MTG Salvation

This is a thought exercise to rebuild the Commander 2015 BG deck as something still in line with price to reward ratio (with the expectation that certain cards will drastically drop in price with an additional reprinting), but more tuned for a developed meta.

What I like about this deck is that they made it feel coherent without doing anything broken or including accidental combos. That being said, there are quite a few cards that I feel are either pushed or questionably added. So with the following restrictions, I'm going to present a decklist that feels like the same precon, just slightly stronger and slightly more expensive.

Restriction #1: Price - This is still a precon after all, so nothing I add will be crazy expensive. (Added bonus: some of the cards I do add are goodies that need another reprint)

Restriction #2: Fun - We're not trying to get very oppressive, so I'm not pushing the stax theme, nor will I intentionally include an infinite combo. Sorry, you're going to have to turn dudes sideways to win.

Restriction #3: New Cards - Since this is still a precon, I'm going to try and include all of the new cards unless otherwise noted.

Thief of Blood is actually really good. It's an effect that crushes planeswalkers and any counter-based strategy, all while growing into something that can potentially kill an opponent. The fact that you can reanimate it makes it even better. I would highly consider keeping this card in the deck, especially if counters are any threat in your metagame.

The Oak Guardian is a solid card, but like you said it's better off in another deck. Same for thought Vessel. It belongs in a deck that wants to have a ton of cards in hand.

When building my Meren Deck, I wanted to try a few things. First off I wanted to have as many cards that interacted with the graveyard as possible. Second of all, I wanted to have lots of utility creatures that had abilities that triggered on death, etb, or something in between. Creatures that kill other creatures or permanents are among the best (like the Blood Thief) because they disable your opponents strategies, which you can then abuse by sacrificing and recurring them again and again. Try to find cards that fit those themes and you should start to shape your deck up well!

Quote from Creedmoor »

Thief of Blood is actually really good. It's an effect that crushes planeswalkers and any counter-based strategy, all while growing into something that can potentially kill an opponent.

I thought about that, but that is another reason to remove it. How many planeswalkers are in these precons? If I'm WotC design team, I just don't see how Thief is doing much more than weakening my entire team to boost one creature which can easily get chump blocked... within the context of playing against other precons. Once I get outside these five decks then I will get more potential value out of Thief but at the expense of a 6-drop slot.

Finally bought the deck and got to play it a couple of times. It was ok but I didn't get enough testing to really know for sure. I made a bunch of changes which removed some of the new precon cards, but it made the mini-themes more apparent and easy to build upon. I also tried to lower the overall price point of the deck to keep in line with the precon mentality. Now the deck has a main theme of death/sacrifice, and two smaller +1/+1 counter and saproling token subthemes. I also started working on the flavor of the deck which is something I initially ignored but later realized that Wizards would have sacrificed synergy for flavor. In line with the flavor, I still need to make the following changes:

Heap Doll -> Crypt Keeper
Triskelion -> ??? (I can't think of a decent replacement that an ostracized Jund shaman or Golgari shaman would want around)