Today Marcy, BPhillipYork, Loxi, and Steel Mentor take a look at some of the cards from the new Fallout: Mutant Menace Commander deck, from the new Magic: The Gathering—Fallout Universes Beyond set.

 

The Wise Mothman

Steel Mentor: It’s Mothman! Who doesn’t love Mothman? Cowards that’s who. Believed to have existed before the Great War, and not a product of the FEV cloud that blanketed the States in its aftermath, The Wise Mothman is a benevolent if spooky member of its species. Contrast with the Red-Eyed Mothmen who’ll kick your ass fiercely if you interrupt their stalking. Unfortunately while their card effect is cool (I love rad counters so much rub them into my chromosomes), it doesn’t have a lot to do with their in game behaviour and that’s a shame.

Loxi: Mothman in all his lordship is here to bless us with love and radiation, as we so deserve. This is a really unique deck because it functions very similar to something like Nekusar, the Mindrazer but a lot more table friendly. It notably triggers when a card is milled, not when you/an opponent mills, so anything that just dumps everyone’s graveyards is fantastic here. Graveyard mill and counters have always gone hand in hand since the classic Golgari days, and adding blue to the mix will give some potent defense and more access to black/blue mill spells. It also means you have two win conditions right in front of you: mill and combat! Fantastic card, I expect this one to be one of the most popular commanders from the set. All hail the great moth!

BPhillipYork: There’s some ways you could loop this to do something fairly abusive with Sage of Hours and milling and discarding and then taking infinite turns, but bleah. Fun 3/3 flyer as a beater that’ll trigger off rad counters and any mill doing their thing, and 4 is affordable enough for something like that for just, regular beater commander with some kind of theme. One really nice thing this does is finally creates a “mill” commander in more than 1 color.

Marcy: Mill is actually my favorite win condition in Magic, probably to the surprise of no one who has read my opinions about Magic the Gathering. I love the idea of manipulating the actual, physical deck of cards, here specifically dumping them in a graveyard. The thing about Rad Counters is that the produce a really interesting and new way to take advantage of mill: they cause cards to be milled, and then also drain life. Mothman is maybe one of my favorite ‘new’ commanders because his mechanic works well with his theme, and making a mill deck may also make him into a huge beater, which gives you options for how to approach a win condition in the event that Mill is not going to work by itself.

 

The Master, Transcendent

Loxi: For those of you who haven’t played Fallout or are new to the franchise, The Master is the main antagonist of the first game and quite possibly one of the most scumfuck villains in the series. His goal was to create an ethnostate by forcibly converting “capable” humans into Super Mutants and solving inequality by sheer force via forced evolution; point to be made, this was not a nice man. I want to mention this because this art just captures how grotesque and horrifying this character is, and to this day I find this character extremely unsettling, but absolute props to Javier Charro for capturing that feeling.

Gameplay wise, this is a really neat way of executing how he functioned as a villain. He literally dipped people in vats of goo to make them Mutants, so…he does exactly that! You mill people into your…uhh…vat of graveyard goo… and then reanimate them as a 3/3 mutant! I don’t think this is particularly groundbreaking mechanically, but the mill-and-reanimate combo is a fan favorite, and having cheap access to it in the command zone (and for free with his activated ability!) is a really sweet and powerful premise.

Steel Mentor: There’s certain cards in this set that I look at and just have certain lines scream into my brain. The Master’s self-aggrandizing dialogue at the end of the original Fallout is one of those cases and holy damn does this card do him some justice. As Loxi mentions it’s pretty much The Master directly translated into card form, taking your discarded creatures and turning them into homogenous Mutants. The only thing missing is a means to talk him to death through mechanics.

BPhillipYork:  You could use this to cheat out Eldrazi or other huge things, obviously they’d only be 3/3 but things like It That Betrays real strength is in what they do not just their stat block. Though to be fair 11/11 is big stats. Obviously it’s super nuts to nab powerful creatures off your opponents milling, and there’s also loops you could set up with this and, well obviously broken cards like Intruder Alarm. But really just a fun way to cheat out powerful creatures and possibly annoy your opponents with your mill deck.

Marcy: The Master sucks, but he’s pretty solid here. What’s also interesting that between the Mothman and the Master, you have two very solid but very different approaches to mill here. The Master really wants to operate as a self-mill reanimator deck, cheating out huge, gamestate altering creatures for free, while The Mothman wants to mill players and grow in size through doing so. I think they both make for fun possible commanders, but The Master probably has more direct combo potential.

 

Agent Frank Horrigan

Loxi: They’re just going back to the classics here: Franky Frank is the final boss of the second game, and less of a total sicko than The Master but more of just a brutal meatbag who kills a heck of a lot of people for the Enclave. He’s one of the early tests of FEV, which is the goopy goop that makes super mutants.

In practice, he’s pretty cool, but I worry a lot he’s just going to end up being a vessel for Infect-like mechanics. If you do go that route, he’s a pretty neat voltron commander similar to Zurgo Helmsmasher who has built in evasion and protection. If you want to do some other fun stuff, proliferating twice (three times on the turn you play him if you can nail haste to him) in one turn is pretty terrifying. He’s expensive and will eat every piece of exile removal in a 200 meter radius, but if you can stick this he’ll probably win you the game in a turn or two of combat if you leverage those proliferate triggers well.

