The Best and Easy Way to Upgrade Your Preconstructed Commander Magic Deck

Last updated on June 4, 2025

Biogenic Upgrade | Illustration by Tomasz Jedruszek

Preconstructed EDH decks went from a yearly product to being released alongside almost every Magic set. Notorious for being weak, the Commander format precons get more and more love, though they’re still weaker than average.

Upgrade your Commander precon to address those weaknesses head-on and tweak the deck to suit your tastes, playstyle, and desired power bracket. Though the power of precons vary, they tend to share similar flaws, so I’m here today to guide you on how to address the typical weaknesses of a Commander precon and easy ways to upgrade them.

Why Should You Upgrade Your Precon?

Neoform | Illustration by Bram Sels

There are plenty of reasons to upgrade your Commander precon. Maybe you’re new to EDH and purchased a precon to play with your friends, only to discover their homebrews stomp it and you want to reach their level. Perhaps you adore the face commander but find the deck betrays your expectations. Or maybe the deck has a subtheme you want to bolster into the deck’s core focus.

There's one thing in common: The precon isn’t performing the way you want, so you want to invest in the deck to improve it.

What Do You Enjoy When You Play Your Precon?

Answer the question to provide yourself an excellent guideline for why and how you want to upgrade your preconstructed deck. For example, maybe you got the Scions & Spellcraft precon from Final Fantasy and want to pivot to an enchantress theme with a heavy hand of control deck influences. This allows lots of cards to satisfy the “noncreature” card type requested by Y'shtola and G'raha Tia. It opens you up to Ghostly Prison, Imprisoned in the Moon, and Blightcaster. Or maybe you missed previous energy commander decks and want to get plugged in with Living Energy and drive home an energy and artifact animation theme. Your upgrades might smooth out your energy production with HELIOS One and Consulate Turret or improve creature quality with Volatile Stormdrake.

Use whatever elements of the deck you enjoy as a signal post for how you want to upgrade the deck. Enhancing the aspects you enjoy should strengthen the strategy and your enjoyment. Now, if you have a precon you don’t enjoy any part of… I recommend investing your time and resources to find another precon or build an entirely new deck instead of fiddling with something you dislike.

How Good Are Precons Out of the Box?

This varies wildly from set to set and even precon to precon. The Sultai Arisen deck released with Tarkir: Dragonstorm plays well as long as you handle complex use of your cards, but the Planeswalker Party deck from Commander Masters just never came together.

Universes Beyond decks associated with Fallout, Doctor Who, etc., tend to be stronger and play better out of the box. Warhammer 40K’s Necron Dynasties is particularly powerful.

If you want a precon that offers an excellent experience out of the box, I recommend one of the ones I mentioned above, plus the Tricky Terrain precon from Modern Horizons 3 and Grand Larceny precon from OTJ; beyond those, a little research goes a long way to assessing a deck’s quality.

How Do You Upgrade a Precon Deck?

Upgrading a deck is a matter of purchasing new individual cards and cutting ones you don’t want to play. The tricky part comes when you decide what gets cut and what goes in.

Establish what you want out of your upgrade, if only because it makes the entire thing easier. Do you want to make your Revival Trance precon stronger? Faithless Looting and Monument to Endurance are established cards that support reanimation beautifully with discard payoffs and card draw.

What do you take out? Cards like Angel of the Ruins and Flayer of the Hatebound which are too big to be reanimation targets in this deck, and expensive enough to be awkward to play.

To upgrade the Revival Trance precon is simple because you went into the upgrade with a clear, defined goal: Make it stronger. That won’t always be your end goal, but you follow the same pattern: Identify what you want to do with the upgrade, identify the cards you want to bring in, then decide what to take out. The decisions on the additions and cuts are the trickiest part. Once you know what elements of the precon you want to change and have an idea of the power level you want to play at, you can examine the actual cards.

Count Cards by Category

It's a tremendous help to get a card count by category, whether you upgrade a precon or build a deck from scratch. This doesn’t mean sort by card type but sort by function. How many removal spells are you running in this Commander deck? How many mana rocks? Does your enchantress deck have enough enchantments? Enough enchantment payoffs?

At the very least, you should be able to break your non-land cards into categories like removal, ramp, card draw, and staples. Depending on your deck’s theme, you could have categories like enchantress payoffs, counter doublers, artifact sacrifice, typal support, impulse draws, etc. The ideal deck sees overlap between these categories—for example, Kindred Discovery counts as card draw and typal support.

If you find yourself with cards that don’t belong in any category, they become easy cuts. Lay your cards out to make it easy to identify other gaps that need to be filled, like a lack of removal or removal that doesn’t make sense.

The gaps you find depend on what your deck wants to do. For example, the Grand Larceny precon helmed by Gonti, Canny Acquisitor has a lot of solid cards but lacks a meaningful ramp package. Almost all my upgrades were mana rocks to support the card draw. If you want to rework a significant portion of the deck, you might find more drastic cuts and additions necessary.

Typical Issues with Commander Precons

Though the power level of individual precons varies across MTG sets, they tend to share similar weaknesses you can easily rectify. Know these weaknesses to help you upgrade the deck since they give you cards to look for and cut. Power-focused upgrades that focus solely on making the deck stronger or more consistent rather than challenging its base themes often just change these weaknesses.

Low-Power, Low-Synergy Cards

Precons often contain weak or low synergy cards. For example, the Grand Larceny precon has Plasm Capture. I see the logic: The deck cares about dealing combat damage, so it has a counterspell that’s also a creature! But Plasm Capture is a weak card, generally and especially in a deck that focuses on tapping out most turns. I replaced it with a mana rock.

It's not uncommon to find high-synergy, low-power cards in precons. For example, the Abzan Armor precon with Felothar the Steadfast cares about high toughness creatures and defenders Wakestone Gargoyle and Walking Bulwark that are flat-out weak.

Low-synergy cards can come in a couple of different flavors. For example, the Most Wanted precon has a couple of sacrifice synergy cards like Laurine, the Diversion and Kamber, the Plunderer that are under-supported. They’re sacrifice cards in a typal +1/+1 counter deck. You could easily cut them for a better outlaw, +1/+1 counter synergies or maybe strengthen the sacrifice theme. Either way, something needs to be done to justify their presence.

Another common form of low-synergy cards are ones that contradict the deck’s game plan. My easy example of this is Beledros Witherbloom in the Squirreled Away precon from Bloomburrow. This precon, headed by Hazel of the Rootbloom (backed up by The Odd Acorn Gang), wants squirrel tokens above others. Beledros Witherbloom is rather expensive and literally gives you pests. Forget low-synergy; this is practically anti-synergy. Another common, more general case of contradictory cards will be a bunch of board wipes in decks that win the game by amassing a large board of creatures.

Weak Mana Base and Slow Lands

Commander precons are notorious for lackluster mana bases. They typically have a good number of lands, but they’re mostly basic lands and tapped lands. Honestly, it’s not the biggest sin. I find they’re rarely much worse than your average budget mana base, and you can certainly put in effort and a little money to really improve your lands.

The ramp package tends to be worse off. It’s often lackluster with synergistically intriguing but weak 3-mana rocks and a scattered assortment of cards. Not every deck needs a vigorous ramp package, but you can often elevate these with a few mana dorks and talismans.

Lack of Interaction

Precons have this interesting quirk where they rarely have enough interaction and too many board wipes. Avoid the thought that you don’t need spot removal if you have board wipes which is… so faulty.

I could go on a very long tirade about why board wipes are bad for EDH, but I’ll keep it snappy: If your board wipes actually synergize with the deck—like Winds of Rath in the Virtue and Valor precon about enchanting your creatures, Swarmyard Massacre in the Squirreled Away or Kindred Dominance in a typal deck—keep it. Otherwise, your precon is probably too creature-dependent to justify many sweepers.

The overreliance on wraths means many precons have a lackluster interaction package. This has gotten better but it’s not perfect. Wizards seems allergic to cheap countermagic and spot removal with most decks only getting one or two pieces. You almost always want to flesh out the interaction suite.

Suboptimal Mana Curve

Perhaps the mildest sin, precons tend to have high mana curves. It makes sense if you play precons against one another. They aren’t powerful enough to win quickly and games tend to drag when every player has 3+ wraths in their deck, so everybody has plenty of time to make land drops. 

