Magic and Warhammer players alike can finally celebrate the release of the new Universes Beyond Commander decks. Four pre-constructed decks with around forty new cards each, themed around a faction from the tabletop miniature war game. But once you buy these decks, what’s next? Can they compete with your friends who play Commander, or the Magic players at the local game store?
The short answer to this question is yes. These decks appear at first glance to be some of the strongest decks that Wizards of the Coast has ever printed. But what if you prefer Be’lakor, the Dark Master over Abaddon the Despoiler? Or your favorite character is Kharn the Betrayer and half the cards in this deck don’t match his color identity?
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Special Deck, Special Guide
Well, this Ruinous Powers Upgrade Guide is going to be a little different from my usual upgrade articles in order to address these questions. I am going to brainstorm ways to upgrade each commander individually, rather than the entire deck related to specific strategies. Hopefully this inspires you to find some interesting ideas if you want to build around any of these new commanders.
As usual, I don’t plan to impose any budget restrictions on these recommendations. I’ll try to find cheaper alternative options when available, but talk to your playgroup about allowing proxies for cards that are beyond your price range.
If you don’t already own The Ruinous Powers precon, you can get it on Amazon.
The Ruinous Powers Decklist
*Find the new cards from The Ruinous Powers here.
Abaddon the Despoiler
First up is the face commander for this deck. Out of the box, Abaddon is a great commander for The Ruinous Powers. I will probably keep the deck together how it comes when I get my copy. But what if you want to add some upgrades? There are plenty of good cards you can use to focus and strengthen this commander.
For example, Abaddon gives your cards Cascade, which lets you cast additional spells off the top of your deck. Adding more cards with Cascade to your deck will let you generate absurd amounts of value in a turn. There are a bunch of Cascade spells that don’t already come in the deck:
- Aurora Phoenix
- Boarding Party
- Demonic Dread
- Etherium-Horn Sorcerer
- Flamekin Herald
- Ingenuity Engine
- Kathari Remnant
- Maelstrom Collosus
- Rain of Riches
- Sakashima’s Protege
- Throes of Chaos
- Volcanic Torrent
- Wild-Magic Sorcerer
Dealing Damage to Everyone
You will also want to find ways to deal damage to your opponents to make Abaddon’s ability a little better. Combat damage is a reasonable way to get your opponents to lose life. If you want to be able to increase Abaddon’s ability to deal combat damage, you might consider cards like Meteoric Mace or the Swords of X and Y.
Otherwise, you can use cards with effects that incidentally deal damage to your opponents for simply doing things you likely were already doing. Cards like:
- Impact Tremors
- Purphoros, God of the Forge
- Sarkhan’s Unsealing
- Spitfire Lagac
- Tunneling Geopede
- Vial Smasher, the Fierce
- Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow
- Zurzoth, Chaos Rider
- Witty Roastmaster
- Guttersnipe
Be’lakor, the Dark Master
The other option in this deck for Grixis commanders is probably the sweetest Demon tribal commander we’ve ever seen. This deck offers a lot of new Demon support to go along with him, but there are other in-universe Magic cards we could add to sweeten the deck up even more.
The first thing that I want to say about this commander, is that he has an even mana value, which makes him compatible with Gyruda, Doom of Depths. You might consider adding a few Clone effects in addition to your Demons if you decide to make your deck a Gyruda companion deck, but Gyruda could also work really effectively in the 99.
Other than that, here are a few cards that work extremely well with Demons:
And then these are a few Demons that I think should be on your radar for this deck:
- Balor
- Varragoth, Bloodsky Sire
- Kardur, Doomscourge
- Dream Devourer
- Lord Xander, the Collector
- Orcus, Prince of Undeath
- Nightmare Shepherd
Lucius the Eternal
Lucius is one of the coolest, but most difficult commanders from this deck to try to build around. The fact that he can pretty reliably come back to the battlefield over and over again is pretty cool. It lets you abuse cards like Purphoros, God of the Forge, Impact Tremors, and Warstorm Surge.
However, the rest of Lucius’s text incentives the player to run a large amount of spot removal and board wipes. This not a terrible problem to have, since often times the solution to a deck not functioning right is to add more interaction. There comes a point, though, when the amount of removal in your deck is doing more to make your friends upset than it is to improve your deck.