Steel Mentor: Franky boy here was the top enforcer for The Enclave, a remnant splinter of the US government dedicated to carrying on its pre-War work of crushing communism and dominating the world under a star-spangled jackboot. The Enclave were the big menace of Fallout 2, slaughtering and kidnapping “impure” Wastelanders with a tech-level that put the Brotherhood of Steel to shame. They’ve appeared all but once in later games to increasingly more background roles, but their atrocious actions can be felt everywhere.
Flavour-wise Frank’s card reflects kinda his relationship with the player over the course of Fallout 2. Before the endgame you’ll meet Frank now and then running purge ops and raids for the Enclave, and while you can attack him it’s near impossible to actually kill him. Up until you attack him in return during the final raid on the Enclave base. Another cool lil’ bit of flavour.

BPhillipYork: Well double proliferate is a thing, this seems like it would be right at home in bog standard old-school Atraxa decks. As a commander this seems too one sided and sort of swingily dangerous for my taste, and 7 mana is uh, a lot. Golgari decks are usually more about destructive rebirth than flat out just battering people with a big fattie. You could be proliferating some poison counters, and that’s nasty, and certainly slapping infect onto this bad boy would be really nasty, but also just get your commander likely blown up.

Marcy: It very much seems like Frank is meant to be the commander of an Infect / Poison deck, which is often a pretty no-fun mechanic, but, well, what can you do. He’s pretty expensive for a commander, also, especially if you’re thinking of using him in that sort of deck, since many infect/poison creatures are very cheap.

 

Hancock, Ghoulish Mayor

Steel Mentor: Hancock’s our first Ghoul card, so lets talk about them. Thanks to the airborne FEV, some humans don’t straight up die when exposed to high intensity radiation. Instead they mutate into a Ghoul, which despite the sloughing skin and exposed muscle are not undead Zombies (which is a big flavour fail for every Ghoul card in this set but I get it, game synergy), but a mostly stable form of mutant. Not only now resistant to radiation, but rejuvenated by it and functionally immortal, being a Ghoul would be great if it wasn’t for the slow neurological decay into a Feral. Also looking like you were fed through a meatgrinder, that too.

As for Hancock himself, he’s a potential companion you can meet in Fallout 4. The Mayor of the seedy township of Goodneighbour, a mostly Ghoul town of outlaws and outcasts, John turned himself into a Ghoul voluntarily after struggling to protect the Ghouls of Boston from his older brother’s anti-Ghoul campaigns. This is pretty well reflected in his Zombies/Mutant Lord effect and Undying, a solid piece.

Loxi: I think this is fun since it doesn’t specify +1/+1 counters, meaning you can use all kinds of janky counters here. I wish it had more colors to have more weird counters from something like blue or green (the other colors in this precon deck, ahem), but it’s pretty cool. I think there not really be enough counter generators for this to be a super potent commander, but I like it as a support piece in a Zombie deck as a conditional extra anthem that can reanimate. Undying also has some really solid combo loops in zombies, which opens up that as an option.

BPhillipYork:  That is an all around solid Zombie lord, and kind of hews to Hancock in a nice way, though it doesn’t seem dour enough. Really solid for 3 mana in Zombie decks, which seems like the main place you’d run this, and also if you can abuse the undying in one of various ways, as well as add more counters to it it could get to be a huge buff for a Zombie army.

Marcy: You’ll need to take advantage of other styles of counters, because otherwise Hancock is very squishy, and if you can’t take the +1/+1 off of him, you’re only going to get one use of his Undying trigger before sending him back to the Command zone (if you’re using him as a commander). I do think that in this deck he feels a little awkward, and feels like a card I’d probably consider replacing.

 

Harold and Bob, First Numens

Steel Mentor: Harold’s led a charmed sort of life. Surviving the Great War only to transform into a Ghoul, spending his immortality travelling the ravaged USA in various occupations. Trader, Scavenger, Mayor and then eventually a Deity to a treehugging cult, Harold was one of the series’ most beloved characters from the first game, returning for 2 and then 3 where players decided his ultimate fate. His card reflects the general arc of his story pretty well, starting as a decently costed creature then transforming into a land as the tree in his head (that’s Bob, btw. He’s an asshole) takes over his body. Great card.

Loxi: Oh Harold, you moral dilemma you.

Flavor wise, big win. This is a really fun concept and a really unique way to get some pretty aggressive ramp into your deck that can flexibly be a body with some useful keywords. Not a commander by any means, but definitely a good grab for any green aristocrats decks that have a high mana curve and could jam some more ramp.

BPhillipYork:  This seems like a strange card, because you really just want it to die most likely. If you want the enchantment, that’s what you want, so the only real play for it would be in some scenario where you want to cast it for 3, then sacrifice it for something to then attach it. That’s fine, I guess; maybe you are cheating it out in a way that will cause it to need to be sacrificed at end of turn.

Marcy: I think the only flavor side of this that feels a little weird is that there’s not really a huge ‘downside’ to equate the moral dilemma at the end of the questline. I do think that rad counters might be ‘bad’ but you’re trading milling things (likely in a deck that doesn’t care too much about milling) for 3 mana.

 

Jason Bright, Glowing Prophet

Steel Mentor: A Ghoulified cult leader players meet early on in New Vegas, Jason just wants to lead his followers to a better place where they can live in peace. In Space. Using rockets clearly not meant for space travel. Amongst all the doom and gloom y’gotta remember Fallout’s still a silly satire at the end of the day. His card design is fine but he’s not exactly a ruthless taskmaster so the sacrifice ability seems out of sorts for him, unless it’s trying to evoke him getting the player to kill the Super Mutants that’re bothering him in his questline or something.

Loxi: Obviously, this one requires a little bit of finesse to really make the most out of in that you want to have Zombies and enough modifiers to really pull weight, but you don’t really want Jason as a commander, you want him as a support piece in basically any Zombie deck that runs anthems or something like Mikaeus, the Unhallowed. The flavorful evasion is also really useful since most Zombies don’t come with any, which is a nice touch. There’s a lot to love here, even if he isn’t the best card in a vacuum he provides a silly amount of value in the right deck.

BPhillipYork:  Nice callback to a memorable quest, and it’s neat how it meshes up with the in game reference, sacrificing other creatures and benefiting from it synchs up quite nicely. It’s really too bad Bright doesn’t have partner or companion or some equivalent, he’d be a really solid co-commander with another color added and this suite of abilities, this plays really nicely with cards that want to die for various reasons, and having the sacrifice ability built in is kind of having your cake and the ability to eat it at the same time.

Marcy: The flavor here is almost comically silly, which I love. There is also a good potential to run sacrifice engines off of this while also ramping things up yourself.

 

Lily Bowen, Raging Grandma

Steel Mentor: Oh Lily. Poor woman was already a grandmother when The Master raided her Vault in search for untainted test subjects, the FEV dip and abuse of the cloaking-field generating ‘Stealth-Boy’ devices robbing her of much of her senses. When players meet her in New Vegas and take her on as a companion she’s developed schizophrenic tendencies, and is refusing to take the meds to repress her violent outbursts as they rob her of her last faint memories of her grandchildren. Hers is one of the most heartwrenching and morally complex pieces in all of the Fallout series, with her tendency of swing between kindly pleasantness and berserker rages being pretty damn well represented in her card mechanics here with the rising and falling counter shenanigans.

Loxi: Angry assassin grandma is not happy with someone at your table and she’s ready to beat the daylights out of them to show it. You need some kind of protection to keep this card going, as it will quickly get shut down without it, but if you can keep her protected she will get some serious stats quickly, albeit temporarily. I think she might really shine in a deck that want’s to spend the counters/remove them in some way, since she’ll get calmed back down to a 1/1 once she bulks up too much. It’s a lot of life to gain, but it’s a slow cycle.

BPhillipYork:  Really kind of funny card, and there’s some things that are fairly nasty you can do with this. If you can move counters or increase her base power and toughness these are both ways you can really leverage this ability, though you’ll need to manage counters carefully if you pump her power up. You’ll hit 16 power in 3 turns, so you want some way to, really lower her power by 1, and then you can be getting 8 +1/+1s per turn and do something with that (hate to bring up Sage of Hours here but…) and there’s also just battering your opponent with a big fattie.

Marcy: This card is great. If you leave the card alone for too long, you’re going to have a bad time when your opponent suddenly goes back up 15 life, as well as a creature that can nearly one-shot a player out of the game.

 

Marcus, Mutant Mayor

Steel Mentor: An original generation Super Mutant from The Master’s army, Marcus’s devotion to The Master’s vision was slowly whittled away until shattering completely when he got into a week long fight with a Brotherhood member called Jacob. Eventually the two just laid down their arms and laughed at how ridiculous and pointless the whole situation was. Since then Marcus has done his best to try and carve out a place for his kind in the Wastes and normalize relations between Supers and humans. As for his card I guessss that it’s him supporting your other creatures, and it’s not Mutant specific for him so that’s nice. Kinda generic though.

Loxi: A bit expensive for a card that requires a bit of setup to get any immediate value out of, but if you drop this before you swing in with a decent board this can net you a lot of value in one turn. Just don’t expect him to last long: that’s a strong effect to be sitting on a body without protection.

BPhillipYork:  Well card draw is just always good, a 5 cost 4/4 with vigilance and trample, buffing your creatures into +1/+1s and then getting draw off of it is just a really solid all around beater mechanic.

Marcy: A lot of cards in this deck give you good options, and I think this is another one of them. There’s a lot of potential to generate value off of this card: you’re either getting card advantage, or your creatures are getting bigger. Both of those things are bad for your opponents, meaning that they need to deal with Marcus while also trying to fend off attacking.

 

Piper Wright, Publick Reporter

Steel Mentor: Okay why is Piper here. Did they really have no place to put her? Fine, I guess she fits mechanically. Piper’s a Fallout 4 companion, an investigative reporter the player can help uncover in her home of Diamond City, as well as unravelling the truth about the sinister Institute. She’s a detective who interacts with clues, something we’ve probably had our fill of following right on from Murders at Karlov Manor.

Loxi: Piper needs a bit of evasion to really get rolling, but if you’re playing something like Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive, this is a great way to fuel your hand while making your already unblockable creatures (which you probably will have some of) strong enough to really start hurting.

