Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver | Illustration by Chris Rallis
Precons are always an interesting thing to review. They invariably fall short of player expectations, but they’re a handy on-ramp for new players, or players looking to get into Commander. We have so many these days that choosing the perfect precon for you can be overwhelming.
I want to cut through that a bit. I’m reviewing all the Dimir () precons, the ones with a blue and black color identity. By dissecting them to their core and examining which are strong, which have good reprints, and what they bring to the table, I hope to make parsing the wide world of Commander precons a little easier for you.
What Are Dimir Precons in MTG?
Mirko, Obsessive Theorist | Illustration by Heonhwa Choe
Dimir precons have a blue-black color identity, and abide by the other deckbuilding rules of Commander—a 99 card deck with a legendary creature in the command zone, singleton, etc.
The biggest surprise I uncovered in this exploration of WotC’s decks was how many Dimir decks are typal. Five of the six decks contain at least some typal synergies, which seems strange given the color combination’s reputation as a heavily controlling color pair full of removal, card draw, and countermagic. But maybe WotC knows something about what the player base wants that I don’t—some of these typal commanders are among Dimir’s most popular, after all.
#6. Grave Danger
Grave Danger was released with the Starter Commander precons; it’s a zombie deck helmed by Gisa and Geralf, a legendary creature originally printed in Eldritch Moon.
Deck Themes
This deck takes the daring mechanical theme of… Dimir zombies. It has some other stuff going on, with a bit of a sacrifice theme plus a few payoffs for milling yourself like Lotleth Giant, though that’s basically just a support card for Gisa and Geralf.
The themes don’t conflict terribly hard; sacrificing creatures to recast with the commander has its uses, and zombies generally muck around with tokens and graveyard synergies and plenty of other things that work well with sacrifice outlets. Overall, this deck doesn’t suffer from conflicting themes as much as it could.
The Commanders
You have two possible commanders: the face commander Gisa and Geralf, and Vela the Night-Clad. You should absolutely keep everybody’s favorite Innistrad siblings in the command zone. You have far more support for zombies than sacrifice, so Vela does very little in this list. G&G is also just the better card; both options offer card advantage out of the command zone, but G&G does it for a lower mana cost while setting up other synergies in the deck.
Strengths and Weaknesses
This deck has a glaring weakness in its high mana curve. An unfortunate number of your spells cost 3 mana, and you also have a dizzying number of 5-, 6-, and 7-drops considering the scant ramp package of 8 spells.
The cards within are also rather weak, or perhaps I should say basic. It draws heavily upon War of the Spark’s amass commons and uncommons; I could almost rifle through a bulk box of WAR and Innistrad and build the list from those. Overall, this looks pretty weak, in terms of power and structure.
Notable Cards
The Starter Decks all use reprints, so this didn’t introduce new cards to Commander, nor does it have any particularly high-value reprints. But it has the bones of a good zombie deck; perhaps the best card in the list is Gisa and Geralf, followed closely by Liliana, Untouched by Death.
Cemetery Reaper, Undead Augur, and Diregraf Captain are zombie staples in their own right, and you have Distant Melody and Crippling Fear as more general typal payoffs.
Midnight Reaper works in many sacrifice decks, and few black lists stay away from Gray Merchant of Asphodel. Though this deck is rather weak, I imagine it would be easy to upgrade into something meaningful.
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#5. Undead Unleashed
Undead Unleashed summons a zombie horde from the horrors of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt that shambles at the direction of Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver.
Deck Themes
Zombies, once again, this time with… sacrifice themes! Hmm, I feel like I’ve seen this one before. Probably because the Grave Secrets deck had the same idea! Except this one is worse, somehow?
The Commanders
The deck has three potential commanders based on legality, though you can immediately dismiss Eloise, Nephalia Sleuth—you don’t have the sacrifice cards to back it up, and too many of these cards are zombies to walk away from those synergies.
Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver versus Gisa and Geralf is more interesting. Wilhelt has become the zombie commander, which is a point in its favor, but Gisa and Geralf is no slouch either. I have to give the nod to Wilhelt, however; the deck desperately needs sacrifice outlets, and I can’t justify removing one from the command zone.
