Wilds of Eldraine brings two new Commander Precons, and the Dimir Faeries deck brings with it powerful new cards and ways to play. So how’s Fae Dominion and what’s an ideal upgrade route? Kristen has the lowdown.
FAE DOMINION: NEW COMMANDERS
The first of Fae Dominion’s two new Commanders is Tegwyll, Duke of Splendor. At three mana, you get a decent body with enviable potential for attacking and blocking. Tegwyll also buffs your board while offering that sweetest of treats: card draw. To get it, you just need to have faeries die under your control.
Tegwyll is the all-rounder Faeries Commander, giving you a way to keep ticking as you sacrifice low-drop faeries for value before potentially reanimating them once more. If you’re not sure what kind of Faerie deck you want, Tegwyll is a solid pick.
Alela, Cunning Conqueror suggests a more focused deckbuilding route. She rewards you with Faerie tokens for casting spells during an opponent’s turn, and she also keeps the game moving by triggering goad on up to one creature per opponent per combat.
For this upgrade approach, we’re opting to promote Alela to the command zone. She gives us some much needed objectivity to picking out our upgrades, especially when on a budget.
PRECON REVIEW: GREAT NEW CARDS
Fae Dominion comes with 10 new cards in total, and some are powerful tools that contribute to our overall game plan. Misleading Signpost serves as a way for us to hold up multiple forms of interaction while ramping — plus it triggers our Commander. Enabling Alela with cards we’d otherwise play anyway is a great plan.
Tegwyll’s Scouring is another fundamentally cool board wipe, given we can play it at instant speed. Holding up six mana won’t always be viable, and sometimes we just wanna jam with it at sorcery speed, but otherwise? Very handy tech.
As I discussed in my article about Dimir in Commander, one of the historical downsides of running tribes like Faeries and Rogues is you don’t have that many ways to push damage through and win a game.
But Fae Dominion comes with two new win conditions in Faerie Bladecrafter (a Faerie “Gary,” if you will) and Shadow Puppeteers, which boosts your Faerie damage significantly while keeping that Faerie typing to trigger other effects.
For more on the new cards from Wilds of Eldraine and the Commander decks, check out the Set Review and Precon Highlights.
FAE DOMINION: $50 BUDGET UPGRADE
I’ve gone for a modest $50 for the Precon upgrade, which is our usual approach. The goals with the upgrades are:
- to give the deck a lower curve, adding cheaper cards and more card advantage
- To patch up the deck’s card draw and ramp to make it more consistent
- To add some more instant-speed action to trigger Alela
Leyline of Anticipation is a key piece, and while it’s a lot cheaper than Vedalken Orrery, it’s also more justifiable. Enchantments stick better, and getting the chance to open with it will make games go that much better.
Cashing in tokens with Deadly Dispute and Plumb the Forbidden will let us chump block and get ahead of board wipes, while Ghostly Flicker can reset our clones or even our Misleading Signpost!
When choosing Alela as the Commander, the deck naturally strays away from pure Faerie payoffs, and instead capitalizes on the many great cards available with Flash.
Cunning Nightbonder pulls double duty as a cost-reducer and enabler for Alela. Aboleth Spawn can (hopefully) net us some great EtB triggers. At the floor, we’re happy if it searches us a basic or draws us a card. At the ceiling? Well it could be anything from a kill-effect to a Dockside Extortionist.
Mana is important, and Dimir often suffers from not having enough acceleration and explosiveness. Sword of the Animist takes up nearly 20% of our budget for good reason, and we shouldn’t be short of bodies that can wield it well. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is a nice ritual from Tales of Middle-earth that I’m excited to run here alongside format staple, Grim Hireling.
We couldn’t not play Notorious Throng; it’s a cheeky extra turn that can also generate a board out of nowhere. Sometimes that extra turn will be all you need to turn the tables.
Given the deck is so keen on having Alela in play, there’s some nice protection effects, too. Ghostly Flicker, of course, is one — but Dimir doesn’t get access to the same protection as other colors, relying mostly on counterspells.
We’ve added those, too, in Spellstutter Sprite and Ertai, Resurrected. But I expect Saiba Cryptomancer and Alexi’s Cloak to do a lot of work for us. Any permanent-based interaction like these become better the more you end up bouncing nonland permanents, too — something to keep in mind for when you edit your build.
The Sideboard column on Moxfield denotes the cards we cut. Most cuts tended to be high mana value cards. Sure, Hullbreaker Horror is amazing, but until the deck consistently makes mana (and can afford some pricier upgrades, depending on your budget), it’s more of a reanimator card. I’m not saying the deck can’t do both, of course; just that with a budget, it’s a lot more difficult to pull off.
While cards like Opt do trigger Alela, they simply don’t do enough to warrant taking a slot away from the cards we’re adding in. Some of the Faeries, too, have been cut in order to facilitate the Flash synergy of Alela more than the Faerie-theme.
FURTHER UPGRADES
In order to truly make the deck sing, you’ll have to pony up for some more expensive inclusions and decide on the ultimate direction for the build. If you’re wanting to stick to Faeries, then adding Bitterblossom is a no-brainer. It’s probably decent in Alela, too, to be fair.
You also probably want the Feywild Visitor background and to change the Commander over to Tegwyll (or even Obyra, Dreaming Duelist if you’re going that wide). An aristocrats theme would be pretty sweet, and all of this would make Kindred Discovery really pop off.
If you do stick with Alela, then the usual suspects are going to perform: Rhystic Study, Fierce Guardianship, Cyclonic Rift et al. If you’re intent on running Hullbreaker Horror, then you probably want a Mana Drain and an Ancient Tomb to help facilitate those big-mana plays.
That said, reanimator can still work for you here. Likeness Looter is an enabler and payoff in one card, and you can cast Necromancy at instant speed. When your deck has ways to sacrifice your creatures, you can start to look at Thought Sponge for that little added insurance that it won’t just get exiled before it dies. This direction also lets us look at Dictate of Erebos, another card with Flash, and a way to make our 1/1 Tokens trade out for actual creatures.
Once you do tinker with the mana base, you can probably look once more at some of the expensive Flash creatures. The Warhammer 40k decks had some really interesting options should you want to give Alela a little more midrange potential. This makes running Filter Out a lot more viable.
Alela does want to play like a control deck, though, and at that point you’re also wanting to get that Torrential Gearhulk and Sublime Epiphany value. I’ll stress again that I want to be really confident in my mana base before adding these. You simply can’t afford to take a turn off when playing a Dimir deck that wants to win through combat.
If combat isn’t your jam, then you can more happily include one of the 3,939 combos in Dimir. And also that copy of Mystical Teachings that was otherwise not doing quite enough in a regular build.
END STEP
I’m really happy with the Fae Dominion precon, and I’m also expecting to see a lot of different Faerie commanders across the table in the next few months. It’s also a great opportunity to dust of Alela, Artful Provocateur, what with all of the Enchantment reprints on the bonus sheet. Which Commander will you play?
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.