BPhillipYork:  This is pretty solid; she’s going to get bigger since you’ll obviously put the +1/+1s on her and then generate more clues, though mana will be a limiting factor. Mono-blue is rough though unless you are comboing off, and beating down 4 players is gonna be a whole thing. Running something like Krark-Clan Ironworks so you can just sacrifice the clues for mana once she gets big is probably one of the better enablers you could run.

Marcy: This card really doesn’t feel like it fits the deck, and she also doesn’t really fit with what the deck does. If you’re forced to play with just the deck, she’s fine, but otherwise, this is probably the first card I’d cut from the deck; she doesn’t even have the Mutant or Zombie typing this deck cares about.

 

Raul, Trouble Shooter

Steel Mentor: Raul’s yet another companion from New Vegas, a mechanic and former rancher from US occupied Mexico who was Ghoulified by the Nuke that hit Mexico City. Like Harold he went on to have a hell of a full life wandering about the Wastelands before winding up in the Mojave, where the player finds him being held hostage by a band of Super Mutants to fix their pirate radio station. Raul’s card design seems to focus in on his mechanic side rather than his gunslinger side, and while his effects are mechanically (ha) neat, they’re not the most flavourful thing in the world.

Loxi: Having basically an extra card to choose from in your hand is very, very valuable, and recurring mill effects are almost a necessity for most decks that want their graveyard to cosplay their library. Also has fantastic creature typings, so this one’s a winner for me. Nothing outstandingly crazy, but a lot of nice in a pretty cheap package.

BPhillipYork:  You could use this to turn mass mill into a tutor, and then cast, and blue black are the colors of Thassa’s Oracle and Tainted Pact, so this is potentially a commander you could run though it doesn’t really offer enough to be better than already existing commanders.

Marcy: Another good protection from milling things you really need or want, this card helps give just that small amount of safety to your deck, assuming that what you are looking for is what you milled that turn; if you wanted it from a previous turn, you’ll need a different tool. He’s also kind of an interesting quandary for removal: he’s not really THAT worth spending removal on, but you also don’t really want him sticking around.

 

Strong, the Brutish Thespian

Steel Mentor: Strong is a Super Mutant companion from Fallout 4, and not a particularly bright one. While he was befriended by an actor his gang had held hostage, Strong took all the wrong ideas from the Shakespeare plays his prisoner performed for him, obsessing over finding the secret to humanity’s strength… milk. Strong’s card doesn’t particularly reflect him traits as a character, but a general Super Mutant grab-bag, including the rejuvenation from radiation they share with Ghouls.

BPhillipYork:  So a 7/7 for 6 with ward 2, to me I’m instantly thinking, ping my own guy, then you can mill cards away and recover them in way since your deck is built for it. 6 Mana is a lot though, green does ramp really well but building mono anything decks just seems so boring to me in modern commander games.

Marcy: An interesting card. This negates the ‘drain’ aspect of Rad Counters, but it doesn’t prevent the mill aspect, but you can also turn Strong here into a huge beater; give him Trample and find some way to easily deal damage to him, and he’s probably capable of ending a game.

 

Alpha Deathclaw

Steel Mentor: Probably THE most iconic and feared monster in all of Fallout, both in our world and the setting’s. A bio-engineered monstrosity designed by the US military to be airdropped into enemy territory and utterly slaughter everyone in it, Deathclaws not only survived the nuclear hellfire but thrived in its aftermath. The apex predator of the Wastes, Deathclaw packs can butcher an entire settlement without breaking a sweat, and it’s only by the grace of their tendency to stay away from populated areas that they haven’t completely taken over the US. In cardboard form it’s a big, brawny monster and… that’s it. I honestly never thought I’d see Monstrosity as a keyword again but here it is. It fits but doesn’t quite feel as enough for a creature as important to the setting as the Deathclaw.

BPhillipYork:  Very solid, since you can reanimate it or otherwise cheat it out to destroy a permanent and you’ve got the monstrosity in reserve. The real value here to me is in repeatedly reanimating it, but it’s still a 6/6 with menace and trample you can pump up to 10/10.

Marcy: A 6/6 for 6 that destroys something and may destroy something else for 7 mana and gets bigger. I’m actually a little disappointed, considering how iconic the Deathclaw has become.

 

Atomize

Steel Mentor: Plasma weaponry never quite got off the ground the same way Lasers did in the dangerous days before the bombs dropped, but out in the Wastelands they’re coveted for their sheer killing potential, capable of shredding through even Power Armour. For particularly unlucky bastards a plasma shot can destabilize their entire structural being, reducing them down to a pile of radioactive goop as depicted in the artwork and effect of this card. Nasty.

BPhillipYork:  That’s a very solid piece of removal with upside, expensive in comparison to better removal, but since you can hit anything with this that’s decent enough and then proliferate if you have something worth proliferating.

Marcy: Very strong universal removal. The proliferate is just a little bonus, frankly.

 

Bloatfly Swarm

Steel Mentor: Take the common House Fly, have it feed on radioactive mutagenic garbage for hundreds of years. Y’get Bloatflies, the Wasteland’s most miserable nuisance. About the size of a human’s head, Bloatflies hurl necrotising blobs of their larva at potential prey but are generally considered a pest by most Wastelanders. A swarm of them however, that can be a different story.

BPhillipYork:  This seems like a really fun way to mess with your opponents, proliferating and adding counters and then pinging off counters to mill and cause life loss, and looping this could play really well into the rad counter mechanic.

