Duskmourn is a really interesting plane for its general inventiveness and creativity. Many of the elements behind it are certainly trope-heavy and familiar, but it manages to get up to some unique aspects all its own. Things like the "Fear of..." nightmares, the ever expanding house setting, the moths, and more all feel very distinct and are excellent. Just as notable are the new characters in the setting as well, including the new goth survivor Winter.

This character helps the main familiar cast explore through the plane of Duskmourn and survive. In the end, he betrays them to Valgavoth for sanctuary and survival. Winter is granted freedom, though is stopped by Niko before he can go through with it. Then, the party defeats Valgavoth, escapes, and leaves Winter to the demon, who proceeds to devour him. I'm simplifying this story, but it's a great little bit with a brand new character, and in the end showcases the horror element of the well: try as you might, there's no escape from the terror.

This is reflected well in the Commander deck that features Winter: Death Toll. The monstrosities and terrors may get away from you in the graveyard, but they always come back to haunt you. This deck plays up the minor theme of delirium that's prevalent within Duskmourn: House of Horror and seeks to make a deck out of it. In the process, it also gives you the tools for a decent basic reanimation strategy. Let's take a look at the decklist itself and then see about finding ways to upgrade it!

Death Toll Precon | Commander

• Commander (1)
• 1 Winter, Cynical Opportunist

• Creatures (26)
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Carrion Grub
• 1 Deathcap Cultivator
• 1 Demolisher Spawn
• 1 Giant Adephage
• 1 Gnarlwood Dryad
• 1 Grim Flayer
• 1 Haywire Mite
• 1 Hornet Queen
• 1 Ishkanah, Grafwidow
• 1 Moldgraf Millipede
• 1 Moldgraf Monstrosity
• 1 Noxious Gearhulk
• 1 Nyx Weaver
• 1 Obsessive Skinner
• 1 Old Stickfingers
• 1 Rendmaw, Creaking Nest
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Scavenging Ooze
• 1 Skola Grovedancer
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Stitcher's Supplier
• 1 Suspicious Bookcase
• 1 Titania, Nature's Force
• 1 Ursine Monstrosity
• 1 Vile Mutilator

• Planeswalkers (4)
• 1 Grist, the Hunger Tide
• 1 Ob Nixilis Reignited
• 1 Professor Onyx
• 1 Wrenn and Seven

• Instants (6)
• 1 Arachnogenesis
• 1 Grapple with the Past
• 1 Grisly Salvage
• 1 Harrow
• 1 Inscription of Abundance
• 1 Putrefy

• Sorceries (9)
• 1 Convert to Slime
• 1 Culling Ritual
• 1 Deluge of Doom
• 1 Formless Genesis
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Mulch
• 1 Night's Whisper
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Reanimate

• Enchantments (8)
• 1 Binding the Old Gods
• 1 Cemetery Tampering
• 1 Crawling Sensation
• 1 Deadbridge Chant
• 1 Deathreap Ritual
• 1 Demonic Covenant
• 1 Into the Pit
• 1 Polluted Cistern

• Artifacts (8)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Golgari Signet
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Talisman of Resilience
• 1 Whip of Erebos
• 1 Whispersilk Cloak

• Lands (38)
• 7 Forest
• 7 Swamp
• 1 Ash Barrens
• 1 Barren Moor
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Darkmoss Bridge
• 1 Dryad Arbor
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Golgari Rot Farm
• 1 Grim Backwoods
• 1 Jungle Hollow
• 1 Llanowar Wastes
• 1 Necroblossom Snarl
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Tainted Wood
• 1 Temple of Malady
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Tranquil Thicket
• 1 Tree of Tales
• 1 Twilight Mire
• 1 Vault of Whispers
• 1 Viridescent Bog
• 1 Woodland Cemetery

Buy This Deck Export text

There's something I admittedly don't care too much for this list and that's how it's both too straightforward and lacks novelty. The deck just does self-mill and reanimation, but bases it on delirium. At the end of the day, that's still basically just another dull entry-level Reanimator kind of deck. Those are always popular, but they often feel like a dime a dozen. I've written about several of these kinds of decks myself over the years and almost had to make myself stop because they started to feel overdone. It's to the point that I'm not even going to cover actual reanimation targets here. Find the coolest and biggest creatures you've got and toss them in, easy peasy.

Compare this to the other Duskmourn precons. Miracle Worker played with miracles as well as enchantments, all while utilizing library manipulation tools. We've seen miracles and library manipulation before, but the enchantment twist gave it an entirely different sort of vibe. Jump Scare! is similar, as we've seen both landfall and morph/face-down decks before, but this provides a new twist by combining them into a single deck. The Endless Punishment list does something rarely seen before: full on group slug. This is a really straightforward deck in practice, but it really makes up for that with the novelty behind it, which appeals to a lot of players.

Now we have Death Toll, featuring Winter as the face card. It reads as a self-mill card that reanimates things while caring about multiple card types. Here's the big problem, though: to actually reanimate something, you have to exile several cards from your graveyard at once. And your permanent doesn't stick around, but rather it gets exiled if it were to hit the graveyard. An experienced player can make this work in their favor, but the ability to do anything with this is so finite, it can provide a fairly underwhelming experience for a newer player. It'd be better recommending a different yet similar precon or just build a deck from the ground up themselves.

To that end, I personally like the alternative commander a bit more. Rendmaw, Creaking Nest provides a really cool and interesting build around strategy. Rather than trying for a sketchy self-mill and reanimation strategy, this legend rewards you for playing cards with multiple types on them. Not only does this provide an interesting deck-building restriction, it also provides a really cool payoff, providing the table with creatures that can't attack you, but have to go after each opponent instead. That's a really cool dynamic to play off of and definitely an angle I personally recommend if you're going to pick up this deck.

