The Eldrazi Incursion Precon Commander deck from Modern Horizons 3 is one of the most aniticipated precons of all time, and now that we have the full decklist, it doesn’t disappoint! But just because the deck looks both powerful and like a ton of fun out of the box doesn’t mean there isn’t some room for improvement, even on a budget! Before we get to upgrading the deck, let’s take a look at what’s new, straight from the Blind Eternities.
Eldrazi Incursion Commanders and New Cards
The default commander for Eldrazi Incursion is Ulalek, Fused Atrocity, a technically colorless commander that, thanks to the wonders of hybrid mana costs, lets you play with all five colors of Magic. For five mana, we get a 2/5 Devoid creature. Not a great rate as a combat piece, the rest of the text box has some potential; whenever you cast an Eldrazi spell, Ulalek says that you may pay two extra colorless mana, and if you do, you get to copy all spells, activated abilities, and triggered abilities you control. Most often, this just means you’ll get two of whatever monstrous atrocity of a creature you’re casting, but with some setup you can get some truly epic stack shenanigans going.
The backup commander in the deck is Azlask, the Swelling Scourge, a slightly more manageable 3-colorless-mana 2/2 that gives you an experience counter whenever it or another colorless creautre you control dies. Then, for one of each color of mana (once more enabling a five-color deck), all creatures you control get +X/+X until the end of the turn, where X is the number of experience counters you have. Arguably more importantly, all Scion and Spawn creatures you control get indestructible and annihilator 1 until the end of the turn – and given the way this deck can and will be able to spit out those tokens, those annihilator triggers can become a problem fast.
And there’s the other 13 new cards in the deck (not counting another 6 from the main Modern Horizons 3 set). We’ll start with the non-creature spells, as there’s only three of those.
Eldritch Immunity is a Kindred Eldrazi Instant for a single colorless mana, and is going to be one of the biggest hope-dashing cards in the deck. For that single mana, you get to say nope to the vast majority of targeted creature removal, or save one creature from a non-exiling or tucking wrath. However, for four and a colorless mana, you can overload it to protect all your creatures. This card is going to wreck so many comeback plans.
Eldrazi Confluence follows the formula of other Confluences, having three different effects and allowing you to choose from those effects three times, with the ability to choose the same effect more than once. Each effect feels more tricksy than backbreaking – while not necessarily the best of the Confluences (I’d take Mystic in a vacuum), the flexibility you get for the four mana is hard to beat. And then there’s Selective Obliteration, a five-mana exiling wrath that feels like it has a ceiling on the ground floor. There’s just too many situations where giving your opponents this level of choice will make the card do effectively nothing, especially against mono-color decks.
Now onto the creatures, starting with Angelic Aberration, one of many payoff for keeping all your Scion and Spawn tokens around. Somewhat expensive on its own, for six mana you’re going to want to be turning a good number of small tokens into much bigger flying ones to get your return on investment here, especially considering that in most situations you’re going to need to wait a full turn cycle before you can swing with your new flying death squad.
Benthic Anomaly is even more expensive, but has the ability to have an impact you don’t have to wait as long to get. Choosing the the most important or impactful creature on the board and then the biggest creatures from your other opponents will is going to net you a pretty impressive body on top of the 7/8 you’re already getting, with the benefit of what enters-the-battlefield or static affect the actually copied creature gives. This is probably more cute than actually great, but there are times it will swing a game right away.
Bismuth Mindrender has the sort of text box that will make people throw removal and poor blocks at it until it’s gone, which has a good amount of value even if the amount of times you get the actual “stealing cards from your opponent” effect are few and far between. Meanwhile if you can get Chittering Dispatcher down early or on a relatively empty board and get a couple of swings in with it, that myriad effect is going to build you a small Spawn army pretty quickly.
Hideous Taskmaster is another expensive creature with middling stats, but is one of the better Threaten effects, as giving the temporarily stolen creature annihilator 1 and trample can be quite a scary proposition. Inversion Behemoth is another card that feels more fun than good, although in the right deck it’ll be a killer. Maybe just not the best choice for this one.
