Lorwyn Eclipsed releases January 26. Alongside the main set, there are two new Commander Precons with some fun new cards. In this article, I’m going to review the Blight Curse Precon deck, and discuss the best ways to upgrade it.
The Blight Curse deck features Jund counters as a theme. Jund combines red, black and green, and most of the counters synergy in this deck is about -1/-1 counters. By combining board control, life drain and resource development, this Jund deck seeks to grind out the mid game and reach the end of the game in a much better position than your opponents.
BLIGHT CURSE COMMANDERS
Blight Curse features two new Commanders, with Auntie Ool, Cursewretch as the face Commander – and arguably the better option for a casual deck. The Reaper, King No More is a strong card when built around, but is way more of an insta-removal target than Auntie Ool, as it breaks the cardinal rule of casual Commanders: if it messes with someone else’s stuff, it gets the axe.
Auntie Ool is easy to cast in Jund, and has a relevant Ward cost that synergizes with what you’re doing in your deck. She’s a card draw engine and also helps you close games by slowing sapping life from opponents as the game goes on.
Today we’ll be sticking with her.
NEW CARDS IN BLIGHT CURSE
The new precons feature some interesting designs when it comes to brand new cards. You can read my round up of the best of them in our 10 Hottest Precon Cards article.
One card I really love, though, is Oft-Nabbed Goat. It’s such a fun multiplayer design that lets you engage in the best part of Commander, which is interactive political shenanigans.
Blight Curse is also home to some fantastic synergy pieces for the new Commander. Dread Tiller and Sinistar Gnarlbark provide easy -1/-1 counters and oodles of value.
Village Pillagers, meanwhile, comes down in the mid-game to help you keep pushing your engine toward inevitability. When you finally reach seven mana, Grim Poppet is a perfect way to keep your -1/-1 counter engine in maximum efficiency.
INITIAL $50 UPGRADES
Blight Curse is a pretty solid precon out of the box, and comes with some surprisingly good reprints.
Necroskitter, Bloatfly Infestation, Hapatra, The Scorpion God and many more -1/-1 counter all-stars are included.
There are also some spicy reprints in Fire Covenant and Chimil, the Inner Sun – it’s the first Fire Covenant reprint since the SLD version.
For our upgrades, I wanted to try and add some more consistency, more synergy, and more powerful cards. Blight Curse is a fine precon out of the box, but needs a little juice to fine tune it.
First up, let’s talk the heavy hitters. Taking up most of our modest $50 budget are Yawgmoth, Thran Physician, arguably one of the better upgrades for the deck, giving us oodles of card draw and proliferate and a sacrifice outlet all for four mana; and Persistent Constrictor, the kind of curve topper that comes down after Auntie Ool and greases the wheels.
Card Advantage – at least synergistically – was one of the things this precon was missing a bit of. Generous Patron and Unnatural Restoration are the kind of upgrades this deck wants, giving us the kind of synergy most decks can only dream of. Shadow Urchin is an impulse draw flavor of card advantage, and a 3/4 for three mana can attack pretty well to trigger Blight if we need it to.
Banewhip Punisher is a removal spell that also triggers most of the rest of our deck. It can be brought back using our recursion, and so works better than many other instant speed tricks we’re not running.
I always like a bit of protection in my decks, and Untimely Malfunction’s role is to offer that, while also being a shatter effect is we need it. It’s a great little card, and much cheaper than Redirect Lightning.
Finally, we slotted in Nest of Scarabs. Nest is a better token generator than some of the other more expensive options in the 99, and it’s those we’ll be cutting a few of to make these eight upgrades work.
We cut the cards you might have come to expect get cut from a Precon when upgrading it – high mana value, low impact cards, cards that want a different build, and cards which synergize less with what we’re doing than the new additions.
! COMBO ONLINE !
By adding Nest of Scarabs, we unlock multiple combo routes. The first is with Blowfly Infestation. This creates an infinite loop of death triggers, which allows you to win the game if you have a way to convert those death triggers into something good. Otherwise, you need to end this combo by putting the -1/-1 counter onto a creature that won’t immediately die.
With The Scorpion God or Hapatra in play, you now have access to as many cards as you want to draw, or as many Snake tokens as you want to make. Cards like Flourishing Defenses can help with token generation here too.
Currently, if you want to win the game off of this trigger, you’ll need Grave Venerations in play. This gives you the life drain trigger you need to wipe out your opponents.
FURTHER UPGRADES
If you want to make this deck even better, there are a number of avenues you can take.
Leaning into combo is one, and so the Game Changers I would recommend are Vampiric Tutor, Worldly Tutor and Demonic Tutor. Jeska’s Will doesn’t do enough for us being in three colors, and Ancient Tomb doesn’t seem better than tutors if we’re going for combos. That said, if the deck ends up consistent enough, you may end up in Bracket 4 anyways.
You’ll want to grab some more combo enablers if you can, like sacrifice outlets and ways to inflict life loss or damage on opponents.
Counters synergy pieces like Crumbling Ashes, All Will Be One and Contagion Engine are good places to park some of your cash too, as they’ll give the deck even more stopping power.
I also really like Soul Immolation as a board wipe. It doesn’t hit your own stuff, and can trigger a bunch of your card draw and other effects.
END STEP
The Blight Curse precon needs a little bit of TLC out of the box to really make it sing, but with just a few choice upgrades you can tweak performance and add in some inexpensive combos. What do you think of the Lorwyn Eclipsed precons? Let us know on socials.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.