Strengths and Weaknesses
I had high hopes for this deck given Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver’s reputation but this deck easily has one of the worst curves I’ve ever seen, with most cards costing 3 or 4 mana. The lack of cheap, early plays makes the sacrifice theme specifically weaker because you don’t have much fodder to throw away.
The deck also has a critical lack of removal and ramp. Any deck that put a scrap of thought into its curve would overrun this deck while Wilhelt waits to cast its fifth 5-cost zombie. The only thing this deck has going for it over the Grave Secrets deck is its higher card quality; this one isn’t stuffed with Draft cards. But I honestly don’t see either winning a game due to their intrinsic issues.
Notable Cards
I’ll grant that the individual cards are good. Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver has become the most popular zombie commander, and it’s a very strong card. Creatures like Ravenous Rotbelly and Hordewing Skaab are good additions to the zombie typal pantheon.
And I don’t hate the quality, or at least quantity, of the reprints. You have most of the zombie lords, plus significant zombie payoffs like Undead Augur, Gisa and Geralf, and Diregraf Colossus. It obviously lacks the cheaper ones, like Relentless Dead and Cryptbreaker, but it has some of the important ones. It honestly feels less like a functional deck than a themed starter pack you’d give to a player to assemble a zombie deck.
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#4. Sneak Attack
The Sneak Attack deck is a rogue typal deck printed with Zendikar Rising led by Anowon, the Ruin Thief.
Deck Themes
The Sneak Attack deck—not to be confused with the card Sneak Attack—is all about rogues and mill. It’s loosely built around the rogue mechanic from Zendikar Rising, which cared about your opponents having eight or more cards in their graveyard—loosely, because the mechanic was never developed enough for Commander.
In lieu of proper payoffs, it has a slew of reanimation spells clearly intended to steal cards from your opponents’ graveyards, plus mill payoffs like Consuming Aberration and Syr Konrad, the Grim.
The Commanders
You have a few choices beyond the face commander, Anowon, the Ruin Thief, but it still works best as the others just lack support for one reason or another.
Too many of these cards care about milling your opponents to put Oona, Queen of the Fae in charge, and you don’t have the mana production to make the activated ability a real threat. This card is only good as a way to get Faerie Rogue tokens for Anowon.
Lazav, Dimir Mastermind has potential that fades away once you realize how little mill the deck has outside of Anowon; if you make Lazav your commander, you’ll just stare at a handful of rogues and wonder what you were thinking.
Sygg, River Cutthroat is Anowon’s closest competition, and it wouldn’t be terrible with all of the desk’s evasive creatures. But the deck has few ways to trigger Sygg on opposing turns and no meaningful burn, so Anowon appears to be the more reliable card draw engine.
Strengths and Weaknesses
This deck’s weaknesses well outweigh its strengths, unfortunately. I’ll start with the curve, which is… messy. It has as many 2-drops as 4-drops, which would be bad in any situation but especially with an ostensibly aggressive strategy.
It’s also a bad mill deck. It really wants your opponents to mill a bunch of cards, but most of the mill is tied to Anowon, the Ruin Thief, which additionally requires you to have some board presence. Worse, the mill payoffs are rarely rogues themselves, adding further tension to the list.
As for its strengths, it has individually powerful cards. I can see winning the game off the back of Sepulchral Primordial, or Necromantic Selection, or Blackblade Reforged on an evasive creature—but those don’t really mesh with the game plan, do they? Additionally, they’re quite expensive in a deck with very little ramp, so these are far from redeeming factors. I can just barely envision it winning, which is more than I can say for Grave Secrets or Undead Unleashed.
Notable Cards
Uhhh… pass? Anowon, the Ruin Thief is a reasonably popular commander, and Notorious Throng is a staple for any rogue deck. And you have Distant Melody, again. Beyond that, pickings are slim—the notable cards drop off hard to format staples like Sol Ring and Command Tower.