Mutated Cultist is one of the few ways in all of Magic to reset a player’s experience counters, or to let you get political and earn a favor by removing poison counters. Even if you’re just shrinking a creature with a bunch of +1/+1 counters, the discount you get on your next spell can let you cast some truly horrendous things for free or near to it. Spawnbed Protector also feels quite pushed, letting you rebuy your best dead creatures while building your token army at the same time, on a body that worthy of the seven-mana investment.
Twins of Discord can make combat a severe headache for your opponents, more than worth the price of admission even without taking into account the bloodthirst boost it gives to the rest of your creatures. Ulamog’s Dreadsire takes me back to the Godsire days of battlecruiser commander; while I probably want it to be good more than it is, it’s still a fine addition at more casual tables.
$50 Upgrade Guide for Eldrazi Incursion
So here’s the thing. Eldrazi as a creature type in Magic are very popular already, and printings of a lot of them are few and far between. This drives up the price of some of the more useful ones, so while this upgrade guide is still going to improve your results (hopefully), it’s probably going to do so in fewer cards than normal for these articles. With that said, let’s go!
First up, I’d give Strionic Resonator a look. There’s so many triggered abilities in this deck, the Resonator is not going to be lacking for targets to copy. Make a huge Spawn/Scion army quickly, double up on enters-the-battlefield effects, and if you really want to be public enemy number one, copy annihilator triggers. If ever a deck was incidentally perfect for the Resonator, it’s this one.
While the deck is surprisingly robust at drawing cards, I can’t ignore Nulldrifter here. Mulldrifter, for all the power creep of creatures over the years, remains in contention for the 99 in many decks, and there’s no reason the tweaked Eldrazi version shouldn’t at least get a look here.
Conduit of Ruin helps unlock the more toolbox side of the deck – you have at least one creature in here that can handle most any situation, being able to both tutor for it and potentially cast it with a good discount is nothing to sneeze at.
Thief of Existence is a good catch-all for any smaller problematic noncreature, nonland permanent out there, and comes with some good stats for the rate.
Lastly, with all the annihilator triggers flying around, we can’t finish up without at least taking a look at It That Betrays. Annihilator is already demoralizing enough, but getting to then steal whatever nontoken permanents were sacrificed is a total morale killer.
Here’s what we’re getting rid of in the precon to make room for the upgrades:
- Inversion Behemoth
- Selective Obliteration
- Skittering Invasion
- Angelic Abberation
- Return of the Wildspeaker
With those changes, here’s where we end up with Eldrazi Incursion:
Further Upgrades in the Blind Eternities
To get the obvious ones out the way first, and combination of the Eldrazi Titans you want to throw in the deck will fit right in. Emrakul, Kozilek, and/or Ulamog are only going to make the deck better, in whichever combination and versions you choose. It just kind of depends on what you can afford, what you want to be doing with the deck, and of course, personal style.
Eye of Ugin remains arguably the best possible land for an Eldrazi deck – its banning in Modern makes its exclusion here completely understandable, but if you want to really take your deck to the next level, consider this absolute powerhouse of a card.
Echoes of Eternity from the main Modern Horizons 3 set definitely slots right in here, essentially acting as a better Strionic Resonator. If an opponent doesn’t remove this as soon as possible after this hits the battlefield, the odds of you running away with the game increase dramatically.
Zhulodok, Void Gorger is a great inclusion here, especially if you are adding some of the meatier Eldrazi to the deck. Eldrazi already tend to reward you quite well for the large amounts of mana you put into them, why not make that reward even more absurd?
End Step
Eldrazi, for being world-devouring eldritch monstrosities that ruin minds at he mere sight of them, remain wildly popular, and Eldrazi Incursion and the rest of Modern Horizons 3 only look to extend that feeling. Whether you’re looking to play the deck straight out of the box, or tweak it a bit to make it your own, it’s hard to wrong with this precon.
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.