Marcy: Assuming this thing doesn’t just take enough damage to wipe it off the board, if you keep proliferating and growing this, you can have an extremely annoying body in the way of your opponent’s attacks that even gets around flying evasion.

 

Cathedral Acolyte

Steel Mentor: While The Master generally made it his business to dip just about each and every human he could get his hands on, he realized pretty early on he needed cover for his operations. Enter the Children of the Cathedral, a doomsday cult The Master subverted to act as his army’s public face, scouting out targets and handling all the tasks Mutants were too scary or clumsy to do on the promise of mutating the faithful. This translates pretty solidly into a support piece for “mutated” creatures, and that’s what we have here. Neat.

BPhillipYork:  Well handing out wards is pretty solid, and putting +1/+1 counters is just, kind of nice. Two mana is fine for an enabler like this, and there’s plenty of things where it getting slightly bigger goes a long way.

Marcy: The ‘enter the battlefield’ part is a little odd, but that has to be some way to prevent you from just endlessly giving +1/+1 counters (surely no cards allow that in the game of Magic,) but I do find ‘Counter Lord’ a really unique piece of flavor; even Ward 1 can be annoying to your opponent’s plans.

 

Contaminated Drink

Steel Mentor: Hey everybody! It’s Roachy! Our favourite guy! Clean water is a luxury in the Wastelands, almost every source being some level of infected by radiation, pathogens and general filth. Wastelanders take what they can get, with meds such as the radiation dampening Rad-X helping a lil’ bit.

BPhillipYork:  Solid card draw, and if you want to mill so you can reanimate this is really solid.

Marcy: Pretty solid “I need to draw cards” downside, and in this particular deck, or a deck that wants to mill and take advantage of milling, there may not even be a downside at all.

 

Feral Ghoul

Steel Mentor: When a Ghoul’s mental degradation goes too far they become considered “Feral,” pretty much a stereotypical zombie in mannerisms. They wander in aimless packs like wild animals, killing any non-Ghoul they find and devouring them. The threat of Feral Ghouls, and the potential for any Ghoul to become one has caused no small amount of prejudice against regular Ghouls, many of which in turn fear turning Feral as a horrifying inevitability. Card-wise this one works well replicating the idea of a Ghoul pack, with the rad counters working to represent the radioactive conditions Ferals like to make their dens in, which tends to lead to the next card in this review…

BPhillipYork:  So this is just really solid; handing out a ton of rad counters is fairly nasty, and having this thing get bigger as you have creatures die fits really solidly into many kinds of arisocrats decks. Zombie is a super useful creature type, and there’s plenty of ways to loop this, as well as you can sacrifice creatures in response to any kind of targeted destruction on this big boy.

Marcy: Quite a few cards in this deck want you to pump up creatures in size and then use that to generate large amounts of rad counters, and this is certainly one of them! What’s even more interesting is that unlike some of the other cards, this one specifically hands out the counters ONLY to your opponents, rather than all players.

 

Glowing One

Steel Mentor: If a Ghoul lives long enough, and stays saturated in enough radiation, they have the potential to mutate further into a Glowing One. Functionally a shambling nuclear core, Glowing Ones constantly output dangerous levels of radiation and can even cause a nova-like burst of radiation when threatened. There’s only a few examples of non-Feral Glowing Ones (like Jason Bright), but both Feral and non-Feral Glowing Ones tend to act as leaders for other Ghouls. This thing’s design owns, its rad counter focus really nailing just how dangerous it is to even hang around a Glowing One.

BPhillipYork: Nice to see this. Weird to me that it’s green but I’m guessing they just wanted to spread out the ghouls, neat set of abilities, and my first thought is give this bad boy double strike ASAP. The life gain off mill is neat but kind of meaningless, and deathtouch is going to function much like an evasion ability but also give you the ability to hold back your Glowing One in order to stop a critical attack.

Marcy: Very funny that this card is far better at handing out rad counters than some of the bigger, more expensive creatures in the deck.

 

Infesting Radroach

Steel Mentor: As to cockroaches as Bloatflies are to regular flies, the Radroach are Wasteland pests who tend to find their way into everything. Though they can be dangerous in a swarm, especially with their radioactive bites, most Wastelanders see them as a source of emergency food thanks to their plentiful numbers. Their card pretty solidly recreates what a low-level menace a Radroach is, the kinda thing that’s not too threatening on its own but can be a persistent pain if underestimated.

BPhillipYork:  Solid all around recursion and handing out rad counters and a 2/2 with an evasion ability that hands out X rad counters is really solid. Funny to cast Howl from Beyond or something crazy on this when you hit, and you can also hand out the rad counters then sacrifice it knowing you’re going to get it back right away.

Marcy: Recursive and annoying, the perfect encapsulation of a roach.

 

Lumbering Megasloth

BPhillipYork:  Funny, also pretty big; not sure enters play tapped really encompasses how slow and weird sloths are (I think it should probably get a stun counter when it attacks tbh) but if you want a big fattie or there’s a desire to have expensive spells in your deck for some reason, here you go.

Marcy: I will say that this card really seems pretty terrible, but since it says players AND permanents, there’s quite a reasonable expectation that this card is going to enter the battlefield very potentially undercost, if not even just for 2 mana; that said, entering tapped so you can’t even use it to block feels a little too much of a downside, even for a potentially huge discount.