Take them outside precon-only pods, though, and the combination of high mana costs, weak interaction, and weak ramp pretty much shoots the precon down against good home brews, even casual bracket 3 ones. I wouldn’t say precons can never compete but it’s hard.

Easy Initial Upgrades

These are the simplest upgrades you can make. These can generally be done right out of the box, regardless of your deck’s themes or power level. If you want to make your precon stronger to compete with your friends’ decks, you should look to these three types of upgrades to strengthen the deck.

Swap Tapped or Slow Lands

Improve your mana base to do wonders for decks. The 3+ color precons struggle with an abundance of tapped lands that send them off-curve for much of the game while 2-color decks take a blow to consistency because 30 of 40 lands are basics.

Put in shock lands, fetch lands, Prismatic Vista, bond lands, slow lands, and Pathways to make your decks way better, though doing so eats up a lot of the budget.

Don’t just look to make your colored sources better; consider whether your lands are worth playing at all. I can’t stand Myriad Landscape, even though it’s in most precons. Temple of the False God is much more playable, especially in green decks that get extra lands into play, but not every deck wants it. Most decks can benefit from value utility lands like Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty’s channel lands or MDFC lands—especially with the power crept ones from Modern Horizons 3.

Add Missing Staples

I find that precons add archetype staples like Academy Manufactor, Mayhem Devil, and Branching Evolution relatively consistently. The staples they lack tend to be in the ramp and interaction departments.

Some of the most common upgrades I make to precons are to cut bad 3- or 4-mana rocks in favor of talismans and signets or cut weak and unsynergetic cards for removal. Often you can cut weak removal for better versions; for example, I cut Grand Larceny’s Plasm Capture for a talisman but you could cut it for Counterspell.

Add staples like Black Market Connections and Cyclonic Rift over weaker cards as an excellent way to directly boost the precons’ power level without meaningfully altering the strategy.

Swap Out Low-Synergy Cards

The absolute easiest upgrades you can make are to swap low-synergy cards for synergistic ones. Those board wipes that don’t belong in the creature-based deck? Spot removal or maybe cards like Selfless Spirit to protect your board from destruction. These are often the cards you want to cut for your archetype or color staples.

This also applies to the aforementioned low-power, high-synergy cards. Find a stronger version of the effect! The Tinker Time precon has Hedron Detonator, a card that’s generally weaker than Reckless Fireweaver, despite a second ability. Swapping the two is a no-brainer. You find similar swaps in most precons, especially ones that focus on well-supported archetypes like +1/+1 counters or tokens.

How Much Should You Spend to Upgrade?

The cost to upgrade a deck can be great, especially if your primary goals involve upgrades to the mana base and pricy staples like Rhystic Study, Roaming Throne, and The One Ring.

Decide the amount you want to spend. This lets you choose a path to take your upgrades, so let’s think about what you should spend.

The Bare Minimum

I think the least you could spend to have a good impact on the precon would be $20-30. It’s all contingent on what you want out of it; that price range seems like plenty to strengthen a theme or get generally good cards to shave off unfocused edges while you address concerns like the lack of removal and good acceleration.

You should always look at the cards you have on hand, especially if you frequently draft as you can find some gems. Perhaps you drafted a ton of Dominaria Remastered, so you have a random Fact or Fiction for Revenant Recon or you picked up one of the billion Oblivion Ring variants printed in recent sets for an enchantress precon.

Check your collection especially for the expansion released at the same time, since cards beyond the precon were printed around its archetype. For example, Endless Punishment is easy to upgrade. The Duskmourn precon looks to make an opponent lose life, and Rakdos has done this since the guild's inception, Razorkin Needlehead is a Duskmourn card that fits spectacularly. It's the kind of card you may have picked during a draft or opened during a prerelease.

Keep the Face Commander or Swap

Most precons come with two potential commanders: the face commander and a backup commander that at least partially synergizes with the deck’s primary theme, even if they apply it differently. For example, Jeskai Striker face commander is Shiko and Narset, Unified and the backup commander Elsha, Threefold Master; both care about casting second spells and pump spells, though in distinctly different ways.