Let's say you want to do one or the other, though. The best way to make this work is naturally with a multitude of card types. Unless I'm missing something, these should be the only combinations of card types that are relevant:

• Artifact Creature
• Artifact Land
• Enchantment Artifact
• Enchantment Creature
• Enchantment Land
• Kindred Artifact
• Kindred Enchantment
• Kindred Instant
• Kindred Sorcery
• Land Creature (exactly Dryad Arbor)
• Planeswalker Creature (exactly Grist, the Hunger Tide)

This begs the simple question: which of these holds interesting options to pull from for a deck like this? Artifact creatures are easy, as there's simply no shortage of them since Magic's very first set, so take your pick of cool options to choose from. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Land creature and planeswalker creature are both easy as there's only a single card for each. Enchantment lands, artifact lands, and enchantment artifacts are also fairly simple, as there's an extremely small selection for all of them, each of which are no brainers to slot in when you look at them. Many are in the precon outright, even, such as Whip of Erebos and Darkmoss Bridge.

That leaves the following options to comb through:

• Enchantment Creature
• Kindred Artifact
• Kindred Enchantment
• Kindred Instant
• Kindred Sorcery

Kindred - formerly known as tribal - is the one that requires a solid look. These cards aren't ones with a ton of options either. When you combine all the kindred variations together, it totals only 36 cards in the Golgari color pairing. Two of these - Demonic Covenant and Formless Genesis - are already in the deck, so are there any others worth playing? I think there's potentially a few that stand out to me.

Both Tarmogoyf Nest and Altar of the Goyf are solid kindred cards in their own right that just happen to benefit from having access to multiple card types, meaning they play great with the deck's central theme. Bitterblossom provides you with a classic card that can prove extremely powerful even in a Commander setting. It's not quite as abusable as it may be in 1v1 60 card formats, but it's still a reasonable tradeoff to make a decent flying blocker for one measly life point. The problem with these, though, is that they can be a bit tough to get into the graveyard to utilize in the case of playing Winter himself, so let's look at some more viable options.

Reach of Branches is another one that provides excellent synergy for this sort of deck. Given that there's lots of self-mill happening, it's not hard to put this card into your graveyard and then get it back to let you make a small army of treefolk to gum up the board and slow down your opponents. Both Lignify and Eyeblight's Ending are excellent removal options that utilize kindred and other types, and thanks to their status as removal, they're likely to hit the graveyard, providing you with excellent fodder. Alternatively, you can always take the nuclear approach and drop an All Is Dust on the table, giving yourself plenty of fuel while wiping out everything your opponents built up.

Enchantment creatures are where there starts to be a little more variety, though. The problem with kindred is that many of the cards care about specific creature types, which this deck definitely isn't going to care about in most cases. With enchantment creatures, there's far less of this limitation, with the only real issues being generally mediocre creatures or caring about casting multiple enchantments for the benefit of constellation effects. Even without a critical mass of enchantments, some of those cards like Eidolon of Blossoms can still be solid plays since, in this case owing to the fact that it replaces itself and possibly draws you a few more cards later in the game.

By my count, there should be 85 total enchantment creatures that can be pulled from. Three are in this list already: Demolisher Spawn, Nyx Weaver, and Skola Grovedancer - all great thematically for the self-mill strategy. Looking through, a few others stand out as well. Chief among them are the various Theros gods. Erebos, God of the Dead and Nylea, Keen-Eyed both work really nicely, and Pharika, God of Affliction makes lots of tokens and enables you to play some solid politics at the table. I'm also partial to Overlord of the Balemurk as a means of filling up your graveyard for your core strategy while also providing decent value and attack power in the later part of the game.

There're several cards that offer a more generic value play instead. Courser of Kruphix and Enduring Vitality are awesome ways to ensure you have the mana to do your nonsense, and in the case of Courser plan your moves accordingly. I'm also quite big on Shigeki, Jukai Visionary for a similar reason. Not only does it set up your mana and fill up your graveyard, but it also lets you trigger Rendmaw, Creaking Nest multiple times in the process. You can even channel it later to get back some of the things you've milled from this card, Winter, and more! Not a bad deal if I say so myself.

Lastly, I want to touch on one other minor thing: those pesky finality counters. When you bring back a permanent from your graveyard with Winter, it comes in with them, meaning that if your permanent is destroyed, it's gone for good. Given the amount of resources it generally takes in order to do this (exiling multiple cards from your graveyard), you should have a way to protect your investment. To that end, I recommend looking into cards that do things like flicker or bounce.

In general, most of these kinds of effects only impact creatures - particularly when it comes to playing in Golgari colors. Conjurer's Closet, Golden Argosy, and Sword of Hearth and Home are all great ways to flicker your creatures, ensuring they stick around. You can play this to your advantage if it's a big creature like, say, Avenger of Zendikar or Terastodon that has a major ETB effect on them. Most Commander-relevant reanimation targets have one of these, so you can get up to some real nonsense this way. There's little bounce in these colors, but Temur Sabertooth is always a classic that will get the job done for you no problem.

Admittedly, I'm barely scratching the surface on things that I could be talking about with this deck. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing either, as if you need to be doing that much with a precon, that's probably not a great sign to how it plays out of the box. Still, there's a lot of easy ways to adjust this, and it works great with the alternate commander as well. I highly recommend giving it a shot. No matter how you play, I hope you have an awesome time jamming it at your next Commander night!

Just be careful when betraying your friends at the table.

Paige Smith

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