If you’re after obvious power or ways to guarantee trying to increase your win percentage with this deck, then you might be in for a shock. In this section, I’ll be suggesting modifications to make the deck even sneakier – be it with more tricks or by just employing some of the existing tricks at a more efficient rate. There are many ways one can go with this process, but the direction taken will often come down to personal taste. This helps the deck play as intended, allowing you to play a morph in your turn while still holding mana up to un-morph creatures in your opponent’s turns. While the point about the theme being mana-intensive remains, the deck still has a lot of ways to support its mana development. Using face-down creatures has historically been an extremely mana-intensive endeavour with payoffs that don’t often provide a sufficient return on one’s investment, but this deck cuts down on mana intensity and provides more reward for using face-down creatures, making it a big ‘win’ from Wizards in my books. Pendant is an offering of mutual value that an opponent may find hard to refuse, especially if you need to team up to deal with another player who is currently dominating the game. Gift falls into a similar category to my favourite creature spells from the deck, in that it can be used to play tricks on your opponents either in response to a removal spell or before inevitable combat damage. However, the most interesting cards for me are Gift of Doom and Pendant of Prosperity. If we have Scroll of Fate and Secret Plans out, we’ve essentially assembled a substitute Kadena, Slinking Sorcerer that can put a creature in at instant speed. Artifacts and enchantmentsĪ small selection of support cards to, again, help set up mana and enhance the utilisation of face-down creatures. Vacuum can be particularly effective against decks that have been built around their Commander and will still work if their controller routinely protects them with Lightning Greaves or Swiftfoot Boots. Substitution can be used in so many ways, from donating a 1/1 snake token in exchange for an opponent’s Expropriate or letting your opponent gain control of your Farseek while you take their best creature.
The standouts for me are Sudden Substitution and Leadership Vacuum, as they offer new ways to interact with opponents. Most of the instants and sorceries are generic effects that support the deck’s ability to set up mana or efficiently remove troublesome permanents. Using face-down creatures is inherently sneaky, but my favourite creatures in this deck are the ones that push that style of play even further, namely: Kadena’s Silencer, Chromeshell Crab, Kheru Spellsnatcher, Vesuvan Shapeshifter, and Willbender. The addition of cards like Ixidron and Thieving Amalgam add more layers to the possible faceless strategies. There are a decent number of them, and they have a good range of different tricks to keep your opponent guessing and on their toes. In summary, I think the selection of Morph creatures that come with the deck is very good. Volrath, the Shapestealer seemed decent, but I thought it looked much more obvious than obscure. I also thought having to exile my own stuff would cut down on opportunities for recursion later in the game. Rayami, First of the Fallen seemed a bit too much of a Voltron-esque strategy which I am less fond of. She effectively turbo-charges the deck’s sneakier elements, which lends itself to my preferred way of playing games. I always chose to use Kadena, Slinking Sorcerer as the Commander because of its card draw and cost reduction abilities.
Here are some brief reflections on the deck itself – perhaps slightly biased towards my preferences. It’s of absolutely no surprise, therefore, that Faceless Menace was the deck I played and enjoyed the most of the four new precons. One of the things I really like to do in Commander is to instill some intrigue, be it through making unexpected plays to my advantage, fielding weird or underplayed cards to keep my opponents guessing, or by simply having a plan that is less obvious to detect. In this article, I’m going to take a look at the Faceless Menace deck and make some suggestions for modifying the deck, it being the deck I had the most fun trying out! Faceless Menace in review I hadn’t followed the preview season that much, but this only added to the novelty when I played some games with friends using only the pre-constructed decks. Last weekend saw the release of four new pre-constructed Commander decks: Mystic Intellect, Primal Genesis, Merciless Rage, and Faceless Menace.
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