Most of the time, red-white feels somewhat boring in Commander. (It’s either an aggro deck or has something to do with Equipment and Auras.) But that’s not the case with Lorehold at all. It’s probably the most unique take on this color pair, featuring themes you wouldn’t typically expect from these two colors.
Thus, the Lorehold Spirit precon from Secrets of Strixhaven seems to be fairly popular. If you wondering if the hype is real, you’re in the right place, as below you’ll find everything regarding this deck.
First, let’s check the deck’s theme, then we’ll move to the full decklists, new cards, and even a few early upgrade ideas.
Leave the Grave, Buff the Spirits
Do you enjoy using graveyard as a resource? Are Spirits among your favorite creature types? You prefer unorthodox strategies to the common ones? If you answered most of these questions with a resounding yes, then this precon will fit your play style perfectly.
A couple of things are going on with this deck. As we mentioned, graveyard synergies are present. Specifically, the deck cares about cards leaving your graveyard.
There are a lot of ways to do so. You could use effects that:
- exile cards from your graveyard
- return creatures to the hand/battlefield
- allow you to cast spells from graveyard
Of course, there are other options available, but you get the gist. Furthermore, there’s also a smaller subtheme that cares about a specific creature type — Spirits. You’ll want to deploy a lot of them and buff them.
Lorehold Spirit Decklist
If the new cards’ images aren’t showing yet, you can find them in the next section.
Lorehold Spirit Spoilers
Quintorius, History Chaser
Among the five Secrets of Strixhaven main commanders, Quintorius is the only planeswalker. (Further cementing the fact, that Lorehold is the most distinct faction.) But how strong of a card it actually is?
Well, a powerful passive ability certainly helps a lot. Creating a 3/2 Spirit whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard is deceptively powerful, and you can probably abuse that effect with a proper setup.
The +1 is also useful, as it can help with your synergies, and also just improve the quality of cards in your hand. Finally, the -4 is a nice way to close out the game.
Quintorious is a pretty powerful card, and also a fun an cool design. Most precon commanders nowadays are payoffs and enablers at the same time. The elephant, on the other hand, requires you to do some extra work, which makes for interesting deckbuilding.
Other New Cards
Lorehold Spirit Upgrade Ideas
Cards that play well with the precon’s theme but weren’t included in the original listoften spike after players start to upgrade their decks. Thus, here are some recommendations that you might want to acquire sooner rather than later, if you plan to upgrade Lorehold Spirit precon. (Provided they look fun to you and powerful enough for your play group.)
Summoner’s Sending
First up, here’s a cheap enchantment from Counter Blitz, one of the Final Fantasy Commander decks.
If you’re able to exile a creature card from a graveyard at the end of the turn, you get a 1/1 Spirit with flying. (Sometimes it’ll even get a +1/+1 counter.)
By exiling creatures from your graveyard, this does double duty. It triggers Quintorious, essentially providing two Spirit tokens per turn. Plus, it can also be used as a hate card against other graveyard decks. For just a couple of mana, that’s a pretty good value.
Banon, the Returners’ Leader
Banon kinda works like a mini version of your commander, by allowing you to rummage (discard and draw) and giving you more value from your graveyard. It also makes cards leave the graveyard, which is obviously neat.
It’s hard to ask much more of a card that costs only a couple of mana.
The Ooze
This artifact was just printed for the first time in TMNT set, so there’s no way it’s getting a reprint here.
The first ability is neat, but the main reason for playing this card is the second effect. You exile a card from a graveyard, and get a Mutagen token. Exiling a card is the neat part here, as it triggers effects that care about cards leaving the graveyard.
A cheaper alternative, that might potentially get a reprint is Ghost Vacuum. Given that it’s reasonably priced, and a mana cheaper you might want to opt for it instead.
Surprise Friends with a Unique Red-White Build!
It certainly feels like this deck enables unique play patters, and your opponents will surely notice its impact. After all, they won’t be able to ignore the elephant in the room.
Jokes aside, the deck does seem like it could be among the more popular once. Sometimes the most popular option in a large release increases in price. So, if you’re already excited about the possibilities Quintorious enables, you might want to lock in the preorder price and get Lorehold Spirit precon on Amazon.
A whole bundle of the five new Strixhaven decks is also available for those who enjoy the setting of the magical school.
Want to learn more about them? Check our article about Secrets of Strixhaven Commander precons. It covers basically everything you need to know about them.
Until next time, may all of your strategies come together nicely, be it with this deck or any of your own brews.
Whoever wrote this article is high. You can only activate Kirol’s ability once each turn so You are WAY OFF saying you can go infinite and saying X creatures=X Spirit tokens
Thanks for kindly bringing this to our attention. We’ll fix this.
The Ooze is a good card, but it’s over $10 and is more costly than other graveyard hate that exiles one card at a time. For example, there’s Ghost Vacuum (which also creates spirit tokens), Unlicensed Hearse, and Honored Heirloom. I believe an extremely undervalued graveyard hate card is Scrabbling Claws. It’s one mana and can be tapped to have a target player (which can be you) exile a card from their graveyard. It also can be sacrificed to draw a card. It’s cheap because it does not give you the choice to exile a specific card from another person’s graveyard, but in this circumstance it’s perfect.
Additionally, there are a host of cards that put a card from the graveyard to the bottom of owner’s library, such as Junktroller and Reito Lantern.
Furthermore, an alternative to Banon is Bag of Holding, which exiles from your graveyard any card that was discarded, and Bag of Holding can be sacrificed at a later point to place all of the exiled cards back into your hand. This might be better in some instances than Banon, which is limited to once a turn.
As for price, other than Ghost Vacuum (which is about $3), all of the cards mentioned above are 5 to 50 cents, compared to over $10 for The Ooze.