It's time to lay out our MTG Duskmourn Commander decks ranking and help you confront your ultimate fear … choosing which precon to buy.
With the latest addition to one of the best card games leaning hard into a retro horror aesthetic, there’s plenty of references to spooky cinema across the MTG Duskmourn set. However, when it comes to their out-of-the-box power level and capacity for upgrades, some of the Duskmourn precons are a little less The Shining a little more Sharknado.
To help you to figure out which decks are instant classics and which should be left to collect dust in your local Blockbuster, I’ve tested and ranked all four. That said, if you haven’t caught up on everything you need to know about MTG Duskmourn, you might want to familiarize yourself with the layout of this haunted house before you dive into choosing your deck.
4. Death Toll
Death Toll is a bit of a strange deck. The face Commander, your key permanent, is a 2/5 creature with Deathtouch, that mills three cards as he attacks. While his 5 toughness is nothing to scoff at, I would be reluctant to push him onto the frontlines for the sake of his trigger. The permanent card you reanimate from Winter’s Delirium trigger isn't an incredible payoff either, especially given you have to exile other potential set-piece cards to get the most out of it.
Winter is a commander that can cheat out strong cards early if you're lucky enough to mill them. However, he can get clunky and slow in the long game thanks to you both exiling valuable cards and potentially interrupting your Delirium by doing so.
Death Toll's alternate commander is a pretty strong 5/5 monstrosity that grants each other player at your table a goaded flyer. It's good at batting away oncoming attacks and making your opponents fight among themselves while you sneakily secure the victory. This deck does have some interesting pieces in its four planeswalkers, and Into the Pit is a fascinating enchantment that I’d argue deserves a spot in any graveyard recursion deck.
There's a decent bit of power to be enjoyed in Death Toll but its lack of variety and clunky synergy make it noticeably weak in comparison to the other three MTG Duskmourn Commander precons. This also makes it a little harder to upgrade. The three other decks have easy-to-read win-cons with straightforward upgrade paths. Meanwhile, Death Toll needs a whole lot more tweaking in order to shake some life into it.
3. Miracle Worker
The top three commanders are pretty much tied in my eyes. Yet Miracle Worker draws the short straw for a few reasons.
Miracle Worker is an enchantment-focused deck that's all about choreographing wins on the board and drawing into the final piece to lock the game down. When things go right, this can snowball beautifully, but it also heavily relies on the top deck gods to bless you on your first draw of the turn. Unfortunately, the cards in this precon don't support the kind of deck manipulation needed to really get the most out of it and, where the likes of Brainstorm make for perfect setup, it only really has a handful of similar instants.
The likes of Portent, Ponder, and Diabolic Vision are sorceries that can also manipulate the deck but that slow speed can be your downfall. Given this precon directly combats against so many black effects in other decks, if you choreograph your move at sorcery speed, you leave yourself extra vulnerable to a mill or recursion deck flinging your glorious chosen card straight into your graveyard.
Luckily, given the prevalence of enchantment cards, these are much harder to remove than creatures so Miracle Worker is less vulnerable to board wipes than most, and Aminato's ability to surveil and give enchantment cards miracle does mitigate a lot of the top deck luck required to get it running. It's still a very strong deck and it comes with some great cards like Inkshield, which can win you the game entirely when played right. It also goes without saying that it boasts some very cool enchantments. Miracle Worker has some obvious potential upgrades, and the likes of Vedelkan Orrery would negate the downsides of those sorcery spells nicely.
2. Jump Scare
Both the face and alternate commanders in Jump Scare are excellent, with Zimone's landfall trigger giving dread and flipping creatures up for free, and Kianne, Corrupted Memory adding much-needed versatility, giving flash to certain card types based on her power. With the latter, you can play a simple card draw instant like ponder to give flash to whatever type didn't have it prior. This means, as the name of the deck implies, you can take your enemies by surprise.
Amazingly, this deck also has an out-of-the-box infinite combo. To achieve it, play a land with Zimone, Fedora, Grave Gardener, and Sakura-Tribe Elder on the field. This will prompt you to manifest dread. From here, sacrifice your Sakura-Tribe Elder to search for a land. When it is sacrificed, Zimone will recur it into a land, which will activate Zimone's trigger and flip it back up into a Sakura-Tribe Elder again. Rinse and repeat to add every land in your deck to the field tapped. Then listen to the sweet sound of your opponents telling you how much they hate you.
To make this even more broken, you can throw in Altar of Dementia for infinite mill or Phyrexian Altar for infinite mana. With the Tribe Elder, you can choose to "fail to find" a land and just repeat this combo until your opponents die. If you want to add a less expensive or less competitive card, the same combo with Prosperous Innkeeper will give you infinite life. You can hold priority while doing so, meaning this combo can't be stopped once it gets going.
Even outside of the infinite combo, this deck has incredible potential to put high-cost cards face down, and flip them up for free. The best part about this is you can't counter a card being flipped up and can't remove it in response to the flip, meaning opponents have to guess what your biggest cards are before you reveal what they do. It gives you the ability to get by at a table unnoticed until you've built up a terrifying board state.
It unfortunately loses a lot of focus in long games as you start to run out of landfall triggers and can't activate your commander as often. However, it still has plenty of power and comes with some potential Simic staples like Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait, and Dig Through Time. You can also spot another infinite when you combine the new Curator Beastie with Lesser Masticore and a sacrifice outlet.
1. Endless Punishment
Endless Punishment is a group slug commander, which is to say it slows down and crushes the table equally. Instead of making an enemy of one person and taking them out, it damages multiple enemies a turn and whittles everyone's life totals down. This is not only good for setting up a board state where you can kill the entire table at once but allows each of your opponents to finish each other off. Vagavoth, Harrower of Souls is our face commander and, as well as having a ward cost of 2 life, it has flying and both gets a +1/+1 counter and draws a card the first time an opponent takes damage on their turn. This can quickly turn into a huge creature and it gives you passive card advantage as you go, sometimes getting four extra cards every turn cycle.
Through pinging for just one or two damage each turn, you end up with a fistful of cards and enough life to survive being hit back. The likes of Massacre Girl, Massacre Wurm, and Blasphemous Act make for easy board wipes when the table gets too powerful too, signaling your win five turns from now without your opponents being able to respond.
The alternate commander, The Lord of Pain, pings enemies for damage whenever a player casts their first spell, which is not only an excellent tool to make your opponents kill each other, but a decent deterrent to not remove them quickly. Though this can technically damage you in a 1 on 1 game, Basilisk Collar can give it lifelink, meaning you replenish any damage you do to yourself. The Lord of Pain has the added bonus of making sure your opponents can't gain life, which means there's no escaping their inevitable death. The likes of Enchanter's Bane is a fun direct hatred card for Miracle Worker and the likes of Fate Unravelers will make Jump Scare a little less likely to use all that jump scare.
One of the biggest problems with a deck like this is that the group slug battle style can make you the archenemy of the table. There's little downside to ganging up and taking you out, though this Rakdos deck's ability to hit everyone a little does mean a single person is unlikely to form a vendetta against you. You hate everyone equally and this makes you less likely to annoy a single person. Given Valgavoth's story in Duskmourn, being the enemy of the table at large is an absolute flavor win for the story but it's easy to call something a flavor win when you don't get knocked off the table for running it. Despite this, Endless Punishment's abilities can make for great politics at the table and it's such an oppressive deck that it makes playing the villain oh so much fun.
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