 

Mariposa Military Base

Steel Mentor: The birthplace of both The Master’s Unity and the Brotherhood of Steel. Mariposa was site zero for the US government’s experiments with FEV, creating countless abominations and the progenitors to the Super Mutants from dissidents and prisoners of war. When the army security detachment found out what was happening, they executed the scientists and went rogue, burying the hidden labs, hiding away in a bunker and eventually founding The Brotherhood of Steel to prevent technology from ever being used for such evils again. Years later, a group of scavengers would find their way into Mariposa, and The Master would emerge sometime later.

Flavour-wise I wish this was more of a Mutant support piece. While it’s a radioactive mess, there’s other locations in the Fallout universe that’d far better fit the rad token generator niche, like The Glow or Gecko.

BPhillipYork:  That’s potentially a playable colorless mana source worth considering; if you can get your rad counters to 5 regularly you have a draw land which is solid enough.

Marcy: The enter tapped aspect is unique; usually, lands enter tapped so you can’t use them right away, but this land enters tapped to give you rad counters, meaning you have to WANT them to take advantage of that trigger, which I think is quite interesting, and you can potentially get a lot of mileage out of the draw a card ability.

 

Mirelurk Queen

Steel Mentor: Mirelurks are a broad array of mutant crustaceans found across the US Wasteland, their forms varying but generally resembling a giant bipedal crab, infesting polluted rivers, lakes and sewers across the nation. Mirelurk Queens are the largest of their kind, and while they thankfully rarely leave their nests, their territorial behaviour often leads them into attacking travelers seemingly at random. This is another case of a card being maybe just a little generic, but it’s fine, another Mutant creature that gives off rads.

BPhillipYork:  Only a 4/4…. that seems kind of sad to me, but this has the potential to get pretty big fast. While the downside of only once per turn is kind of rough, it works really well with rad counters since they trigger on individual players’ precombat mains, so for only 1 colored mana this is potentially a really solid card draw engine.

Marcy: I wonder what exactly it is with Wizards and making crabs = mill? Another card where the one turn trigger can actually be important, because otherwise this card might easily grow out of control.

 

Mutational Advantage

Loxi: Really nice protection piece; I think this is a staple for lots of counter-based decks. Even if you already run Heroic Intervention, if you reliably have a lot of things this will impact, there is no reason not to jam both. Big fan of this one, and the art is just straight comedy, love it.

BPhillipYork:  Nice defensive card for decks that are playing lots of counters, especially if you are proliferating something really useful. A little pricy to be holding up 3 mana all the time though.

Marcy: Very nice flavorful protection spell, that is somewhat conditional; it won’t just save your cards without them having counters, but there are many decks and cards in these colors (including this deck itself) that will be happy to hand them out for you. Proliferate is just an extra, almost mean bonus.

 

Nightkin Ambusher

Steel Mentor: Nightkin are a strain of Super Mutant with an inclination towards being unseen. Outfitted with wrist-mounted Stealth-Boys they operated as black-ops and assassination units under The Master. Unfortunately as we saw with Lily above, Stealth-Boys tend to destabilise their Mutant users and turn that preference towards not being seen to a violent compulsion, with Nightkin warbands roaming separate even from their fellow Supers looking for fresh Stealth-Boys to slake their cravings. In terms of their card it’s… what you’d expect, a beefy brawler with conditional Unblockable and some Rad interaction. I dig it.

Loxi: I don’t realistically think this is the payoff you want for rad counters, although giving someone four right off the bat isn’t anything to scoff at. A 4/4 unblockable isn’t the worst by any means, but I think if you aren’t juicing it up with Mothman or something similar I’d go for a different card.

BPhillipYork:  This doesn’t really seem to work for itself that well, it gives out rad counters but the player who you hand them to is likely to run out of them in a turn or two, and it doesn’t have a continuing source of rad counters, so it’s a 4/4 with ward 2 that hands out 4 rad counters but no way to add more, so unless you’re planning to flicker this or reanimate it repeatedly it seems dangerous.

Marcy: 4/4 ward 2 unblockable that stacks rad counters is kind of a lot on the card. The realistically scary part of this card is if you had some way to flicker him, because then you’re just stacking tons of counters and he’s hard to remove.

 

Nuclear Fallout

Steel Mentor: I have no real lore to tell you about this one, this one’s just an amazing riff on Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom From Want’. If you ever wanted to capture the satirical and political vibes of Fallout, here it is in a single card. Goddamn I want this art on my wizard van.

Loxi: This is a very very solid board wipe. It’s basically Toxic Deluge, albeit more expensive but much safer. The rad counters can be handy, but even that aside this can be a really nice sweeper for a lot of decks.

BPhillipYork:  Well this is really great board clear, and that’s that. And handing out a bunch of rad counters is solid too.

Marcy: Insanely strong board wipe coupled with amazing art and flavor. This isn’t quite as strong as Meathook Massacre, but it is certainly up there, and in a precon deck, this is just as good.

