Summary
If you find yourself in a standoff in the desert and all you have on you is aMagic: The GatheringCommander deck, you’ll want it to be one of the ones from Outlaws of Thunder Junction. These four decks take players to the plane of Thunder Junction, the location of one of the biggest heists in Magic’s history.
With all sorts of villainous folk flooding the plane thanks to the newly opened Omenpaths, there are crimes aplenty, an overflowing wanted board, and the law is nowhere to be found. For those looking to recruit the best decks for your interplanar travels, you’ll want to know how these Commander decks stack up.
4Desert Bloom
Life Thrives On The Battlefield
The first of the four Commander preconstructed decks from Outlaws of Thunder Junction is the red, green, and white Desert Bloom deck. This deck has an odd Land-based theme, where you want to discard lands as early and often as possible, only to bring them back into play soon afterward.
Much of the deck is dedicated to either discard effects like Bitter Reunion to help sculpt your hand or mill effects from new cards like Dune Chanter. While this color combination isn’t well known for being particularly effective at milling and returning your cards from the graveyard to the battlefield, the Desert Bloom deck makes do with the few cards there.
The highlights of this deck include Rumbleweed, a monstrous creature that comes loaded with an enter the battlefield Overrun effect, an Ancient Greenwarden, which has an incredible ability to copy your land-based triggers, and Embrace the Unknown, which can help turn your lands into Impulse-draws later in the game.
3Most Wanted
The most vile red, white, and black outlaws of Thunder Junction come together under the Vampire queen Olivia Voldaren. She brings together Assassins, Mercenaries, Pirates, Rogues, and Warlocks all together under the outlaw grouping, and utilizes cards to give all these otherwise unrelated creature types extra effects while generating tons of Treasure tokens.
At first glance the deck can feel a little disjointed, with all the different creature types running around, it can be somewhat difficult to find an unifying strategy at first. There are plenty of cards that care about outlaws, but if you’re missing those key pieces you’re still just sitting with a bunch of good creatures but little synergy.
Which is where the Treasure theme comes in. You get Rain of Riches, Academy Manufactor, and even Olivia, Opulent Outlaw giving youtons of Treasure tokens to work with.
Once you have a good amount, you can use the alternate commander from the deck, Vihaan, Goldwaker to transform all those Treasures into 3/3 artifact creatures that are also outlaws, giving them all vigilance and haste, both giving your other outlaws a huge boost, and your newly animated Treasure tokens the ability to swing out on the same turn.
2Grand Larceny
What’s Yours Is Mine
Gonti returns to Magic with the Grand Larceny deck, stealing your opponent’s cards just to cast them on your turn to remind your opponents that there’s no justice to be found on Thunder Junction. This black, green, and blue deck has plenty of ways to steal cards and then rewards you for casting them.
Gonti, Canny Acquisitor is the main commander for the deck, reducing the cost of spells you cast but don’t own by one generic mana. Then, anytime a creature you control deals combat damage to an opponent, you get to look at that card, exile it face down, and cast it from exile for as long as it is in exile.
Much of the deck is built around creatures that can’t be blocked, giving you plenty of opportunities to steal your opponent’s cards.
The tradeoff for a lot of those cards is that their power is much lower than other creatures, so winning through combat damage isn’t going to be very high, at least with your own creatures. This gives you plenty of chances to steal your opponent’s through, so you’re not losing much.
to help you along with your spell thievery, you get cards like Dream-Thief’s Bandana, which is avery cool new equipmentthat effectively gives you an extra trigger of Gonti’s ability, Cunning Rhetoric, which punishes your opponents for attacking you, and Heartless Conscription, which is a mass removal spell and exiling fuel for your gameplan.
1Quick Draw
Keep Your Hands Free
Quite possibly the strongest preconstructed Commander deck from Outlaws of Thunder Junction is the blue and red Quick Draw deck. Like plenty of other blue and red deck strategies, the Quick Draw focuses on casting as many spells as you can, granting you extra benefits for the more spells you cast.
Stella Lee leads the Quick Draw deck, impulse drawing you cards when you cast your second spell of each turn. That spell sticks around in exile until the end of your next turn, so if you don’t need it now you may stockpile them a bit. Her activated ability lets you copy one of your own instant or sorcery spells by tapping her, though you can only do it once you’ve cast three or more spells in a single turn.
you may take advantage of all that spell slinging with some fantastic new cards. Crackling Spellslinger is a slightly expensive creature, sitting at five mana, but when it comes into the battlefield, if you’ve cast it, you can give thenext instant or sorcery you cast storm, which is an incredible effect that can devastate a game on its own.
Thunderclap Drake makes casting your spells easier by reducing your instant and sorcery spells by one generic mana, while also giving you a chance to copy it a ton of times, depending on how often you’ve cast your commander.
