Outlaws of Thunder Junction releases on April 19th! Among the various products available for the new set, there are four Commander Precons. As you can probably guess from the name, the Sultai Grand Larceny deck looks to steal your opponents’ cards and generate extra value for doing so! In this article, I’m going to look at the contents of the precon and suggest some upgrades.
THE COMMANDERS
Gonti is the face Commander for the deck, and like their previous incarnation, they’re great at grabbing cards from the top of your opponents’ libraries. When one or more of your creatures hits a player you get to steal the top card of their library. You don’t have to worry about having the right color mana, either. In fact, you get to pay one less mana to cast them!
One of the great things about Gonti is that their trigger doesn’t care whether or not they are attacking. This means it is active the turn Gonti hits the board, and you can send creatures in to reap the rewards right away. Just like the original Gonti, they don’t need to be on the board for you to maintain access to the spells, either.
You can also use Felix Five-Boots as the Commander for this deck. He sports some nice stats and doubles all of your combat damage triggers. This works well with Gonti, of course.
I think it’s best to leave Felix in a support role in this particular deck since it’s largely built around the theme of stealing stuff, and he doesn’t really help you there. However, he is a really interesting Commander in his own right, as he’s the first to be able to double “combat damage to a player” triggers.
NEW CARD REVIEW
In addition to the two Legendary Creatures I mentioned above, the deck also features some unique cards which either help you steal your opponents’ stuff and/or pay you off for casting spells that you don’t own.
Smirking Spelljacker lets you nab spells right off of the stack before it resolves, and if it gets a chance to attack, you can cast that spell for free. Whatever spell you steal will feel like a great deal at that point, but sometimes you’ll get to cast something truly insane.
Arcane Heist lets you steal an instant or sorcery from an opposing graveyard and cast it for free. Because of Cipher, you can actually end up getting this effect twice.
Dream-Thief’s Bandana is an equipment that lets you steal the top card of your opponent’s library when the equipped creature hits them. While it’s a bit of a letdown that it doesn’t do anything to make the equipped creature better at attacking, this type of trigger looks very valuable in this deck.
Thieving Varmint has a huge amount of potential, as any time there’s a card that can tap for multiple mana it can do some serious work. While some of the deck’s “steal” effects don’t require you to pay mana to cast the cards you pilfer, many of them do – including Gonti. Stealing your opponent’s spell is bad enough, but if you can manage to cast it ahead of schedule, you’ll really be rubbing salt in the wound.
Savvy Trader’s enter the battlefield ability doesn’t actually go after your opponents’ stuff, instead exiling a permanent card from your own graveyard and letting you play it. However, the Trader does reduce the cost of spells you cast from places other than your hand, and that’s going to end up including all the cards you appropriate.
Between Gonti, the Varmint, and the Trader, you’re not likely to have a very difficult time casting your opponents’ stuff.
The deck also features two cards that have wider implications for Commander as a whole:
Heartless Conscription is one of the most powerful sweepers we’ve ever seen. Exiling every creature on the board is a huge deal, as it even lets you ignore things like pesky death triggers and indestructibility. Then, for the rest of the game you have access to all the creatures that got exiled that way. That’s right, this is a sweeper that is largely one-sided.
While you can get extra value out of all those stolen cards in this precon, I can see Conscription making some noise in Black decks across the format.
Tower Winder is a little less exciting, but being able to tutor up your Commander Tower is a very appealing effect, especially for 4+ color Commanders. I really like that it can grab it from the graveyard if necessary, and the fact it comes packing both Reach and Deathtouch means you can probably trade it off effectively too.
$50 UPGRADES
This precon is fairly strong right out of the box, and you’ll quickly find yourself making your opponent feel just how powerful their own cards are. However, there are some budget-friendly changes that can be made to the deck to make it stronger. My main goal with these changes is to take advantage of the plethora of ways this deck can exile and steal opposing cards.
For example, any cards that make casting spells from exile more powerful works quite well here. Rassilon effectively draws you an extra card each turn, while also giving conspire to all of your noncreature spells cast from exile. This includes the spells Rassilon exiles on his own, but also any cards of your opponent that you’ve stolen.
