Willowdusk, Essence Seer 1.0

The Base Precon Review

Hey there! This is the first article on the first deck here on PreCon Playground so I want to start by saying thank you for coming to the site and checking it out!!

Willowdusk Summary

The Good:

Willowdusk is a pretty cool commander that manages how much life you’ve lost and gained during the turn to make any creature into a beater. I think of it as a more-value commander. Do a thing you want to be doing anyways and here’s some more-value. Some other more-value commanders that are similar include [[Queza, Augur of Agonies]] and [[The Locust God]] as just drawing cards comes with the extra value of gaining and draining with Queza and in establishing a board presence of 1/1 flyers with The Locust God. Willowdusk is just a notch under as you don’t always want to be changing your life total.

You hope it doesn’t go down enough to lose but many decks don’t actively pad their life total up. They just hope to speed out their competitors to win sooner. That’s one of the main things I like about Willowdusk. It buys you that time for some solid setup so towards the end of the game you’re gaining 10 - 15 life a turn and making giants for just one mana. And as you’re building up incidentally earning one - two life here or there, no one is really expecting it to get out of hand until it’s too late.

Another benefit to life gain is how many card variants there are that just slap “Gain ___ life” on it to balance or flavor it up. If you don’t care about the basic land typing of Wastes

, why play it when you can play [[Reliquary Tower]] ? It’s a Waste that adds no max hand size. Or in the case of this deck, why not play a [[Radiant Fountain]], it’s a Wastes with some very thematic and important life gain attached. Same thing goes for any tapped Green & Black Source when you could have a [[Jungle Hollow]] that gives both colors and gains 1 life. So many other cards have that gain some life text slapped on them that makes what would normally be bottom-of-the-bulk-bin draft chaff, into some solid synergistic tools.

The other great thing about Willowdusk is the fact it cares about losing life too. In the same way a card’s true value can be tweaked by giving it the ability to gain some life, you can also tweak strength at the same mana cost by adding the additional cost of losing life. If I just said 3 mana draw one extra card every turn it’d be ridiculous and in every deck that can run it and it would be just as prevalent as Sol Ring. Make it cost 1BB and add the drawback of losing one life each time you draw that extra card and you have a completely balanced and fair [[Phyrexian Arena.]] To draw cards in black is a luxury that often comes at the price of life or sacrificing creatures and Willowdusk decks really don’t mind the life loss especially if they’re getting it back with some lifegain soon.

The Bad:

There’s a few drawbacks to Willowdusk, the biggest of which is that last line of text “Activate only as a sorcery.” I feel like that has been Magic’s first go-to for balance. Crazy ability but only once per turn or only at sorcery speed. If Willowdusk’s ability could go off at any time like any other activated ability, I’d love to see someone go in for an alpha strike just to make one of my creatures a giant at the end of turn. Cards that let you untap creatures would be even more fun as you could double up the counters from when you get hit by a huge creature. Unfortunately we will have to play at sorcery speed.

The second drawback is that Willowdusk makes a single creature very big and in a 4 player game, there are three opponents seeing you grow one very large target. You have to be careful about growing one giant weapon only to have it get Swords-to-Plowshares ‘d away. And if it happened not on your turn, you wouldn’t be able to use Willowdusk since again, it’s only at sorcery speed.

The Not So Ugly Gameplan:

The plan starts with getting Willowdusk & at least one other creature out on the battlefield as quickly as possible. Step two is gaining as much life as possible while always leaving one mana open to activate Willowdusk. Step three, is go in swinging with whatever you’ve been giving those counters to. There’s some pretty solid evasive creatures that are just begging to have the counters dumped on them. My personal favorite is [[Noxious Gearhulk]] which comes in and gets you some valuable Willowdusk life to grow the gearhulk. That paired with its Menace makes for a problem the board will have to deal with very quickly. The second best targets are anything with lifelink. The classic [[Vampire Nighthawk]] getting in for flying and lifelinking damage makes for a great body for Willowdusk to dump counters on. And as the nighthawk gets bigger, it’ll only get more and more difficult to block which leads to the feedback loop of life gain, growth, and repeat spiraling out of control.

Full Deck Breakdown

Intro

So the deck is composed of a few different kinds of cards. You have your typical tags like ramp and removal and other deck specific tags like life gain payoffs and beaters. Below are the deck specific tags that I use in Moxfield. It's a great tool for seeing how much of your deck can do what. These are tags that I have on Moxfield so if you want to see the tags breakdown for the the Recursion, Card Draw, Ramp, & Removal, just click here to check out the Moxfield page.

1. Lands

   1. 1 color

   2. 2 color

   3. Colorless Producing

2. Life Gain

3. Beaters

4. Life Gain Payoffs

5. Recursion

6. Card Draw

7. Ramp

8. Removal

I’ll go over some of the most important tags and the all stars from each category.

Lands [40]

The land base lives up to the reputation of precon land bases. It’s running 40 lands but only 8 of them can produce two colors and 7 can only make colorless mana. If there’s anything that needs changing first it’s the mana production. This deck doesn’t even run Golgari Signet!

Life Gain [23]

As mentioned above, the way to make big beaters to smash your way to victory is by gaining some life. Cards like [[Alhammarret’s Archive]] increase the life you gain and the cards you draw. We have some cards with Lifelink that also serve as great targets for Willowdusk like Vampire Nighthawk and [[Leyline Prowler]]. The best kind of lifegain for this deck is through is some of the permanent recurring lifegain. Cards like [[Paradise Plume]], [[Venser’s Journal]], and [[Moldervine Reclamation]] are great because once they come down, it’s lifegain that you don’t have to worry about forcing yourself. With so much of the lifegain being on resolution of the spell or on the ETB of the permanent, any lifegain you can get without investing mana is very useful.

Beaters [15]

These creatures are big, get big on their own, or are just all around great targets for Willowdusk’s ability. [[Blossoming Bogbeast]] is definitely a powerhouse serving almost as a Craterhoof for life gain. With the Bogbeast swinging by itself, it makes itself a 5/5. With a few other incidental lifegain effects during your first main phase, you can easily have the bogbeast swinging as a 9/9 or 10/10 while also pumping your whole team. I’ve added [[Rogue’s Passage]] and [[Loxodon Warhammer]] because even if they don’t do the beating themselves, they allow for most other creatures to get through.The warhammer being especially amazing as you’ll get more lifegain for Willowdusk, and some guaranteed push through damage.

Life Gain Payoffs [19]

These cards are just happy to see you gaining life on their own. Ageless Entity is essentially Willowdusk’s ability but only for itself. One or two life here or there can make this 4/4 into a real threat very quickly. [[Ezzaroot Channeler]] is another haymaker that also comes with the benefit of making your creatures cheaper. And with its tap ability, you can guarantee a minimum of a two mana discount for creature spells. Pair this with a big lifelinker making it through combat and you could be casting most cards in your deck for just the colored pip cost. Since this deck is ultimately a combat focused deck, [[Veinwitch Coven]] is especially useful to get some of your best beaters back by only costing one black mana after some instance of lifegain.

First Test Run

It’s a lot of fun right out of the box! It wasn’t very hard at all to get a Vampire Nighthawk with 13 +1/+1 counters on it! It curves out surprisingly well and it has a lot of staying power. As the game gets longer, you have more chances to gain large swings of life to keep you in the game. As the game was coming to its end, I was gaining 10 life per turn and throwing counters all over the place. I’m pretty sure that by the end of the game I had taken over 70 damage. One drawback that I believe was just from this game, is that if Willowdusk is taken out, you just have a lifegain deck with no real game enders. You have to rely on the payoffs and slog through combat if you want to win. I didn’t win this first game but I made a very strong showing to get to second place.

Conclusion/Preview

All in all it’s a solid deck with some pretty cool interactions. It is definitely a fun time out of the box. With a mission as broad as gaining life, all of the payoffs have really cool interactions that are a real treat to witness. There is definitely room to grow though as there are a ton of cards that more consistently get us life every turn and some mega payoffs for paying some of that life away. I think the first set of upgrades is going to focus on better beaters, preferably with lifelink, and really lean into maximizing how much life we can gain in our turns. Precons also have a reputation when it comes to mana bases and we can definitely spruce it up there as well.

So that’s it for our first precon deck review! I hope you’re all as excited as I am to get this deck upgraded and finely tuned over the next few months. Thanks!

DeckList

Click this link for the Moxfield deck list which is much more interactive and includes the tags reviewed in this article!

Remember,

Play Nice & No Shoving