Aura of Courage Upgrade Guide

Welcome to the Nitpicking Nerds Precon Upgrade Guide for the Aura of Courage deck, where we deliver the full list of cuts and adds needed to power up this deck! 

When upgrading a precon, it’s important to build towards the commander’s strengths and stick to a main theme so the deck doesn’t become unfocused. Cutting cards of wildly differing strategies will help keep the deck focused and increase its synergy. It’s also useful to address the deck’s win conditions, and for this deck specifically, to speed up the clock and eliminate players as quickly as possible in combat.

Aura of Courage’s main strategy is to combine Equipment and Auras to suit up your creatures and swing in for big damage, and it’s going to win by assembling a one-shot kill on each of your opponents while protecting the attacking creature!

With that key strategy in mind, it’s time to start cutting cards that won’t be pulling their weight.

  • Catti-brie of Mithral Hall and Storvald, Frost Giant Jarl are better off commanding their own decks and won’t work well in this deck.
  • Clay Golem’s ability is far too expensive to keep in the deck, and does nothing for our Voltron plan.
  • Fey Steed could work well, but its stats and abilities don’t quite make the cut for the power level this deck ended up at.
  • Ride the Avalanche is one of the worst cards in the precon and probably won’t find a home in many decks going forward.
  • Song of Inspiration is a disappointing die-roll card that doesn’t deliver, and Angel of Finality is a bit expensive for graveyard hate.
  • Realm-Cloaked Giant is a big head-scratcher, since this isn’t a giant deck and we don’t need a 7 mana 7/7.

Now we can cut the subpar Equipment. Most of these are okay, but we can do better. We need to hit as hard as possible, or protect our creatures.

  • Argentum Armor, Sword of Hours, Belt of Giant Strength, and Behemoth Sledge come in the precon and are meant to power up the deck’s creatures, but we can do so much better. These are better left on the sidelines.
  • No Voltron deck has any time for Viridian Longbow!
  • Moonsilver Spear spits out 4/4’s, but is too slow of an engine, especially when you can’t score a free Equip.
  • Winged Boots will provide some level of protection, but we can do so much better.
  • Masterwork of Ingenuity works very well if you build this deck around Equipment alone, but we are leaning into both Auras and Equipment, so there just isn’t space for a card so heavily reliant on Equipment.

It’s time to trim some Auras, too.

This section represents various cuts in other categories that help focus the deck more around its Voltron strategy,

Lastly, the land cuts: Azorius Chancery, Simic Growth Chamber, Halimar Depths, Lumbering Falls, Thriving Grove, Thriving Heath, Thriving Isle, Mishra’s Factory, two Forests, and an Island.

Now that we’ve gutted the deck, it’s time to put in better, harder-hitting cards that will score you more wins.

Let’s first upgrade the equipment suite.

Now, it’s time to enhance the Aura side of the deck.

There are just a few more boxes to check before we have a fully-functional upgraded precon.

That concludes the Aura of Courage Upgrade Guide! Whether you’re building Galea towards Equipment, Auras, or both, you now have everything you need to build an unstoppable creature capable of knocking everyone else out of the game!

EDHREC Code of Conduct

Your opinions are welcome. We love hearing what you think about Magic! We ask that you are always respectful when commenting. Please keep in mind how your comments could be interpreted by others. Personal attacks on our writers or other commenters will not be tolerated. Your comments may be removed if your language could be interpreted as aggressive or disrespectful. You may also be banned from writing further comments.