Are you a Commander player who enjoys the horror genre? In that case, you might want to mark your calendar for September 27th, 2024. That’s the release date for Duskmourn Commander decks.
These ominous precons are the main focus of today’s article, in which we’ll discuss everything we know about them so far. What’s been revealed about them? First batch of info contained packaging, colors, and general themes. Additionally, there’s been a recent development.
UPDATE: On September 12th, the last teo decks were revealed. You can find all four decklists below.
Before we get to all that, here’s a quick overview of the four decks. Right afterwards, we’ll dive into exploring them further.
| Deck name | Colors | |
|---|---|---|
 | Miracle Worker | |
 | Jump Scare! | |
 | Endless Punishment | |
 | Death Toll |
Miracle Worker
- Theme: See the future, cast miracles.
- Colors: White, blue, black
- Main Commander: Aminatou, Veil Piercer
- Miracle Worker Decklist & Spoilers
Draw your power from destiny. — Use fate-shifting powers to cast miracles and see a future where you’re the one winning the game
If you’re a newer player, you might wonder what are miracles. These are cards with the miracle mechanic. When you draw your first card for the turn, if it has miracle, you may reveal it, and and can cast it for less mana.
One example would be Temporal Mastery, an extra turn spell. It costs seven mana, but it can be cast for just two, if it’s the first card you draw in a turn. Now that’s a really big gap in power level. If you can guarantee to cast it for cheap, then it’s probably quite strong. If only there was a way to control the top of your deck.
Thankfully, there are a bunch of those effects, whether with scry effects or with cards like Brainstorm. Since this deck can “see the future”, you can expect a lot of such effects, setting up the top of your deck in order to unleash powerful miracle spells.
While the Aminatou, the Fateshifter was previously a planeswalker, duo to the desparking in March of the Machine, the Esper commander returns as a creature.
Aminatou, Veil Piercer
This time, Aminatou will work with enchantments. It’ll give you a way to somewhat control the top of your deck with surveil, plus a cost reduction for enchantments by combining them with a miracle mechanic.
The 4 generic mana cost reduction is a lot. If you can do the work, that’s an enormous discount. Nevertheless, there are certainly some deckbuilding challenges. Nothing wrong about that, as it’s another way that this deck will feel different from generic enchantment Commander decks.
Miracle Worker Decklist
The hover images for the new cards aren’t working yet. You can instead find them in our Miracle Worker Precon article.
Jump Scare!
- Theme: Tricky instants, mysterious face-down cards.
- Colors: Blue, green
- Main Commander: Zimone (returning character)
- Jump Scare! Decklist & Spoilers
- Jump Scare! Upgrade Guide
Quick! Behind you! — Invite the element of surprise with tricky instants and lay out mysterious face-down cards to keep ‘em guessing, then flip them over to spring your traps
Would you look at that? Here’s a Simic deck that isn’t all about drawing cards and ramping. (Although, there’s surely be some of that in the deck.) Instead, you’ll try to keep your opponents guessing, when you’re playing with Jump Scare! precon. How? Mostly with face-down creatures.
These were somewhat under-powered in the previous years, but with disguise mechanic In Murder of Karlov Manor and manifest dread in Duskmourn it got much needed boost. Now, with another deck with face-down creatures, your opponents won’t know what to expect with multiple viable options in Commander.
It certainly looks like Jump Scare! is a front-runner for everyone who likes playing mind games with their opponents.
Zimone, Mystery Unraveler
Zimone uses the landfall mechanic, which is certainly one of the more popular mechanics. It combines it with the new one, manifest dread, which can keep your opponents guessing.
While Zimone certainly belongs into Simic colors (due to landfall), it’s refreshing to see these colors do something new with that. Not only do you get face-down creatures, you can also turn them face up for free, by playing additional lands. Pretty neat, and there are certainly some fun mini combos you could do with it.
Jump Scare! Decklist
Some cards might not be showing just yet, right now you can find them in our Jump Scare! spoilers article.
Endless Punishment
- Theme: Punish your opponents, make them pay.
- Colors: Black, red
- Main Commander: Valgavoth, Harvester Of Souls
- Endless Punishment Decklist & Spoilers
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. — Become the House that always wins and dish out damage to all who enter your halls until you see your new tenants evicted . . . permanently
First thing about this deck, the commander’s artwork looks absolutely metal. I can’t wait to see what this card will do, but hopefully, it’s something powerful and fun. However, it’s pretty hard to predict what that might be.
Contrary to the other Duskmourn Commander precons, the description doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the deck. Punishing your opponents and making them pay, leaves a lot open to interpretation. The most likely thing is some kind of a punisher mechanic.
That mechanic gives your opponents choices, but both choices are bad for them. Some examples of such cards include Tyrannize and Bellowing Mauler. Oh, and of course, there’s also the iconic Torment of Hailfire.
Perhaps, there’ll be such effects in the Endless Punishment precon. But let’s be honest, for a second. If you’re a big Rakdos fan, you’re probably getting this deck no matter what its theme is.
Valgavoth, Harvester Of Souls
Valgavoth doesn’t specifically work with the punisher type cards. However, most of them can make your opponents lose life, and if you can do that, you’ll trigger Valgavoth’s powerful ability.