Similarly, Tlincalli Hunter lets you cast a creature spell from exile for free every turn. This works alongside the Scorpion’s adventure, but casting your opponents’ creatures for free is pretty sweet too.
Ashiok, Nightmare Muse and Tasha, the Witch Queen are a planeswalker duo that feel tailor-made for this deck. Ashiok exiles stuff with his +1 and -3, and their ultimate lets you cast any face-up exiled cards for free. Because this deck has plenty of ways to exile things, you’re going to be able to threaten to do something nasty with that ultimate pretty quickly.
Tasha is even more of a powerhouse in this deck. Like Ashiok she can exile cards, which she does with her +1, and she can cast them with her -3. But it’s her triggered ability that makes her insane here. She’ll make you a 3/3 creature token every time you cast a spell you don’t own.
Court of Locthwain is a powerful Enchantment that makes you the monarch, which itself means you’re going to draw extra cards. But it’s extra powerful here because it also exiles a card from one opponent’s library each turn and lets you play it. If you’re the Monarch, you can even cast it for free. This deck is particularly well-positioned to maintain Monarch status, because it has many evasive creatures to enable Gonti.
Wasteland Strangler and Blight Herder both let you exile an opponent’s exiled card, and this deck is going to do a lot of exiling! While casting or playing your opponents’ stuff is obviously the most optimal thing you can do with those exiled cards, sometimes you’re going to hit lands or cards that aren’t especially useful, and these Eldrazi help you turn those whiffs into real value. Wasteland Strangler kills a creature, and Blight Herder gives you three extra bodies.
I removed the following cards to make room for these upgrades:
–Darksteel Ingot
–Culling Ritual
–Cunning Rhetoric
–Baleful Mastery
–Cazur, Ruthless Stalker
–Cold-Eyed Selkie
–Oblivion Sower
FURTHER UPGRADES
If you’re looking to go beyond a $50 investment, there are some other cards you should consider adding.
This is a great deck for the Dauthi Voidwalker + Helm of Obedience combo. Because the walker exiles cards that get put into the graveyard from anywhere, you can pay one for X and mill out one of your opponents entirely. The Voidwalker is a great fit for the deck anyway, because he can give himself up to cast a card you exile. He also happens to have Shadow, making him great at enabling Gonti’s trigger.
The Helm isn’t too bad on its own either. It lets you steal an opposing creature that gets milled, and loads the graveyard in a deck that has lots of ways to make use of your opponents’ cards there.
In other words, you can run this powerful combo and get tons of value out of each half of it even if you can never assemble the combo itself.
Opposition Agent lets you control your opponent when they tutor stuff up, and any time they tutor the cards they grab get exiled and you get access to them. Because it has Flash, you can do this in response to a tutor and really punish them. However, the Agent just sitting around on the battlefield is fairly powerful too, because it really shuts down all of your opponents’ tutors.
Lastly, there’s Thada Adel and Agent of Treachery. Thada comes with islandwalk, which means it’s fairly likely she’ll be unblockable for at least one of your opponents. And when she hits them, you get to steal an Artifact directly from their deck. Gonti will make it easier for you to steal the most powerful option.
Agent of Treachery doesn’t exile cards like most of these cards, but it lets you steal a permanent and pays you off in a huge way if you control three or more of your opponents’ permanents. That’s kind of hard to do with the Agent on its own, but this deck is often going to control multiple permanents you don’t own. So getting Ancestral Recall at your end step is surprisingly easy.
END STEP
Grand Larceny is a fitting name for this deck, as it is well-equipped to let you steal your opponents’ stuff. While Ante might not be a very popular way to play Magic these days, this is as close as you can get to that feeling! But make sure to give your opponents all of their cards back at the end of each game. What do you think of this new precon? Let me know over on X.
Jacob has been playing Magic for the better part of 24 years, and he especially loves playing Magic’s Limited formats. He also holds a PhD in history from the University of Oklahoma. In 2015, he started his YouTube channel, “Nizzahon Magic,” where he combines his interests with many videos covering Magic’s competitive history. When he’s not playing Magic or making Magic content, he can be found teaching college-level history courses or caring for a menagerie of pets with his wife.