Outlaws of Thunder Junction releases April 19 with prerelease starting on April 12. With it comes the now customary Commander decks. Most Wanted is one of four Commander decks, and focuses on the new Outlaw grouping in a Mardu deck led by Olivia, Opulent Outlaw. How good is the precon out of the box? What are some easy upgrades to make it hum? Let’s dig in.
First up, a quick clarification on what Outlaws are. Outlaws are Assassins, Mercenaries, Pirates, Rogues and Warlocks.
MOST WANTED NEW OUTLAW COMMANDERS
Olivia, Opulent Outlaw is the face Commander for the Most Wanted deck. She’s got a respectable 3/3 Flying Lifelink body, and she can generate you a treasure for each player your outlaws deal combat damage to each combat. She has a mana sink, too, that lets you grow the team in order to close the game.
While on the face of things that ability might seem a little lacklustre, in practice, getting two extra power on your team can make the difference between trading and swinging freely.
The alternate Commander, Vihaan, is a pretty powerful build-around. While he lacks the shell in the precon to do as good a job as Olivia leading the deck, he’s sure to be a popular Commander for those brewing outside the box. You can focus your entire build on generating treasure and overrun effects, and then just swing in. Giving those animated treasures Vigilance is truly the icing on the cake.
PRECON REVIEW: WANTED LEVEL INCREASED
Most Wanted is a solid precon, and for anyone who hasn’t dipped into the new-school approach to generating value that Mardu-sphere decks explore, then it’s a solid pickup. If you wanted to build a deck that utilized the new Outlaws creature grouping, then picking up the precon is a good bet, given the many Outlaws-matter new cards on offer.
Amongst the new cards, Discreet Retreat is a solid roleplayer for Outlaws decks, giving mana ramp and card draw.
Like Discreet Retreat, Graywater’s Fixer can slot into decks like the new Grixis Marchesa, or even the old Marchesa, the Black Rose, with an Outlaw theme.
As far as cards that can slot in in other builds, We Ride at Dawn is a great one for Convoke decks, especially because it helps re-cast a Commander but also provides bonus creature tokens to pile into the melee.
Reprints wise, Command Beacon is the big hitter, with Council’s Judgment, Witch of the Moors and even Deadly Dispute at common increasing card availability. Overall it’s a solid precon to sit down with, partly due to Olivia’s straightforward value-based approach to a win condition, but the reprints are a little less exciting for veteran players.
MOST WANTED: $50 BUDGET UPGRADE
For this upgrade, sticking to the $50 was a little frustrating, as cards like Akroma’s Will, Black Market Connections and others are all $20+ cards. While any of them can increase the power of your deck, you’ll see way more gains by spreading that $20 or so across multiple cards, at least for initial upgrades.
That said, the budget gets us some stellar cards that can help achieve the goals of this exercise. Those goals are:
- Increase treasure production
- Add more low curve Outlaws
- Add more evasive Outlaws
- Add more card draw
- Add better removal
That’s a lot of goals, sure, but we can meet them through deft use of stacking effects on singular cards. Professional Face-Breaker and Mastermind Plum both increase treasures while offering card advantage, which is right where we want to be. The former is also evasive, helping us to trigger Olivia.
Kellogg is another card that fulfills this criteria, swinging in with First Strike and Haste while offering a way to use that mana in an on-flavor way.
Speaking of Mercenaries, Claim Jumper helps us fix our mana in a more permanent way, while Taurean Mauler adds some inevitability – especially with the Trailblazer’s Boots already in the deck.
Those Mercenaries and more can be found with a cheeky Cateran Summons, an old tutor that is seeing a breath of new life.
To help get the most from this tutor, amongst the removal I’ve added a Crib Swap, which can be grabbed just like Mirror Entity with the Cateran Summons. Being able to grab those cards, or a Kellogg to spend your accrued treasure, is a really nice play, and it’ll get better the more Mercenaries you can slot in – such as the new Rakdos, if you extend your budget.
Ruinous Ultimatum, Ruthless Lawbringer, Path to Exile, and Stroke of Midnight give us some much needed interaction, with the former acting also as a way to demolish the defenses and swing for the win.
While some of the better overrun effects in these colors are too expensive for this build, we did manage to squeeze in both a Port Razer and a Bond of Discipline, which can both end games. Bond is an especially fun one if your opponents have goaded tokens in play, let’s say from Nettling Nuisance.
Rounding things out, Grim Hireling and Lotho can also increase our treasure production, but you might frown at Curse of Opulence; it makes Gold, right? Well, Gold is still Gold, and it can be used to pay for Olivia’s ability. It’s just too mana efficient to not consider.
These upgrades took a very specific line: increasing the consistency of the strategy, which is to swing with Outlaws, make treasure, and overwhelm with combat damage. I opted to eschew the time-tested artifact-burn approach that utilizes the likes of Mirkwood Bats and Marionette Master because I’ve provided that kind of win condition in previous upgrade guides, and it takes away from the Outlaws approach that Olivia offers.
If you do want to look at that strategy, then be my guest! The upgrade guide for the Vampiric Bloodline deck from Crimson Vow featured this kind of tech.
The cuts can be found in the Sideboard, and were largely made to reduce the mana curve, and replace inefficient effects with better ones, such as Hex with Ruinous Ultimatum, or Angrath’s Marauders with Bond of Discipline. Mass Mutiny could easily become a Mob Rule if you wanted, but it made way for effects that we needed more of in this instance.
The deck had no right to be playing Feed the Swarm in Mardu, and I can only imagine it was there in the precon to reduce the power level of the deck relative to the others, and “synergize” with Olivia’s lifegain.
FURTHER UPGRADES
The immediate splashy upgrades are Bitterblossom and Black Market Connections. They both enable Olivia with Outlaw creatures, with the former also making them Fly, which helps massively in connecting to deal damage. They’re both a little out of range of a budget upgrade, and will only truly net their value if you make the budget adjustments first; Bitterblossom, for example, is way better when we’ve already grabbed Grim Hireling and Professional Face-Breaker.
Lowering the curve is going to make the deck perform better in general, as the more evasive Outlaws we can muster before dropping Olivia, the better. In that sense, The Big Score’s Generous Plunderer is a solid option, especially if we’re attacking the opponent who is cursed with Curse of Opulence.
If you do include Cateran Summons, you can use it to grab Rakdos, the Muscle, or Nameless Inversion. Cateran Summons itself is a budget card, and a low-power option at that. Using it to access a limited toolbox is fun, whereas upgrading it to a Demonic Tutor is both much better but also much stronger, and speaks to a different kind of approach.
Demonic Tutor can find you win conditions like Akroma’s Will, which act as protection in a pinch. This is the kind of effect the deck wants to end games, and can be paired with a nice Clever Concealment for some solid protection. We can also play Teferi’s Protection, of course, but Clever Concealment lets us leave cards like Smothering Tithe in play to accrue value while we’re waiting to untap.
Finally, if you’ve added all of the extra treasure generation to the deck, you can potentially net yourself infinite combat steps with Aggravated Assault. Getting up to three treasures from Olivia, you just need another treasure producer creature, or doublestrike, and you can get the five you need.
END STEP
And that’s the Most Wanted Precon Upgrade Guide – hopefully it has given you some solid ideas of where to take your precon. Olivia is for sure underrated, and I think she will perform similarly to Aurelia, the Law Above, who at first glance is also pretty fair, but can be the anchor-piece your deck needs to keep moving forward. How will you upgrade your precon? Let us know on X.
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.