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#3. Mind Flayarrrs
Mind Flayarrrs uses its pun to illustrate the horrors within this horror-typal deck helmed by Captain N'ghathrod that came out alongside Battle for Baldur’s Gate.
Deck Themes
Mind Flayarrrs is a horror typal deck that dips into mill and theft synergies, with middling success across the board. The face commander, Captain N'ghathrod, does an admirable job binding the themes together, but it has some underlying issues.
The Commanders
This deck only has two potential commanders: the good captain, and the creature/background pairing of Zellix, Sanity Flayer with the Haunted One background.
While I think the background pair is the stronger overall, and it’s what I’d go with if building the deck from scratch, a general lack of token support and a need to justify all the horrors leads me to think Captain N'ghathrod deserves its spot at the helm. Zellix also needs better mill support than what this deck has.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The deck has genuinely impactful cards, like Hullbreaker Horror, Brainstealer Dragon, and In Garruk's Wake that turn games in your favor. Your commander also has a powerful ability that grows in prominence as it remains in play.
The trouble is the curve, again, said the broken clock. Horrors tend towards being big, impactful creatures, which wouldn’t be a problem if they were your only expensive cards. But spells like Black Market, Hex, and Reflections of Littjara clutter up the curve further. A deck like this needs plenty of cheap interaction and ramp to buy the time and resources necessary to leverage all those big, expensive horrors.
There’s also something to be said about the typal strategy holding the deck back, and that Captain N'ghathrod would be better served by a strictly mill strategy, but that’s a little beyond the scope of this review.
Notable Cards
The deck introduced some pretty cool cards to EDH. Aboleth Spawn’s a sweet disruption piece that profits off all the busted enters abilities WotC prints these days. Zellix, Sanity Flayer sees a decent amount of play as a mill commander and payoff, and Haunted One does work in some typal decks.
The reprints aren’t bad, either. Though I criticized the inclusion of Reflections of Littjara and Black Market in a deck with such a steep mana curve, both are powerful cards in the right deck.
Hullbreaker Horror is one of the best blue threats in the game. Spellskite sees varying amounts of play in multiple formats, and Hunted Horror is pretty cool in Commander since it sets up political deals. You also have another typal staple in Herald's Horn.
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#2. Revenant Recon
Revenant Recon seeks to raise the dead corpses littering Ravnica in the wake of Murders at Karlov Manor with the aid of Mirko, Obsessive Theorist.
Deck Themes
This deck focuses on the graveyard, combining reanimation effects with plenty of surveil cards to get those cards in the graveyard. It attempts to build a synergy package around the surveil cards as well, as demonstrated by the commander, Mirko, Obsessive Theorist.
The Commanders
Which of the three possible commanders should you run? It’s just the face commander, Mirko, Obsessive Theorist. It’s a cheap threat that eventually reanimates something, and I like the idea of having an early play that accumulates value as I dig for my main threats.
Lazav, the Multifarious is pretty mediocre at the helm of a reanimator deck because the copy ability doesn’t provide any sort of mana discount.
Marvo, Deep Operative works reasonably well with big creatures, but it has two issues in this deck: You only have three spells that cost more than 8, and the responsible curve makes it hard to win the clash without significant top deck manipulation, which this deck lacks.
Strengths and Weaknesses
This deck has a glaring weakness in its card quality. It tries to be a thematic surveil deck, which means playing cards like Dimir Spybug and Whispering Snitch. It draws too strongly on Limited-level cards to pose much of a threat; Mirko is all the surveil payoff you need while cards like Sinister Starfish dig towards creatures for it to reanimate.
And the reanimation targets aren’t particularly inspiring, either. Eye of Duskmantle is pretty cool, and a Commander-level payoff for surveil, but it and Massacre Wurm are the only expensive cards I’d really be happy to reanimate. This deck could use more mass reanimation like Incarnation Technique and Breach the Multiverse. Maybe a touch more mill, too.
Overall, I think the deck is well built. It has a solid curve, cards that function well together, and a distinct, achievable game plan. But the focus on making surveil matter beyond putting cards in the graveyard to use later and the generally underwhelming reanimation targets drags the power level down.