 

Nuka-Nuke Launcher

Steel Mentor: The ‘Fat-Man’ mini-nuke launcher was a portable nuclear launcher that hurled miniaturized nuclear bombs. As you’d expect, the average soldier thought twice about using nukes on a foot-level firefight and most of them sat rusting away in armouries. Raiders and Super Mutants meanwhile aren’t so discerning about safety, and they became greatly prized for their sheer destructive potential. This particular variant comes from the Nuka-Cola company, a soft-drink conglomerate that received government kickbacks in exchange for developing weapons and chemicals for the increasingly warmongering US as the Great War intensified.

Loxi: Yes Wizards, a Nuke launcher is intimidating to say the least. This has a really unique effect as well: dumping rad counters on players trying to storm off is a pretty neat effect. That being said, there are some games where this card might not really do much, or the times where it would be useful someone could just storm off and win and kick your rad counters to the dirt.

BPhillipYork:  This is uh, hilarious. Delayed triggers to hand out rad counters is nasty.

Marcy: This is pretty dirty; you may not even really care about the creature you’re attacking with, because the point of this card is that you’re looking to punish your opponents for playing spells at all by stacking them with rad counters, especially if they cast spells off turn.

 

Overflowing Basin

Steel Mentor: Vault 34 was an overcrowded Vault with limited private space, its square footage being taken up with leisure spaces and a massively overstocked armoury. It developed a bit of a gun-nut culture and when the Overseer restricted access to weaponry in fear of a revolt, they only succeeded in provoking it. The rebels would fight their way out of the Vault and go on to found the Boomers tribe, with their rebellion in time inspiring more. This eventually led to the Vault’s power plant being damaged and flooding the entire complex in radiation, killing and Ghoulifying the remaining dwellers trapped inside.

Loxi: Ecto Cooler? In MY Vault? Nonsense!

BPhillipYork:  Well filters that enter untapped is fine.

Marcy: Yay filter lands!

 

Power Fist

Steel Mentor: Satirical Sci-Fi settings and massive murder fists. Name a more iconic combo. Unlike the 40k Power Fist, however, the Fallout one doesn’t have energy fields or the like, it’s just a giant slab of pneumatic metal that can crush a skull in a single blow.

Loxi: Let’s face it, this is a website founded on Warhammer, and we all love one thing here regardless of what game we play. Fisti— Power fists, yeah. This card is awesome, and is cheap enough that I think it’s actually quite effective. Bant Equipment decks will absolutely adore this thing, and it realistically is a super strong piece to make any moderately threatening combat commander have the ability get spicy with commander damage after just one swing. Combine it with double strike and just make a stupid amount of counters each turn, since each hit should trigger this separately.

BPhillipYork:  Potentially really dangerous if you have some ways get a creature big or turn a pump spell into something permanently huge.

Marcy: I do like that this card allows your creature to keep growing in size as long as it continues to win fights, almost like it is levelling up stats in game.

 

Radstorm

Steel Mentor: Immense radioactively-charged weather systems, Radstorms are an ever-present threat to everything in their path, striking the land with high winds and highly aggressive rad-lightning. While not as common as in the days directly after the nukes dropped, Wastelanders still keep an eye to the skies for a tint of green, while some areas such as The Glowing Sea are caught in a persistent state of Radstorm. Spreading rad counters, getting more and more intense, it’s all here and ready to ruin your pod’s games night.

Loxi: It’s a storm card; I’m sure there’s some bullshit (positive connotation) that wins you the game with this.

BPhillipYork:  Well, this is potentially hilarious. Like, 10 proliferates can be enormous, especially if it’s say, planeswalkers, especially if it’s you know, Teferis. Which is kind of nasty, and it’s also kind of a hat on a hat. Like if you’re generating enough storm to do something meaningful then proliferating a bunch is a weird win condition. Funniest way of casting it is to drop it after a counterspell war or something like that.

Marcy: Uhhhhhh, this card is kind of bonkers? Storm Proliferate seems insane.

 

Rampaging Yao Guai

Steel Mentor: Another case of FEV taking a regular animal and making it bigger and badder, this time America’s native bears. And they’re very much the same as the average bear, only now they can smash a building to pieces when hunger drives them to encroach on human settlements.

Loxi: A bit expensive, but a neat and pretty powerful alternative to something like Bane of Progress that might be better for decks that want to keep some of their own stuff kicking.

BPhillipYork:  Board clearing a ton of enchantments and artifacts and making this thing bigger is solid, coming in at 5 or 6 mana and a 5/5 or a 6/6 with vigilance and trample and taking out 2-3 permanents is solid.

Marcy: Wouldn’t be a Green deck without some X mana cost thing that could either be spot removal for tricky artifacts/enchantments, or just a huge beater.

 

Recon Craft Theta

Steel Mentor: So. Aliens are canon in Fallout. And while I have some… words on certain developments that have been added to their place in the Fallout universe lets just pretend those didn’t happen and discuss this card. Recon Craft Theta belongs to the aliens known as the Zetans, who have been intermittently investigating post-nuclear Earth. Theta crash landed in the Capital Wasteland at some point during Fallout 3, where the player can find the remains of the pilot and loot themselves an Alien Blaster, a powerful joke weapon with super limited ammo. The ship also puts out a damn dangerous amount of radiation, and thus we get the other half of this card’s flavour in presumably boosting your rad tokens. Cute. It’s cute.

Loxi: A little expensive, but recurring proliferation is always handy. The alien also cannot pilot it’s own ship without assistance which is…priceless. This set rules.

