I’m pleased to say that Duskmourn: House of Horror is happily horrifying! There are tons of good cards that are all going to hit your wallet pretty hard. The Commander precon decks offer a quick way to get battling with the full Duskmourn flavor, and we’re here today to look at the Miracle Worker deck. And figure out how to upgrade it without breaking the bank! And then, if you do want to break the bank, we’ll have some suggestions for you there as well.
First, let’s look at who’s going to be the Commander for our deck:
New Commanders
Aminatou is the kind of build-around Commander that deck builders dream about. She doesn’t have stats to make her a powerhouse threat on her own. But the potential she has to make busted things happen ahead of schedule is nothing to be sneezed at. Surveilling 2 each upkeep is already some prime card selection (and graveyard fueling if that’s what your going for) on its own. The way it sets up her second ability to give you miraculous discounts on enchantments is some real one-card synergy.
We can build a deck that functions well on its own, but gets turbocharged when she sticks on the battlefield. She rides the line of being powerful enough to be incredibly useful while not instantly threatening enough to draw a ton of hate once the rest of the table sees her as you Commander. At least, not the first game you play with her.
The Master of Keys is the alternate Commander for the deck, and if you want to build an Esper Voltron deck, you could certainly do worse. For three mana, you get a flying 3/3 that wears auras and equipment well enough and can rebuy any enchantments you’ve managed to get put in the bin so far. Pump enough mana into it and you have a fairly immediate threat to end games quickly. You’d absolutely need a full on protection package to make sure it sticks around, and all of that’s more than enough of a shift in the way Miracle Worker is built out of the box for us to stick with Aminatou for now. We’re certainly happy to have the Master in the 99, of course.
New Cards
Those two aren’t the only brand-new cards in Miracle Worker. Let’s look at what other new toys we get right out of the box.
Rooms! This new enchantment type has a lot of potential, as Tom wrote about recently – check out that article for the ins and outs of the new mechanic. For our purposes, Secret Arcade turns all our nonland permanents into fodder for Aminatou to Miracle off the top of our decks, while Dusty Parlor makes all those enchantments buff up our creatures. Cramped Vents is a decent if not terribly flashy removal spell with some tidy lifegain tacked on, while Access Maze gives us a once-per-turn semi-impression of a hand-centric Bolas’s Citadel. Of the two cards, the Arcade/Parlor is overall better for us, but Vents/Maze can get us out of some sticky situations in a hurry.
Fear of Sleep Paralysis is kinda busted if you can have it stick around. We’re going to be able to fairly reliably trigger the Eerie ability here, and the ability to just lock down either the biggest threat or a problem utility creature is incredibly useful. And even once it gets taken out, you still get a turn cycle before the creatures untap – assuming you didn’t stack counters on the same creature.
If the Fear is defensive powerhouse that can enable attacks later, Soaring Lightbringer encourages attacking while giving you ample future chump blocking fodder. Or you can just use the Glimmer tokens to keep attacking, but then my nice little parallel in the previous sentence doesn’t work as well. In any case, giving all your enchantment creature evasion while building your army whenever you attack can get out of hand fast.
A deck named Miracle Worker needs some new miracles, and these two certainly deliver. Redress Fate is the closest we’re likely to come to a Replenish reprint, and there are plenty of situations where this will be worth it even when paying full price. The Fanatic is much more hit or miss, likely to feel a little overpriced at full mana value and quite good if you can miracle it. Some of the swing depends on what you bring back, of course, and the lifelink all around isn’t the worst.
These two are a bit of an odd fit, not entirely off-theme but also feeling just slightly out of place. There are a few of the relevant creature types in the deck for Ancient Cellarspawn, but you really want to trigger the second ability here with Aminatou Miracle-ing out some enchantments. I’m a little less sold on the Investigators, whose two abilities both seems generally useful but not terribly focused here. I’m still willing to give them a shot, but they came pretty close to hitting the chopping block.
As has become expected nowadays, Miracle Worker looks quite solid and fun to play right out of the box. But solid doesn’t mean that there’s no room for improvement! Let’s start with some simple additions we can make with a $50 limit on our spending.
$50 Upgrade
Let’s start with a little redundancy. Each of these provide you a little enchantment graveyard recursion, with different upsides to go along with them. Heliod flips into a spell-discount machine that lets you cast everything at instant speed. The brand new Ghostly Dancers also plays well with your Rooms, and can build you an army of aggressively-statted fliers as the game goes on. Starfield can be especially game-swinging, allowing for massive attacks out of nowhere. Deploy it carefully, though, as it can open up enchantments you’re relying on to creature removal and board wipes.
