Chaos Incarnate - A Noob's Guide: Upgrading the Starter Commander Decks on a budget

Dylan Shearer 22 Dec 20, 2022

You’ve been wanting to jump into the fun, casual format known as Commander for a while now, and just recently picked up the new Starter Commander decks from your local store. Perhaps you’ve played a few games and want to make the deck better? Let’s take a look at what your deck does, find a path you want to play into, and what cards you need to make that more efficient on a budget. Are you going to win a tournament with these upgrades? Absolutely not. But if you’re looking to just up your game amongst your friends, this is a great way to start.

Let’s take a look at the Black-Red Chaos Incarnate deck…

Commander: Kardur, Doomscurge

What does the deck do?

This deck is the only Starter Commander deck that, in my opinion, is doing two different things. Kardur, Geode Rager, Kazuul, Tectonic Giant are all about attacking and combat, while Kaervack, Wildfire Devils, Guttersnipe, and Thermo-Alchemist focus more on the spell-slinging of yourself or your opponents.

The only single-goal throughout this deck seems to be dealing damage, just with different ways of triggering it. So let’s focus on beefing up that damage and getting the most out of combat.

Our Goal

To deal lots of damage and getting a benefit out of it

The Changes

To begin with, we’re gonna focus on Kardur, Doomscurge remaining the commander. He Goads all enemy creatures when he enters, causing those creatures to attack next turn if able, and drains your opponents whenever an attacking creature dies. Let’s get some extra goading out of Kardur with Conjurer’s Closet. This artifact lets you exile then return a creature you control to the battlefield. If you choose Kardur every turn, not only do you get a form of pseudo-vigilance that untapped him (unless an opponent has a “creatures enter tapped” effect), every turn, you get to goad your opponents’ creatures, which means more attacking (and more creatures dying). I’d say the option to replace here would probably be Vampire Nighthawk. While it has some awesome keywords on it, it in itself is not doing anything directly towards attacking the opponent. It’s just attacking. We still need to protect Kardur but Lightning Greaves can’t do the job on its own. Let’s add Swiftfoot Boots so that we can protect Kardur while still being able to target him with Conjurer’s Closet and take away Rakshasa Debaser as its cost is too high for its reanimation. Let’s focus on taking down our opponents quickly.

Let’s lean into the attacking aspect a little more by adding both Garna, the Bloodflame to give all your creatures HASTE as well as returning any creatures of yours that died to your hand to play again (see Conjurer’s Closet above as to why her enters-the-battlefield effect will give you some serious reanimation capabilities), and Garna, Bloodfist of Keld to give you either a card draw or one damage to an opponent when one of your creatures dies, depending on what that creature was doing when it dies (attacking for the card draw, dealing damage in any other circumstance. These two cards will replace two of the spell-slinging focused cards, Wildfire Devils and Guttersnipe.

Now let’s beef up the damage output. Dictate of the Twin Gods is already an awesome card for the deck, doubling the output of any damage. Torbran, Thane of Red Fell increases the damage of red sources by another two, and Jaya, Venerated Firemage adds another one to that, as well as Tor Wauki, the Younger. With these three going into the deck, we’re going to pull out Breath of Malfegor, Reign of the Pit, and Scythe Specter. Don’t forget that as the controlling player, you get to choose the order that these additions happen, so you can stack them so all the plus ones and twos are applied, and THEN Dictate of the Twin Gods doubles from there. These additions not only beef up the combat damage you do, but also increase the output of Thermo-Alchemist, Brash Taunter, Kaervack, Tectonic Giant, Magmatic Force, and the myriad of damage-dealing spells.

This does leave us in an interesting position though. We’ve certainly increased the damage output of our red sources, but our black sources are still a little lacking. So let’s break down what we have left that’s mono-black, and what we can look at doing to improve them.

Sepulchral Primordial may be expensive at seven mana, but its reanimation capability is amazing, particularly if we get it working with Conjurer’s Closet, so it gets to stay. Indulgent Tormentor allows us to draw more cards, but it’s ultimately pretty inefficient at five mana as well as allowing an opponent to pay three life makes it a pretty hard keep. Let’s change it up with Harvester of Souls. It’s one mana more than Indulgent Tormentor but if we’re forcing combat as much as possible, creatures will die, allowing you to draw more and more cards from both your own, and your opponent’s creature deaths. It’s also a “may” ability, meaning you don’t have the risk of drawing when you shouldn’t.

Ob Nixilis, Reignited is an ok Planeswalker, but he’s kind of just ‘existing’. For five mana, you’re likely to draw only one, maybe two cards, or destroy one creature, which isn’t that efficient. Instead, let’s put in Ob Nixilis, the Adversary from Streets of New Capenna. It’s only three mana, gives you the ability to create more red sources that can deal damage to opponents, discard a card from each of your opponents while possibly gaining you some life, and you can copy it by sacrificing a creature, which can fuel more of the other pieces in the deck.

The last card I’d like to remove is Bloodgift Demon. It’s an ok card draw but again, it’s five mana and there’s some pretty solid card draw in the deck now. So let’s swap it out with Judith, the Scourge Diva. She gives your creatures +1/+0, making them a little more potent in combat, but also deals one damage to any target when a nontoken creature you control dies. As she’s a red permanent, she’ll benefit from those damage-increasing effects we included previously.

Now, if we look into the other pillars of a commander deck, Ramp, Control, and Removal, we should know that the deck does what it can with what is available to the Black-Red colour identity. A mix of artifact-based ramp, along with Solemn Simulacrum and Burnished Hart will mean you accelerate into your strategy. Being a damage dealing deck, nearly the entire deck is some form of removal, with cards like Abrade, Rakdos Charm, Chaos Warp, Feed the Swarm and Fiery Confluence giving you access to artifact, enchanment or permanent removal. And with Goading capabilities on the commander, you’ll at least be forcing your opponents to think hard about what creatures they want on the battlefield, and the sneaky Wild Ricochet can swerve a piece of targeted removal away from your key pieces. There’s not much else you can do in Black-Red unfortunately.

Ultimately, I think that covers it for modifications. The other cards we kept like Kaervack, Sunbird’s Invocation, Hate Mirage, they all accelerate you or punish your opponents for playing the game. This is obviously the most efficient permutation of the deck. There’s a lot of really valuable and effective cards in Black-Red but we’re talking $30+ per card at that point. So, on a budget, these modifications should get you well under way. Any further modifications you want to make here would be about making the land-base broader with more non-basic lands like Dragonskull Summit, Blood Crypt, Luxury Suite, Haunted Ridge, Tainted Peak, Sulfurous Springs, and Blightstep Pathway.

MODIFICATIONS SUMMARY

Out: