Revenant Recon Precon: Decklist, Value, and Verdict

Mirko, Obsessive Theorist

Flying, vigilance Whenever you surveil, put a +1/+1 counter on Mirko. At the beginning of your end step, you may return target creature card with power less than Mirko's from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter on it. (If it would die, exile it instead.)

Singles value

$133.98

TCGplayer market, 82 cards, basic lands counted at $0

Sealed price

$90.14

TCGplayer price for the box (Amazon $109.95) · singles are 1.5× that

New cards

12 / 100

First printings in this deck

Bracket

Core, out of the box

Is Revenant Recon worth buying?

from Murders at Karlov Manor Commander Decks: Are They Worth It? by Timothy Zaccagnino

Revenant Recon has a slightly more open-ended theme than Deadly Disguise’s morph agenda, though it’s less flexible than something like Deep Clue Sea’s investigate theme. It still works as a self-contained deck and provides a home for surveil cards that have yet to make it into Commander decks. Mirko, Obsessive Theorist seems quite strong to me, and if you do nothing but dismantle this deck for pieces, you’ll at least walk away with a handful of top-tier reanimator spells. This looks like a tight-knit deck out of the box that might gain new pieces over time now that surveil is evergreen, but I’d expect most players’ decks to look very similar post-upgrades.

How Revenant Recon plays

primer from Revenant Recon Upgrade Guide: 9 Easy Changes You Can Make by A.L. Walser

Revenant Recon is a reanimator deck hidden beneath the guise of a “surveil deck.” While surveil’s front and center here, that’s not actually a headlining mechanic from MKM, but it’s put to good use as a way to fill your graveyard for reanimation spells. If nothing else, it’s the perfect shell for all the surveil payoffs and enablers that came out in Guilds of Ravnica.

Mirko, Obsessive Theorist is doing its best impression of Dimir Spybug (also in the deck), though I’m getting strong Meren of Clan Nel Toth vibes here. It shouldn’t be hard to dump some +1/+1 counters on Mirko, then reanimate creatures from your graveyard for no additional cost. Sure, the finality counters are a bummer, but we love a good balancing act, and you can’t complain too much about free reanimation.

If Mirko’s not cutting it, you’re probably not interested in this deck in the first place. However, you could run Marvo, Deep Operative as the commander instead. I like the card well enough, but it’s definitely pulling you in a different direction than what this precon’s trying to do, so I’m pretty firmly on Team Mirko here.

The deck’s full of underpowered cards like Sinister Starfish and Nightveil Sprite, though they all serve the purpose of powering out haymakers like Grave Titan and Sphinx of the Second Sun via the handful of reanimation effects present in the deck. I’m skeptical that surveil payoffs like Thoughtbound Phantasm and Whispering Snitch really matter all that much, but that’s what Draftsim’s upgrade guides are for!