Swell the Host | Precon Remastered

Ezuri, Claw of Progress | Art by James Ryman

Compleated Ascent

Greetings, and welcome back to another edition of Precon Makeover. Here, older precons become compleated...I mean revamped to meet the current precon standards as best as possible. This week, we take on a commander from a notorious color pair. One that's known to be met with groans from fans and haters alike. That said, our commander this week asks for a relatively unique approach...

Compleated by Jin-Gitaxias after being captured, Ezuri is sure to deviate from his Elf deck roots...or will he? At least his precon will try, as we shall see soon. With him, he wants us to drop a flood of small creatures (easily done with tokens) to build up experience counters, then swing with a massive threat. It's a bit long in the tooth, but we surely can sharpen it enough to be a threat.

Preparing for the Hunt

As always, here are our rules for remastering precons:

1. The value of the deck cannot exceed $120. This will apply to the reprints only, which gets to my first personal quirk.
2. Every card unique to the original precon stays in the deck. All those new cards that get released with precons remain in the list.
3. The land package should closely reflect what we get in precons these days (and, in my humble opinion, they're actually pretty good).
4. At least until 2020, we're not tied to a particular set, so we're free to choose whatever we want. You can be assured I have ideas for 2020 and beyond, though.
5. Universes Beyond cards are not added. No exceptions, unless they have an in-universe variant. Granted, this will change when we get there.

With that out of the way, let's see what the original list looked like.

The Precon List

Entering the Hunting Grounds

Above, we can see the deck doesn't touch into Elves all that much, but Snakes instead. The backup commander for this precon, Kaseto, Orochi Archmage, exemplifies this. On top of that, Skullwinder was first printed in this release, and that's another Snake.

Unfortunately, I do have to throw a bit of a hissy fit here, because a lot of the Snakes we see in the list aren't exactly good, and not even the new cards can salvage the creature type (They would eventually, but under Golgari (black-green) instead).

However, what other new cards we get tend to carry some influence, even today. Firstly, Ezuri's Predation is one of the only board wipes in green, though it ironically does not synergize with our commander. The tokens will be too beefy to rake in experience counters.

Speaking of tokens, Arachnogenesis is one of the best cards here because it protects us, and helps build our experience counter numbers.

One, though, I do feel is slept on is Verdant Confluence. Yes, six mana is a lot, but we're in green, and two of the modes are serviceable in the late game. The ramp mode is great if we want to get some landfall triggers.

Retreading Old Ground

The reprints for this precon aren't much to write home about. The priciest card in there is Caller of the Claw, which relied on us having a big board before it being worthwhile, making it a situational card. There's also a Snake subtheme, like I hinted at, but while a lot of them give us experience counters, they don't add much to the precon.

Patagia Viper exemplifies this to an extent. It comes in, drops a few hisses, giving us a few experience counters, then they just sit there, twiddling their thumbs until some attacker comes our way.

On the other hand, we do have Beastmaster Ascension, which is going to do a lot of heavy lifting for our smaller critters, assuming we attack with enough of them (also, if our opponents don't blow it up first). There are another one or two similar effects, but we can do better than those.

Swell the Host Remastered

Fresh Meat!

Old price: $99.47

New price: $112.85

Sadly, I did end up keeping the Snake subtheme, but this is largely off the back of Kaseto, Orochi Archmage. I wouldn't be surprised if they're the first cards cut with further upgrades.

On the other hand, we reinforced the +1/+1 Counter theme that had been an undercurrent in the original list. An old favorite of mine, and personal +1/+1 counter staple, Master Biomancer will make sure our big tokens enter huge in a hurry.

Instead of the Overrun that was in the precon, I added both Overwhelming Stampede and Cultivator of Blades.

The former's nothing new, but the latter is a deep cut from a decade ago. We can fabricate the Cultivator to get tokens out, then dump the counters from our commander's trigger onto it, so we end up having to choose both modes anyway.

Lastly, the best upgrade for this precon is the humble Avenger of Zendikar. While we're not putting counters on it, it'll come in with a flood of tokens, swelling our experience counter number to astronomical heights.

Ending the Hunt

With that, that wraps up our third entry in the Commander 2015 precon family. Next time, we tackle a precon I really want to like. However, next week is Commander Makeover, so stay tuned for that new entry.