Necron Dynasties Upgrade Guide: 17 Easy Changes You Can Make

Szarekh, the Silent King | Background Illustration by Anton Solovianchyk

A common concern regarding Universes Beyond is card availability. After all, cards with a creature type or name specific to a non-Magic IP can’t just pop up on our next foray to Ravnica or Innistrad. It seems Wizards’ solution is just to reprint that product, which is exactly what they’re doing with the Warhammer 40,000 precons!

With a new supply of precons to pick up, we need to think about upgrades. Today, I’m finetuning the Necron Dynasties precon so you can overtake your table with artifact creatures galore!

Necron Dynasties Deck Overview

Necron Dynasties is a mono-black deck themed around self-mill and artifact creatures with the face commander Szarekh, the Silent King and the backup commander Imotekh the Stormlord (though there are several other legendary necrons—more on that shortly).

The game plan is simple: Fill the graveyard, then use reanimation spells, creatures with unearth, and other synergies to overwhelm your opponents. All the creatures in the deck are artifact creatures, which enables another layer of synergy as many cards care about artifact creatures, either buffing them or rewarding you when they enter.

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Magic: The Gathering Universes Beyond: Warhammer 40,000 Commander Deck – Necron Dynasties

• 100-card ready-to-play Warhammer 40,000 Commander Deck— Necron Dynasties
• Black Deck—contains 2 legendary traditional foil cards plus 98 nonfoil cards
• Every card features Warhammer-themed art—including 42 cards that are new to Magic
• 1 foil-etched Display Commander
• 10 double-sided tokens, 1 life tracker, and 1 deck box

$399.95

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Upgrade Plan

The first and most important thing I intend to address in this deck is the command zone. Szarekh’s a fine card, but you can do more with your commander. I recommend putting Anrakyr the Traveller in charge; it’s a powerful spell that cheats big artifacts into play from the graveyard or your hand. It does so much more for deck, and several of the cards I’m adding were chosen with it in mind.

For the most part, the deck is thematically focused. A few cards care about activated abilities in the graveyard, which the deck doesn’t support, so I’m cutting them, but most of my cuts are purely quality of life upgrades. I’m also bolstering the removal count as I find it lacking. For the most part, I’m trimming low-impact cards for more efficient or more explosive options. And none of the suggested cards cost more than about $10.

Armix, Filigree Thrasher

Suggested Cut:

Skorpekh Destroyer is embarrassingly close to a Limited card with its cost and power. Maybe if this cost 2 or 3 mana it could be forgiven, but not at 4.

Armix, Filigree Thrasher is much better: A cheap artifact creature that gets cards in the graveyard and kills things every turn. It was practically designed for the necrons.

Bitter Triumph

Suggested Cut:

While I’m a fan of fog effects in Commander (you can sow a lot of chaos because nobody expects them), I don’t know about Darkness, if only because the deck seems unlikely to capitalize on it. I’d much rather have Bitter Triumph; the deck could use more spot removal, and discarding an artifact is all upside.

Carrion Cruiser

Suggested Cut:

I could get behind Cryptek if the deck had a more developed sacrifice theme and thus worked it into a synergy engine of sorts, but it doesn’t, so it feels very expensive and slow to get going.

Carrion Cruiser fills a similar role as it gets back a dead necron, but it also mills cards, gets back vehicles, and costs half what Cryptek does.

Charcoal Diamond

Suggested Cut:

Convergence of Dominion is one of those under-supported activated ability cards. Sure, it shaves a little mana off unearth costs, but Charcoal Diamond also makes activating them easier while casting more spells and, perhaps most importantly, costing less mana.

Cityscape Leveler

Suggested Cut:

Hexmark Destroyer is little more than a French Vanilla creature—you could convince me this fell out of The Brothers’ War‘s uncommon sheet. Cityscape Leveler is several times more impactful, especially since Anrakyr cheats the mana cost but still casts a spell, so you get the first trigger.

Demonic Junker

Suggested Cut:

While I won’t deny that Resurrection Orb is cool, it’s also extremely costly and slow. Demonic Junker comes down for little mana and blows up a creature controlled by each opponent. It has a more immediate impact, and I’m much more interested in attempting to recur it.

Liliana the Repentant

Suggested Cut:

Adding a non-artifact creature might be a flavor fail, but Liliana the Repentant is so perfect here. It’s an incredible mill engine that doesn’t drop off in the late game thanks to the exhaust ability. It might be 2026’s best graveyard enabler.