While we’re talking about turning our enchantments into creatures (and already boast a goodly amount of enchantment creatures to begin with), we should definitely consider Zur, Eternal Schemer. While the other version of Zur is good in the deck, this one turns every enchantment creature you control into a hard-to-remove brick wall of a blocker, if not a terrifying attacker as well.
Looking further into the main Duskmourn: House of Horrors set, we find a couple of easy additions. Inquisitive Glimmer makes a sizable chunk of our deck cheaper to cast while being a good early blocker, and Entity Tracker helps us keep our hands full as we play out our game plan. Nothing too flashy, just both solid workhorses in the 99.
Blind Obedience and Karmic Justice are both cards I tend to hate seeing on the other side of table, so I’ll play them most any chance I get. Obedience can slow your opponents’ game way down, stifling hasty aggro decks and artifact ramp alike, while also giving you some nice incidental life drain with Extort. Karmic Justice ensures that anyone who wants to take out one of your noncreature enchantments is going to pay a costly price to do so – notably, this can take out lands in a pinch if there’s nothing better to destroy and you’re feeling mean.
Finally, we get to the big one: Sensei’s Divining Top. Taking up $33 (at the time of writing) of our $50 budget, this card is about as close to an auto-include in Miracles-themed decks as you can get. Most of the rest of our upgrades have been centered around the enchantment side of things, and that’s because this one card does so much to bolster the Miracle side. The ability to control what’s on the top of your deck and draw a card at any time is absolutely broken in a Miracles build, hence why we are devoting so much of our resources to the Top.
Fair warning though – get used to making decisions quickly. Spinning the Top can eat up a lot of time (just ask Legacy players who played when Top was legal in the miracles deck in that format), and nothing will make people want to knock you out of the game more than if you make every turn take an extra few minutes while you futz around with the Top.
Here’s the cuts we made to make room for our additions:
Monologue Tax
Bottomless Pool // Locker Room
Spirit-Sister’s Call
Diabolic Vision
Read the Bones
Nightmare Shepard
Dream Eater
Verge Rangers
Thirst for Meaning
And here’s the final decklist we end up with:
Further Options
Of course, if you want to spend a little more than $50, there’s more you can do. With these upgrade guides, we can assume the mana base can be upgraded. That part I’ll leave up to you. The only specific land I’ll call out here is Command Beacon. In a deck like this, where the Commander tax can add up quick, Command Beacon can be a lifesaver. In any case, on with the non-budget upgrades!
Let’s start with a classic combo, Enchanted Evening and Aura Thief. Evening Turns everything on the battlefield into enchantments – not just your stuff, not just nonland permanents, but everything. Since Aura Thief steals enchantments when it dies, if it ever does you gain control of all enchantments. Which means you now control everyone else’s permanents. That should put you so far ahead of everyone that you’d really have to try and lose from there.
A tutor package can easily power us up, and enchantments are a card type that has some good ones. Enlightened Tutor and Idyllic Tutor are both great places to start, with Academy Rector allowing for some truly bananas sequences.
For example, a good target to grab off of a Rector death trigger is Omniscience. Pretty good card! And to protect it (and everything else if we’re playing the Enchanted Evening from above) we can also throw in Greater Auramancy. Rendering any targeted removal our opponents have useless is pretty good, I hear.
There’s lots of other places to go from here. I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least bring up Smothering Tithe, Rhystic Study, and Grave Pact. While Tithe and Study are almost always going to give you good value, you will occasionally run into a tokens deck that really doesn’t care one way or another about Grave Pact. It’s good enough everywhere else that we’ll take that chance.
Schemes
With the Duskmourn Commander decks also comes the return of Archenemy! or at least the Scheme cards you need to play that particular one-versus-all format. I’m not going to go too into detail on these, as you either want them or you don’t. I will encourage everyone to give Archenemy a try if you’re picking up the deck anyways. And if you love Archenemy already but have no intention of picking up the Duskmourn Commander decks, I’d still encourage you to snag these schemes while you can (or at least the six new ones). Archenemy only comes around every so often, and the art on these is pretty sweet.
End Step
Miracle Worker looks like a blast to play. With these upgrades, you can hopefully take on slightly more competitive tables. Happy spellslinging, and may your topdecks be miraculous!
Chris is the Associate Media Producer at Card Kingdom. He would like to apologize to his son for not holding onto more cards from when he first started playing, as that likely would have paid for college. He enjoys pretty much all formats of Magic, but usually ends up playing decks that make other people dislike playing those formats with him.