Notable Cards
This deck didn’t introduce anything ground-breaking to Commander. Final-Word Phantom and Charnel Serenade are interesting, and the right decks do decent stuff with them, but they’re far from revolutionary.
This deck has some spice when it comes to reprints. It has lots of black cards that see frequent play like Massacre Wurm, Grave Titan, Toxic Deluge, and Phyrexian Arena, plus Phyrexian Metamorph for the blue players. Additionally, the really good reanimation spells—Reanimate, Animate Dead, and Necromancy—got reprints, as did Rise of the Dark Realms. If you really want to build a reanimator deck, this has a lot of the staples to get started.
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#1. Fae Dominion
The Fae Dominion deck came out alongside Wilds of Eldraine, with a royal general in Tegwyll, Duke of Splendor.
Deck Themes
It’s faeries, just faeries—it’s rather astonishing how many Dimir precons are typal decks. The deck has a controlling sub-theme with cards that want you to cast spells on your opponents’ turn, but that’s well within the tricksy design space faeries naturally inhabit. Overall, the deck’s quite cohesive.
The Commanders
There are a couple of potential commanders, and I prefer the alternate commander Alela, Cunning Conqueror the best.
Tegwyll, Duke of Splendor is the face commander, but you don't have enough sacrifice support to make the death trigger meaningful. That reduces the Duke to a mere lord, which is just weak; you can and should ask more of your command zone.
Obyra, Dreaming Duelist technically works as a commander, but it lacks power; this was printed as a signpost uncommon and doesn’t reach beyond its station.
Oona, Queen of the Fae doesn’t hold up to modern Commander, especially in this deck that doesn’t really need a burst of tokens.
Nymris, Oona's Trickster is a little more interesting since you have a high enough instant/flash count to reliably trigger it. But you have zero graveyard synergies, and a Nymris deck doesn’t necessarily need to be a faerie deck and probably wants to be more controlling. It wouldn’t be bad, just not perfect.
Unlike Alela, Cunning Conqueror. It’s just a more interesting and powerful card. Just like Tegwyll, it rewards you for having a wide board of faeries, except it does something interesting and powerful with them rather than just making them larger. Since Alela brings its own clique, it’s less susceptible to board wipes and makes good use of all your instants and flash cards.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The deck’s cohesion gives it some real strength compared to other Dimir precons. All the cards work towards the same general game plan, and it has the only reasonable curve. It’s still a little high, but it shouldn’t choke with a bunch of 7-drops in hand.
The big weakness is a general lack of interaction. It just needs more, both removal and countermagic. Frankly, it’s a real shame that WotC printed a precon with very clear reasons to play a controlling game and failed to give it the fuel to back it up.
But overall, this looks like a deck that wins games through clever tempo plays and a mass of goad, and the card draw doesn’t look too bad. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to play this.
Notable Cards
This deck introduced a lot of cards to Commander, with Alela, Cunning Conqueror standing heads and heels above everything else. It’s become the de facto faerie commander, and one of Dimir’s most popular.
But it’s not alone in being a great introduction to the format. Archmage of Echoes supports faeries and wizards alike with powerful token production, and Nettling Nuisance introduced a neat aggressive card that works within Commander.
The reprints are no slouch, either; major flash threats like Brazen Borrower and Hullbreaker Horror grace the creature slots. Dig Through Time is one of the best draw spells ever printed, and Reflections of Littjara provides a more substantial form of typal card draw than Distant Melody (which is still here).
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Commanding Conclusion
Captain N'ghathrod | Illustration by Andrey Kuzinskiy
While I find the high number of typal decks surprising, many of these decks have that interesting Dimir flavor, even if I wish the color pair had one good, archetypal control deck. Dimir’s offerings are unfortunately weak, with a range of poorly designed precons, but I guess that what upgrades are for?
Are you interested in any of these decks? Have you played a Dimir precon, or considered picking one up? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!
Stay safe, and thanks for reading!
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