Its power level will depend on how likely you are to make opponents lose life on their turn.
Endless Punishment Decklist
You can find the new cards from this precon in our Endless Punishment precon article.
Death Toll
- Theme: Fill your graveyard, reanimate monsters.
- Colors: Black, green
- Main Commander: Winter, Cynical Opportunist
- Death Toll Decklist & Spoilers
Do what it takes to survive. — Send your cold dead cards into the graveyard, the return your heavy hitters from the great beyond and rise victorious!
We’re wrapping up with what looks like a very traditional Golgari reanimator deck. You’ll fill your graveyard, probably by self-milling, or perhaps with some discard effects. Then, you’ll return your creatures directly to the battlefield.
It’s going to be interesting to see what new twist Wizards will add to this theme. While they do tend to reuse some popular themes, they typically change some things. Perhaps the reanimation will be tied to some new mechanic that’ll appear in the Duskmourn main set.
For example, here’s Coiling Rebirth from the previous set, Bloomburrow. This one uses the new gift mechanic of the set, and pairs it with the reanimator theme.
But what about a mechanic that makes a return in this set? That would be delirium, which would make a lot of sense for a graveyard based set. Plus, it’s also featured on the deck’s commander.
Winter, Cynical Opportunist
The last commander looks like a really fun card for Golgari players. The delirium mechanic cares about having four or more different card types in your graveyard. So, you need to make some work for it.
First, you need to include different card types in your deck. Second, you need to get them in your graveyard, either by milling, or some other way. Thankfully, the latter is already something you already wanted to do in a reanimator deck.
The cool thing about Winter (pun unintended) is that you can get value from it, on the turn you play it. You just need to have 4+ different card types in your graveyard, including a juicy creature to bring back. That shouldn’t be too hard to do in a black-green deck.
The finality counter is a bit annoying, but you can also play around with cards like Nesting Grounds and Power Conduit.
Death Toll Decklist
The new cards can be found in our Death Toll precon article.
Duskmourn Commander Decks: Contents
That was it for the four Commander precons. But what exactly can you expect in them? Here’s an overview of their contents:
- 100-card deck
- 10 Archenemy cards
- a Collector Booster Sample Pack (with two cards)
- 10 double-sided tokens
- a life tracker
- a cardboard deck box (see a review here)
Two of the 100 cards, the main and the secondary commander will come with foil borderless art. On top of that, you can expect a couple of cool cards in your Collector Booster Sample Pack.
Additionally, these decks include 10 Archenemy cards, which isn’t the case for other Commander precons. This allows you to play a special three players versus one game mode. You can learn more about Archenemy here.
Duskmourn Commander Precons: FAQ
Before we wrap up, here are the answers to some questions players often ask about these decks. If there’s something that you want to know and we didn’t talk about, feel free to leave a comment below, and we’ll get back to you:
There will be four different Duskmourn precons.
Yes, they do. Each one comes with a special 2-card Sample Collector Pack.
Each one contains 2 cards. One will be a rare or a mythic with an alternate art and/or border. At least one of the two cards will be foil (shiny).
This hasn’t been confirmed yet, but based on previous releases, that number should be around 12, without counting the Archenemy cards.
Archenemy cards allow you to use an Archenemy deck and play a special 3 vs 1 game mode. With the lone player being the Archenemy and having access to the powerful Archenemy card.
Each deck contains 10 brand-new Archenemy cards. So in total, there will be 40 new Archenemy cards released. This number might be somewhat lower, if the four decks share some of them.
Yes, you can. That’s just an additional game mode that you can play, but it’s entirely optional. You can ignore the Archenemy cards, if that isn’t your cup of tea.
It’s too early to tell, but typically Commander precons are a fine buy. You do get a complete deck, and there’s no randomness to it. Even if you have bad luck, you know you’re getting the exact 100 cards as everyone else who bought the same deck. (The only exception is the added boosters, but that’s just a small bonus anyway.)
Conclusion
That’s everything about the Duskmourn Commander decks, at least for now. You can expect more information in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, feel free to check Bloomburrow Commander decks, which were already released.
Finally, don’t forget to share your predictions, hopes and opinions with our other readers in the comments below. I for one, can wait to see what the black-red deck will be all about. Perhaps I’ll get it for the artwork alone.
Until next time, have fun, and may your starting seven always contain a Sol Ring.
The death toll color allocation is wrong. :) The Green Blue colors were used instead of it’s Black Green Color that he should have.
Yeah, nice catch. It’ll be interesting to see if the mistake is only on digital media, or on actual packaging too.
I picked up the Valgavoth deck without knowing anything about it, and “always wins” is right. This deck is massively OP, most of the creatures have passive abilities that inflict damage to opponents whenever they take any action, its very easy to lay out a combo of creatures, enchantments, artifacts, etc., within the first half dozen turns that lock down all opponents to take damage for every action they perform (cast a creature, cast a spell, do damage to your creatures, etc.). Then this pumps up your commanders, one of whom has flying. You dont even have to attack very much yourself, just keeping your creatures alive on the battlefield ends up ping’ing your opponents non-stop. Most games have seen the opponents down to 25 health and below before I have even taken any damage and while many are still trying to ramp and get creatures on the board. I had to stop playing this deck because it stopped being fun to win so easily.