I only say this as a word of warning. Go ahead an enjoy Lucius however you want. Just be aware that your opponents might not enjoy playing against him the same way all the time.
Magnus the Red
The hardest part about building an Izzet spellslinger deck is choosing your favorite few non-instants/sorceries to support the instants/sorceries. If you get too many you risk not having enough, but if you don’t have enough your instants/sorceries don’t give you enough value. Don’t include all of these, but here are some of the best support cards in these colors:
- Storm-Kiln Artist
- Goblin Electromancer
- Archmage Emeritus
- Baral, Chief of Compliance
- Veyran, Voice of Duality
- Krark, the Thumbless
- Primal Amulet
- Rowan, Scholar of Sparks
- Ral, Storm Conduit
Creature Tokens
Magnus rewards you for casting instants and sorceries in a way that makes winning the game much quicker for a spellslinger deck: he makes little creature tokens. These tokens are great for helping you finished out a game, but they also do double duty by reducing the cost of your instants and sorceries with Magnus. If you want to multiply the number of tokens you can make, though, here are some other cards that do a similar thing:
- Talrand, Sky Summoner
- Young Pyromancer
- Murmuring Mystic
- Docent of Perfection
- Manaform Hellkite
- Zaffai, Thunder Conductor
- Metallurgic Summoning
- Shark Typhoon
- Saheeli, Sublime Artificer
And lastly, once you get an army of tokens, Magnus is going to reduce the cost of your spells by a ton. You can cast whatever spells you want, but here is a short list of ones that seemed pretty interesting to me:
- Storm King’s Thunder
- Comet Storm
- Expansion // Explosion
- March of Reckless Joy
- Crackle With Power
- Apex of Power
- Mass Manipulation
Kharn the Betrayer
Another interesting commander from this set is Kharn the Betrayer. His ability is different from pretty much any other commander we’ve ever seen, but it may or may not actually be good. He could be the commander of an interesting group hug deck, but it might be difficult to actually win a game like that.
One interesting strategy that I thought of is to use Threaten effects to take back your Kharn. Once you give him away to your opponents, they might not give him back to you and just bounce him back between themselves. Or worse, they might strike deals with each other to sacrifice him or chump block and kill him. For the latter issue, Assault Suit (which comes in the precon) will be really helpful. For the former, though, you can gain control of Kharn again on your turn to make sure you get in on the group hug action.
Mista Steal Yo Girl
As far as Threaten effects go, the game has no shortage:
And that’s not even all of them. You probably don’t want to run forty of these cards, though. Choose a handful of them, prioritizing the ones that are repeatable, then spend the rest of your slots making Kharn a large enough threat that he can win the game for you once you draw enough cards. Goad could also be helpful, so he does commander damage to your opponents and speeds up the clock.
Mortarion, Daemon Primarch
The last commander from this deck is one that uses the player’s life total as a resource. There are a handful of cards that let you do this, and a bunch of them are in black. For example, check out these cards. You’ll notice they are all pretty powerful:
- K’rrick, Son of Yawgmoth
- Black Market Connections
- Phyrexian Arena
- Bolas’s Citadel
- Toxic Deluge
- Ad Nauseum
- Necropotence
When you flirt with death in such a way, you have to prepare either to win aggressively or to keep yourself alive by some other means. There are plenty of cards that will keep you alive longer than you deserve, as well as cards that trade your low life total for one that feels much safer. Check out these cards for a better understanding of what I’m talking about:
- Lich
- Lich’s Mastery
- Platinum Angel
- Pact Weapon
- Stunning Reversal
- Repay in Kind
- Profane Transfusion
- Soul Conduit
- Magus of the Mirror
- Mirror Universe
If you can effectively manipulate your own life total as well as your opponents’ you will keep them guessing all game long. It won’t end until the fat lady sings, as they say.
Chaos Shall Reign
If you do decide to build around one of these commanders, I hope this Ruinous Powers Upgrade Guide is a good starting point for you. If you found some inspiration in any of these suggestions, or if you thought of a powerful synergy that I missed, let me know down in the comments. You can also find me on Instagram and Twitter. I love hearing from readers who want additional help building their decks or just want to show me how cool their list turned out.
You can find more information about the Warhammer 40k Commander deck here. Also, check out the upgrade guides for the other decks: