The long awaited Warhammer 40,000 Commander decks are finally coming out. We first heard about these decks about a year ago, but our patience is paying off. Necron Dynasties is the mono black one of these decks, led by Szarekh, the Silent King. This Necron Dynasties Upgrade Guide is here to help you make it better.

If you are like me, you might buy these decks and leave them intact. There’s something satisfying about how all the cards have Warhammer art and were all designed to be good together. However, I also recognize that these decks introduce multiple new legendary creatures to the format, any of which have already captured the imaginations of brewers.

This article is going to be a little different from my typical upgrade guides. Rather than talking about how to improve this deck out of the box, I want to write about each new commander individually and how to tune this precon to be synergistic with that card’s abilities. I’ll include my regular power level estimations, but I won’t talk about how to improve the mana, nor will I recommend cards to remove from this deck to make room for new additions.

Many of these commanders will be similar to each other, since they come in the same precon. But as we explore the things that make them unique, I expect most if not all of them to present a compelling reason to make them the commander of their own deck.

If you don’t already own a Necron Dynasties deck, you can get it on Amazon.

*Find new cards from Necron Dynasties here.

First up, we have the face commander for this deck. Szarekh wants you to play artifacts, specifically artifact creatures and vehicles. This isn’t the first artifact commander, even in black. However, this deck seems to be a very compelling version of this archetype. It leans heavily into one of black’s strengths: the ability to pull cards out of your graveyard. Thanks to that, the deck probably doesn’t need to include too much self-mill. The more reanimation, on the other hand, likely the merrier.

Szarekh mentions both artifact creatures and vehicles on his card. You could include either of those individually or both of them together. There are way more than this, but here are two short lists of some of the relevant cards from each of those card types that you might consider for your Szarekh deck:

Also, in a vehicles deck, there are a handful of cards that just synergize well. They aren’t Vehicles themselves, but I’m sure you’ll find that they are plenty useful:

One thing that black does better than most other colors is make a ton of mana. Usually it uses cards like Cabal Coffers or Nirkana Revenant and is only able to make black mana. Szeras is no exception. Similar to Burnt Offering, Szeras lets you cash in your creatures for specifically black mana. Here are a few cards that do a similar thing, and would be right at home in this deck:

Once you have all this black mana, the world is your oyster. You can do almost anything with it. The low-hanging fruit, though, is to cast spells with an X in their mana costs. For example:

Some of these cards might be pretty familiar, but that doesn’t make them bad. Part of the fun of this deck is going to be getting to these cliché win conditions in a unique way. Speaking of, you will need creatures to sacrifice if you plan to utilize Szeras to cast these big spells. If you are able to cast creatures for less than their mana value, Szeras can serve as a repeatable ritual effect. There are tons of creatures that let you reduce their own casting cost. Here are a few that I found:

This commander reminds me a lot of another beloved black commander, Syr Konrad, the Grim. The fact that it cares about artifacts leaving your graveyard lets you get extra value out of an already powerful archetype: reanimator.

This archetype has a lot of overlap with others like aristocrats (think Agent of the Iron Throne) and combo. You could easily add elements of these other strategies to flesh out this deck a little more, but for now, check out these cards that take artifacts out of your graveyard:

Don’t forget that Imotekh’s ability will also trigger if you have artifacts in your graveyard when you exile it. Cards like Bojuka Bog serve double duty when they can rescue you from an opponent’s engine or act as a finisher when you have a full graveyard.

I’m really glad that they printed this card, because this archetype is one of my favorites. There are already a handful of decks out there that use this strategy, but Anrakyr is another fantastic option for a commander who uses your life total as a resource.

Some of the most powerful cards in the format let you spend life rather than mana to cast spells. For example:

The hard part is going to be finding cards that also keep you alive or care that your life total is really low. Here are some of the cool cards that I found that match this description:

With all this life manipulation in your deck, you might want to include some lifegain as a safety valve. There are a solid handful of ways to do this in black, but here are three of my favorites:

The last legendary creature from the deck has a name that tells us exactly what we should do with the card: go infinite. For those unfamiliar with this phrase, the goal for us is to find a combination of effects that generate as much or more resources than the amount it took to activate the abilities. This lets you then start the loop again and again ad nauseam. Examples of this include:

Since Trazyn can have all the activated abilities of artifacts in your graveyard, you want artifacts with powerful activated abilities. These are well known to be powerful combo enablers in Magic, so generating infinite loops will be easy. In fact, you will probably discover some by accident just by playing with them.

Here are a few great options to get you started:

If you do decide to build around one of these commanders, I hope this Necron Dynasties Upgrade Guide is a good jumping-off point for you. If you found some inspiration in any of these suggestions, or if you thought of a powerful synergy that I missed, let me know down in the comments. You can also find me on Instagram and Twitter.

You can find more information about the Warhammer 40k Commander deck here. Also, check out the upgrade guides for the other decks:

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