when we use it as single target but when we overload it which is pretty easy to do in this deck is where it really shines.
Add:
Most Copies of Living Death range from 2-4 USD
Cut:
Living Death is another card that I’m shocked wasn’t included, we have so many cards that go in the graveyard and other support cards to put our cards in the graveyard its the natural progression of things to want to flip the board and bring back our whole graveyard, Living Death can be an absolute bomb and really can clip the game on its head! Ruinous Ultimatum is a good card and has a strong effect, but it’s extremely hard to cast and, in my experience, will just sit in your hand all game and rarely be relevant. It feels like a precon card and not something that should stick around in the deck.
Conclusion:
Thanks so much for reading to the end! I hope you enjoyed this little quick one. Even with just five upgrades, you can make this deck a lot better and function much higher than a typical precon. Stay tuned for tomorrow when we add the non-budget upgrades to this deck! Stay tuned and TAP IN!