Every precon has the same four problems
This guide names no specific cards, deliberately. Precons rotate several times a year and a list of swaps for one is useless for the next. The shortfalls are identical across every precon ever printed, and fixing those is a method that keeps working.
| # | Card | Type | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ramp | Ships with about 7, wants 10 | The biggest single gap and the cheapest to fix. Mana rocks and dorks are mostly inexpensive, and adding three makes every expensive card in the deck castable a turn earlier. |
| 2 | Card draw | Ships with about 6, wants 10 | The second gap. Precons run few repeatable draw engines because they are hard to balance for a fixed product. This is why precons run out of gas around turn eight. |
| 3 | Interaction | Ships with about 6, wants 10 | Usually enough targeted removal and only one sweeper. Precons are built to have a fun board presence, which means they are built not to blow up boards. |
| 4 | Lands | Ships with 36 to 38, usually fine | The one thing precons generally get right. Do not cut lands. Almost every upgrade guide that recommends cutting to 34 is wrong. |
| 5 | Expensive filler | Ships with 6 to 8 too many | Six and seven mana cards that do something moderate. These are the cuts. They exist to give the product splashy cards at a price point. |
The order of operations
The order matters more than the specific cards, because fixing the mana makes every subsequent change better while the reverse is not true.
1. Ramp, to ten pieces. Cheap mana rocks and, if your deck is creature-based, mana dorks. This is the change you feel immediately in every game.
2. Card draw, to ten pieces. Repeatable engines rather than one-shot draw spells, because Commander games run long enough for engines to pay off several times.
3. Interaction, to ten pieces. Including a second board wipe of a different type from the one the precon shipped with. If it came with a destruction sweeper, add a damage or minus toughness one.
4. Lands, only if below thirty-six. Usually no change needed.
5. Then and only then, the theme. Cards that make your commander better. This is the fun part and it is the last part, because a deck with great synergy and no mana does not get to use it.
Most upgrade guides start at step five, which is why people spend a lot of money and their precon still stalls on four lands with a hand of six drops.
What to cut
Cutting is harder than adding and nobody writes about it, so here are the criteria in order.
Expensive cards that do not win the game. Anything costing six or more that is merely good. A six mana card must either win the game, refill your hand, or answer a board. If it does none of those, cut it. Every precon has four to six of these.
Situational cards. Anything needing a specific board state to be worth casting. Precons include these because they read well. In practice they sit in hand.
Off-theme filler. Cards with no relationship to what your commander is doing, usually included to fill a color or a curve slot.
The weakest tribal or theme payoff. Precons often include three versions of the same effect at different power levels. Keep the best, cut the worst.
Not the lands. Repeating this because it is the most common bad advice. Thirty-six lands in a deck with a six mana commander is not too many.
A useful test for a borderline card: would you be happy drawing this on turn nine, in a game you are losing? If not, it is a cut.
The ten card first pass
Ten changes, roughly twenty-five dollars, and it produces a visibly better deck.
- Three ramp pieces. Cheap mana rocks in the two to three mana range.
- Three card draw pieces. At least two repeatable.
- Two interaction pieces. One targeted removal, one board wipe of a type the deck lacks.
- Two theme cards. The best synergy pieces you can afford for your commander.
Cut the six most expensive do-nothing cards, plus the four weakest situational ones.
This is the highest value change you will ever make to the deck. The gap between an unmodified precon and a precon with these ten changes is larger than the gap between that and a three hundred dollar deck.
Where the money stops helping
Worth being honest about diminishing returns.
The first twenty-five dollars fixes the structural gaps and is transformative.
The next fifty upgrades your worst remaining cards to solid ones and adds a tutor or two. Still clearly worth it.
The next two hundred buys efficiency: the same effects at one less mana, better mana rocks, a premium land or two. Real but incremental.
Beyond that you are buying the expensive staples that every deck in the format wants, and the marginal gain per pound drops sharply. Those cards are usually worth buying eventually because they move between decks, but they will not fix a deck that is still short on draw.
The practical guidance: spend the first twenty-five dollars on every precon you own before spending two hundred on one of them. Four decks that all function beat one that is optimised and three that stall.
When to stop upgrading and start rebuilding
There is a point where you are no longer upgrading.
If you have changed more than about twenty-five cards, you are building a new deck that happens to share a commander. That is completely fine, and it means you should stop thinking in swaps and start from the slot template: thirty-seven lands, ten ramp, ten draw, ten interaction, and the rest theme.
The signal that you have crossed the line is when your cuts start being cards you actually like. Up to that point you are removing filler. After it, you are making real deckbuilding choices, and those are better made against a blank list than against somebody else’s product.
Why precons are built this way
Understanding the reason for the shortfalls makes the fixes obvious, and it stops you assuming the designers made mistakes.
A precon has to satisfy constraints a deck you build does not:
It must be beatable by other precons. Wizards balances these against each other, which caps how efficient any of them can be. A precon with ten pieces of ramp and ten draw spells would flatten the other three at the table.
It must be understandable. Every card needs to make sense to someone opening their first Commander deck. Complex engine pieces and subtle interaction do not fit that brief, and those are exactly the cards that make a deck strong.
It must feel exciting to open. That means big splashy cards at six and seven mana, which are the cards you cut first. They exist for the unboxing, not for the game.
It has a fixed price. The efficient staples every deck wants are expensive, and putting four of them in a thirty dollar product is not possible.
None of that is a design failure. It means the product is optimised for something other than winning, and the upgrade path is simply the process of re-optimising it for winning.
Testing before you buy
The cheapest upgrade is the one you do not need, and ten games will tell you which slots actually hurt.
Play the precon unmodified five to ten times and write down, each game, the single reason you did not win. The answers cluster hard, and they are almost always one of four:
“I was stuck on lands.” Ramp, and possibly land count.
“I ran out of cards.” Draw.
“I could not deal with their thing.” Interaction.
“I had expensive cards stuck in hand.” Curve, which means cuts rather than additions.
That list is more reliable than any generic advice, including this page, because it is measured against the decks you actually play against. A playgroup full of slow decks does not need the same upgrades as one full of fast ones.
The habit is worth keeping after the first ten cards too. Every subsequent purchase should answer a loss you actually had.
Should you keep the precon commander
Often, but not always, and it is worth asking early because it changes everything downstream.
Precon commanders are built to be understandable and to showcase the deck’s theme, which usually makes them reasonable but rarely makes them the strongest option in their colors. The deck also ships with several alternative legendary creatures in the ninety-nine, and one of them is frequently a better commander for the strategy you actually want to play.
Keep the precon commander if the deck’s theme is what you want and the commander does something on arrival. Swap it if you find yourself cutting cards that support it, which means you and the product disagree about what the deck is for.
Which precon to buy in the first place
If you have not bought one yet, the choice matters more than any upgrade, because you are buying a mana base and a direction as much as ninety-nine cards.
Buy for the colors you want to play long term. The lands are the most reusable part of the product and the most expensive to replace. A precon in colors you will build in again is worth more to you than a stronger one in colors you will not.
Buy for the strategy, not the commander. You can swap the commander. You cannot easily swap forty cards built around a theme you do not enjoy.
Check the reprint value. Some precons include two or three cards worth a meaningful fraction of the box price on their own. That is a real consideration if you are buying several, though it should never override the first two points.
Two colors is easier than three. The same advice as building from scratch applies. A two color precon has cleaner mana, is cheaper to upgrade, and is more forgiving to pilot.
Avoid buying a precon because it is the newest one. Precons are not power-crept in a straight line, and a two year old deck in colors you like is a better starting point than a current one in colors you do not.