World Shaper Upgrade Guide: 18 Easy Changes You Can Make

Szarel, Genesis Shepherd | Illustration by Matt Stewart

Tifa Lockhart and Bristly Bill, Spine Sower have introduced a new generation of Standard players to the fun of landfall, and that might make the new World Shaper Edge of Eternities precon a tempting proposition. And the deck looks like a lot of fun!

The trouble is that the go-tall Tifa style counters strategies that work in Standard don’t play as well in a multiplayer game like Commander. The precon has you covered, shifting focus toward sacrifices for value with recursion ahead of a go-wide finish, but if you haven’t built decks in this space before, you’re gonna need a hand to level up this decklist, just a bit.

That said, No products found. is one of the most coherent precons I’ve seen in a while, and it doesn’t need quite as much tinkering as we’ve come to expect. Let’s get cracking and explain why Mayhem Devil ships in the box!

No products found.

World Shaper Deck Overview

World Shaper | Illustration by Raymond Swanland

World Shaper wants to drop a ton of lands, starting with ramp, and ending with land recursion from the graveyard. The most popular landfall commander, Omnath, Locus of Creation, wins with an astonishing amount of card draw and value if left unchecked. The World Shaper deck is slower, but it’s also harder to stop, with a legendary spacecraft commander that’s tougher to interact with if you never station it into a creature.

There are bits in this deck that support the “go-tall with +1/+1 counters” strategy that the secondary commander, Szarel, Genesis Shepherd represents, but not a lot. This deck mostly looks to overwhelm with token value to get bodies on the board while it draws cards with houses like Korvold, Fae-Cursed King. It then hits with extra combat steps with Moraug, Fury of Akoum and uses the classic Mayhem Devil as a Korvold backup plan.

We’re going to buff up the main plan, especially given how half-hearted the counters thing is in this precon. Let’s get to the mayhem!

The Upgrade Plan

More tokens! More land sacrifice and recursion to maximize your sac payoffs and your landfall triggers at the same time! A few more sac payoffs! More of the good stuff, like a double-stuf Oreo.

Just note that my plan doesn’t involve the classic Cauldron Familiar and Witch's Oven combo you know and hate. I just think it generates far more you're-wasting-my-time ire at an EDH table than it’s worth, but perhaps you choose to live dangerously?

Also note that there isn’t a great suite of graveyard protection for this strategy. Feldon's Cane-style effects slow you down as much as the graveyard hate, and if you’re packing a Ground Seal, that shuts off your strategy just as well as their hate. A Bojuka Bog still makes you sad. But the land recursion is only a piece of what this deck does. It’s a graveyard deck that’s recoverable with tokens and value, so you don’t have to sit on fear of that like in a reanimator deck.

World Shaper

Suggested Cut: Night's Whisper

World Shaper is the namesake card for the deck, and it’s not in the precon!! It’s wonky and a bit unreliable, but we gotta represent here. Night's Whisper makes no sense to me in this deck. Slight card draw? Meh.

Scute Swarm

Suggested Cut: Rakdos Charm

Scouring Swarm needs it's better big sibling here to help with folks clip clopping over your bridge. Scute Swarm is a wincon on its own for almost any deck, but especially for landfall, and especially for a go-wide theme. If you make only one of my suggested changes, this is the most important.

Sylvan Safekeeper

Suggested Cut: Groundskeeper

A cheap, repeatable way to sacrifice a land that can also protect your important creatures (including itself!) from removal is bank in this deck. You need a few more land sac outlets in here, and this is about as easy as it gets. It can replace underwhelming 1-drop Groundskeeper. This deck is three colors, and even fetching lands with ramp spells doesn’t give you enough to reliably make this matter, especially because you still need a sac outlet. It also costs 2 each time around, and there’s better ways.

Elvish Reclaimer

Suggested Cut: Horizon Explorer

Elvish Reclaimer is worth the 2 mana to activate. It can grab you any land, not just a basic, while it sacrifices things repeatedly. There’s other big dumb green things you can add to this deck like Ancient Greenwarden, but it’s not 2013 and you can only afford so many battlecruisers. Keep it nimble and quick! That’s not what’s happening with new card Horizon Explorer. It makes a token when you attack, but you’ve got a ton of cards that want to just sit around generating value or pings until the right time. This feels like the wrong deck for it, and the untapped bit is just kind of meh for you.

Springheart Nantuko

Suggested Cut: Satyr Wayfinder

A lovely and annoying card that can generate more of your reasonable stock of nonlegendary wincons and support cards, Springheart Nantuko survives the first creature removal spell and makes tokens on the second pass. Nice! Satyr Wayfinder is too smallball for this deck, and you’re not super interested in milling cards here. It helps for things like Aftermath Analyst, but it's better to sac things given this deck’s engines.

Popular Egotist

Suggested Cut: Escape to the Wilds

You might want to bestow the Nantuko on Popular Egotist. There are only seven (!) cards in Magic with the all-important, “whenever you sacrifice a permanent” text, and this is one. You’ll rarely use the activated ability early, but in the late game, it can get you triggers when you really need them. I love Escape to the Wilds in a lot of decks, but this kind of card draw is dangerous with all the 5-, 6-, and 7-drops that you’ll eventually need, not to mention lands, that you might just exile.