Swapping between the commanders is pretty common. In this instance, I think Elsha, Threefold Master needs more help to work with than Shiko and Narset, but then again, I might over-value vigilance cards and the ability to copy spells in Commander. Should you go further and play an entirely different Jeskai commander? That could be a natural path to take the deck, especially if you want to push the power level until the precon is barely recognizable. Like any change made in the 99, if you swap the commander, it should be done to enhance your enjoyment of the deck.

Pricey Lands

What to do about those lands? Your entire upgrade budget could be spent on land regardless of what that budget is. If you upgrade an EDH deck on a budget and still want to maintain the mana base, look towards budget-friendly untapped lands like pain lands and pathways. You could also up the consistency of 2-color decks with dual lands, or Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse that sacrifice speed for consistency. To upgrade the mana base doesn’t require that you drop a hundred dollars on fetches and shock lands, or a dozen dollars on a triome.

Should You Do a Budget Upgrade?

A budget upgrade is when you set a hard budget for your upgrades—say, $50. This can be really useful as a budgeting tool to make sure you don’t overspend on singles and helps keep power levels consistent. This is ideal if your playgroup mostly plays with precons and wants to change things up without getting into an arms race.

The value of a budget upgrade depends on what you want out of the upgrade. If you want to increase your deck's power level to keep up with your friends’ decks, you need to consider what that looks like. Can you even achieve that with a budget?

A budget upgrade inspires creativity; you can’t always jam staples like Ancient Tomb, Smothering Tithe and Rhystic Study into the deck when they take up most or all the budget. Restrictions breed creativity, and a budget is an excellent and useful restriction.

Budget Upgrade Ideas

How do you stick to a tight budget? Where do you get the ideas?

One option I quite like is to look at recent sets, especially at the uncommon rarity like how we pull out the best uncommons and commons in Final Fantasy. The supply should be plenty high since a recent set has players that want to offload their draft chaff. You can go really deep on this with a gatherer like Scryfall and a search for gold uncommons ordered from newest to oldest cards.

Wizards designs modern Limited formats with signpost uncommons: multicolor uncommon cards that signal to the drafter what they should do in a given color pair. For example, Final Fantasy has Shantotto, Tactician Magician, a clear signal that cares about noncreature spells that cost 4 or more. Look through the signpost uncommons to give you a good idea of the synergies present in a set and whether you should dig deeper for hidden gems.

EDHREC

EDHREC is an incredible resource to find new budget cards. You can go to your commander of choice and sort the displayed cards by budget; go for the one $ budget option to pull up all the cheap cards commonly played with that commander. Sorting cards like this is especially helpful at digging up old cards, cards you didn't realize had reprints, and cards you might not have heard of because not many players slotted it in the past 20 years.

Buying a Precon Vs. Building An EDH Deck from Scratch

The desired power bracket for your EDH deck comes near the top of your descisions. If you want to keep things casual instead of competitive, a precon gives you a fairly reliable power level, even if you choose to upgrade it. But if you want your new deck to tear out of the gate, you should build it yourself.

Precons are especially useful for players that are new to Commander. Deciding what deck to build can be overwhelming, especially as every set introduces dozens of new Commanders. Picking a precon doesn't require deep knowledge of the color combinations, and is as simple as picking a deck that looks like you might enjoy it, if only because you recognize a character you like, saw how a graveyard deck dominated, or always enjoy dragons.

Precons can also be a great way to mess around with a commander you’re interested in building. If you want to build Tidus, Yuna's Guardian, then pick up the Counter Blitz precon and give yourself a strong foundation and understanding of how the deck wants to be played with little effort. You can then upgrade from there!

There are good reasons to both buy precons and build Commander decks from scratch. I personally prefer building decks from scratch, but I understand the appeal to take a deck with an existing gameplan and tweak it to my specifications.

Wrap Up

Complete the Circuit | Illustration by Eelis Kyttanen

Now that you’re armed with more info on how to upgrade your precon deck, here are a few tips for Commander deckbuilding, and I hope that you get more enjoyment and life out of your precon. Remember, in the end, there’s no right or wrong way to upgrade your Commander deck.

EDH is meant to be fun and casual, and there’s plenty of room for experimentation. If you happen to put a Gilded Drake in your deck, definitely share it and tag us!

Let me know how your game nights go on Draftsim's X or our Discord, where you can ask friendly and experienced players which cards you should put into your re-constructed decks.

Thank you for reading, and ‘til next time!

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