While Dread Return has competitive prestige, I’m not in love with it in a deck with so little token production. It feels like you’re sacrificing real creatures to flashback more often than not, so I wanna pass.

Lich’s Relic

Suggested Cut:

I’m pretty low on Wayfarer's Bauble; non-green decks do what they must for ramp, but there are enough mana rocks that you shouldn’t need to stoop this low. The recently printed Lich's Relic will be a Commander staple, mark my words: You can’t do much better than a synergistic removal spell that impacts all your opponents.

Lightning Greaves

Suggested Cut:

I normally cut Lightning Greaves from precons, but it’s perfectly appropriate here as the new commander has an attack trigger. Heck, even if you keep Szarekh, the attack trigger there justifies it. As for Mask of Memory, it’s just a mediocre card.

Memnarch, the Warden

Suggested Cut:

I heavily respect Trazyn the Infinite as a powerful artifact-combo commander that turns a full graveyard into a win. But Trazyn’s specificity requires detailed support that isn’t in the precon; you’d be better off building an entirely separate deck around it.

Memnarch, the Warden is a massive threat that’s perfect to cheat into play with Anrakyr. You get multiple artifact creatures, one of which is huge and indestructible, and an amazing payoff for flooding the board with artifacts.

Millikin

Suggested Cut:

Many precons have at least one card whose absence is astounding because it seems so obvious. For Necron Dynasty, that’s Millikin, an artifact creature mana dork that mills when you tap it. They didn’t even come up with a parallel. As for Commander's Sphere, this card hasn’t been playable since, uh….

Noxious Gearhulk

Suggested Cut:

I’m not sold on Ghost Ark. Crewing it adds relatively little power to the board, and enough artifact creatures in the deck already have unearth that I don’t see it being too useful.

Noxious Gearhulk does everything the deck cares about: It’s an artifact creature with an impactful enters ability and decent stats. The lifegain is also fairly relevant since Anrakyr makes you pay life instead of mana for spells.

The Endstone

Suggested Cut:

I find Tomb Blade a frustrating beater because it doesn’t do anything. Your opponent either has so few creatures that they can pay a few life or so many they don’t mind sacrificing one. It’s the classic issue for Browbeat, made worse because this creature costs so much mana.

The Endstone, on the other hand, is much more threatening as it draws so many cards. Setting your life total to half can also be a benefit; if you have less than 20 life at the start of your end step (which isn’t hard with Anrakyr), it becomes a source of lifegain.

The Warring Triad

Suggested Cut:

Sautekh Immortal, and similar cards, have rarely impressed me. Sure, you can make a flashy play after a board wipe, but it can also just rot in your hand.

The Warring Triad will always be useful to this deck, whether you play it on turn 3 as a set-up piece that provides mill and mana or a late-game 8/8 for .

Triplicate Titan

Suggested Cut:

Technomancer’s reanimation ability is pretty decent, but I abhor those stat lines. Triplicate Titan is a more well-rounded threat that demands exile-based removal and incidentally works well with the deck’s few sacrifice outlets.

Worn Powerstone

Suggested Cut:

Plasmancer is the sort of card I get excited about in Limited, maybe a Peasant Cube. But 4 mana to tutor a Swamp—not even put it into play—is absurd in Commander. I’d rather have a nice, reliable Worn Powerstone to actually provide a meaningful advantage.

Wurmcoil Engine

Suggested Cut:

Beacon of Unrest is far from embarrassing. But I like Wurmcoil Engine more as a decent-sized threat that offers lots of lifegain. I should say, it fudges that $10 limit since the cheapest versions cost about $10.50.

The Final Deck and New Cards

Here’s the final deck, and the new cards in a list below. If you want to pick them up, use the shopping cart button in the corner!

Commanding Conclusion

Trazyn the Infinite | Illustration by Michal Milkowski

Necron Dynasties was famously one of the more powerful Warhammer 40k precons, and generally hailed as one of the stronger precons overall. These upgrades emphasize its strength by ditching some filler and under-supported cards with better threats, removal, and ramp.

How would you upgrade Necro Dynasties? Are you planning to pick up any of these decks with the new print run? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord! If you want more Draftsim, check out our YouTube channel and newsletter, both called The Daily Upkeep!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!

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