Mirkwood Bats

Suggested Cut: Formless Genesis

Mirkwood Bats can kill the table if Scute Swarm is going off, even without the attack step. It’s another bit of backup for Mayhem Devil. Formless Genesis is a bit of a lost card here, with too low an impact for your engine.

Tireless Provisioner

Suggested Cut: Centaur Vinecrasher

Tireless Tracker only has one buddy on Innistrad caffeinated enough to keep up with its adventures, and that’s Tireless Provisioner. You need the tokens! And Centaur Vinecrasher in this deck feels like a legacy character looking for something to do in a teen-centric sequel.

Scapeshift

Suggested Cut: Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar

Okay, welcome to the playing-with-power package. Scapeshift is astonishingly busted. Which is why it’ll cost you a bit to buy. A ton of sac triggers and landfall triggers. You can see how this could land on like turn 8 in this deck and just go nuts. This isn’t a Game Changer if you’re worried about that, by the way, which I was kind of surprised by given the green list.

I love Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar, but it’s too slow and expensive, and it kind of does nothing for this deck.

Crop Rotation

Suggested Cut: World Breaker

This one is a Game Changer, so beware the politics of that given that you aren’t looking for something like a Gaea's Cradle proxy. This is a cheap trigger that basically grabs you Field of the Dead. Token city. And you don’t have enough ramp to get you to World Breaker in any reasonable way. You’ll lose with that card in your hand in this deck every time.

Field of the Dead

Suggested Cut: Swamp

Another expensive staple that’s another Game Changer, Field of the Dead is really what this deck wants. If you want to stay Bracket 2, you’ll also likely need to pitch Planetary Annihilation from the list, but if you’re okay with Bracket 3, this and Crop Rotation are a good reason to be there, I’d say!

Life from the Loam

Suggested Cut: Loamcrafter Faun

One more classic lands card, Life from the Loam just makes everything work better in this deck. Dredge-y goodness and recursion. I’d rather have the original than the sequel with Loamcrafter Faun, in this case.

Nahiri’s Lithoforming

Suggested Cut: Infernal Grasp

Nahiri's Lithoforming is the kind of card draw you want in this deck! Synergy, baby! You have much clunkier removal than Infernal Grasp in the deck, but most of it hits things besides creatures as well, which is important.

Constant Mists

Suggested Cut: Skyshroud Claim

Have you met buyback, one of the most busted mechanics in old Magic? With Constant Mists you can Fog as long as you can while also generating triggers. If you have enough mana, you can just slam this a bunch of times for a ton of triggers. People will need to read this card, though. They won’t like you for it, but this is a time to be brave. You have ramp in the deck, and I’m not sure 4 mana ramp is where you want to be, so I cut Skyshroud Claim

Walk-In Closet // Forgotten Cellar

Suggested Cut: Splendid Reclamation

There are creatures that do the Crucible of Worlds effect, including some already in the deck, but I like a version that's harder to interact with. I think Walk-In Closet // Forgotten Cellar is even more resilient than the classic artifact in this case, and opening the second room is a good bonus. I like to be able to recur land more often, not just once, as I’m not sure you’re always going to end up with a massive pile of lands in the graveyard to welcome Splendid Reclamation as a topdeck.

Phyrexian Tower

Suggested Cut: Forest

Remember that this deck puts lands from your graveyard and deck onto the battlefield, most often. Rarely does it put them in your hand. Powerful utility lands like Boseiju, Who Endures, Takenuma, Abandoned Mire, and Midgar, City of Mako or other Final Fantasy rare lands don’t work as well, although I’d likely still include them all. You want your fetchable and recurrable utility lands to be like Phyrexian Tower, which is mana, triggers, and all you might want, especially if you have a creature token-maker rolling.

Shifting Woodland

Suggested Cut: Forest

The other good land for this deck is the powerful Shifting Woodland, which can be Korvold or Scute Swarm or Mayhem Devil you really need them, which you will!

Ziatora’s Proving Ground

Suggested Cut: Wastes

The classic call to upgrade the lands is even more important in this deck, especially with lots of cards that fetch lands with basic types, like Nature's Lore. Take this as license to add shock lands, surveil lands, and whatever else you have to replace some basics and some of the wonky duals in this decklist for faster, more powerful starts. The Wastes seem to be here only for the World Breaker I abandoned.

The Final Deck and New Cards

Here’s the final list and a focused list with just the new cards. You can use the shopping cart button on the decklist to buy them in one click!

Note that these upgrades add two Game Changers to the list.

Commanding Conclusion

Mayhem Devil | Illustration by Dmitry Burmak

I’m excited to play around in the Jund () landfall space, and there’s plenty of brews you can make to add cards like Loot, Exuberant Explorer, Lumra, Bellow of the Woods, Ramunap Excavator, Zuran Orb, Squandered Resources, and even Strip Mine if you want to be the meme kid with the burning building.

But I like this cheaper card focus on the token and sac payoffs.

And you can make the Tifa Lockhart style deck work in the Jund colors, despite my skepticism. But you’ll need more tutors without cards like Tifa in the command zone. If you build that deck and it works, share it in the comments or on the Draftsim Discord, as I do think it’d be cool if someone could make that happen.

It’s time to bring this deck guide in for a landing, so I hope I’ve grounded you in the rocky landscape of the deck’s mechanics and that my explanations were down to earth.

Have some happy brewing, and I’ll see myself out….

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