BPhillipYork:  This set is hot on proliferating, which is fun. Funny the alien can’t pilot it, which tracks, and proliferating over and over from attacking is a big build up.

Marcy: The flavor on this card is probably better than the card itself, but it is at least cute.

 

Screeching Scorchbeast

Steel Mentor: Scorchbeasts are another unfathomable horror that we can thank The Enclave for, and the big threat of Fallout 76’s main story. As if mutant bats the size of dragons wasn’t bad enough, Scorchbeasts spread radioactive spores in their fur that carry a vicious contagion known as the Scorched Plague, a plague that robs the victim of their sanity, opens up smouldering crystalline growths across their body and brings them under the control of the Scorchbeast Queen, compelling them to organize and spread the plague even further. These things are a zombie apocalypse on wings, and that’s exactly what they’ll do if they’re left sitting on your battlefield for too long. Aces design.

BPhillipYork:  This could be nasty, you’ll generally want to cheat it out but then generating 2/2’s every time someone mills nonland, and you’re handing out rad counters on attack. This will make a horde fairly fast.

Marcy: This might be an instance where ‘only once each turn’ is a blessing and not a curse, because otherwise this card could be a potential nightmare, especially considering that Rad Counters trigger on players Upkeeps, and can be persistent.

 

Strength Bobblehead

Loxi: Thematically I love the bobbleheads, but I think I’d cut them for 2-drop rocks still in a more optimized deck.

BPhillipYork:  Solid enough, and putting +1/+1s onto certain creatures can be tremendously enabling. For the nth time, Sage of Hours and this can easily be infinite turns, but can also just make your beaters bigger or anything you need a lot of counters on.

Marcy: I think this is probably the least good Bobblehead so far, unless you’re running all of them, and even then… probably not.

 

Struggle for Project Purity

Steel Mentor: A strange card to have in a deck themed around Mutants, this Enchantment represents the final battle of Fallout 3’s non-DLC storyline, with the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave fighting over the massive water purifier of Project Purity. The Brotherhood side of the card seems to refer to the Brotherhood winning benefitting everyone, while the Enclave side seems to refer to the optional villainous choice to infect the water with a toxin that’ll kill anyone infected with FEV, something the Enclave you fight during this event don’t want to happen. A bit of a muddled design, but they were going off of Fallout 3’s own muddled design so, shrug.

Loxi: Enclave is really good for a radiation or mill themed deck, sure. Brotherhood though? Seriously that’s a crazy effect. People have to draw that card on your upkeep, and at a standard pod that means you open your turn with 3 extra cards. Yes, each opponent gets one, but you get three. Three. That’s nightmarish.

BPhillipYork:  Well card draw off your opponents draw here is a bit dangerous; white has plenty of ways to also benefit from opposing player card draw, and this fits really nicely into that kind of theme.

Marcy: Yeah, this is a card that has 2 abilities but one of them is just absolutely bonkers. There’s no world of Magic the Gathering where drawing potentially 3 extra cards a turn is not good.

 

Tato Farmer

Loxi: Not bad honestly, if you’re milling a lot of cards this is a pretty good one card engine. It provides reusable ramp and mill all in the same package, plus being a Zombie means it’ll probably find a home in a lot of decks. Big fan of this one and honestly one of the more slept on cards in the release in my opinion.

BPhillipYork:  Well stealing people’s lands is fairly useful, and getting rad counters when you want them is useful if you want them for cheating out or something like that.

Marcy: I like the ‘may’ trigger the most on here, because if you are scared of losing too much life or fearing that you’re milling yourself too hard, you can just ignore the trigger. More importantly, this card presents one of the important tools self-mill decks need: getting lands back from your graveyard, so that you don’t accidentally mana screw yourself.

 

Vault 12: The Necropolis

Steel Mentor: Vault 12 was one of Vault-Tec’s signature Vaults, shown off to entice the US public to fork over their dollars for a space. Once the nuclear sirens went off and the residents evacuated inside however, they discovered the blast door wouldn’t close. Vault-Tec deliberately supplied the Vault with a faulty door to test the effects of extreme radiation on a populace. Those that survived became Ghouls and would go on to found the settlement of Necropolis, a location players can visit in the original Fallout and involve themselves in an ideological struggle between the city’s rulers and a pacifist sect.

Loxi: Knocking it out of the park with another vault, this one is a decent Zombie generation engine but I think you really want this as a payoff if you’re going deep on radiation effects. Generating what will probably be about 8 Zombies by the time the second line triggers is still pretty solid though, so I can see some merit in just jamming this in Zombies decks, but at 6 mana it might be a bit slow without some more oomph from additional rad counters.

BPhillipYork:  Really solid for some kind of proliferate Zombie deck.

Marcy: The interesting thing about this deck is it tries to present you with options in terms of how to win. Do you want to win by going real hard over the top with damage? Build up Mothman or use Frank. Want to pull ugly things from your graveyard? Use Master. In either case, you want rad counters, and mill, and the third option you have here is just swarming your opponents with a large amount of creatures between this and the Radstag.

 

Forced Evolution

Steel Mentor: We don’t know what the original intention was for Vault 87, but what it became known for was Mutants. After the breakthroughs at the Mariposa site, the US government seconded Vault 87 for more experiments into creating Super Mutants and was equipped with holding cells and a supply of FEV. The Vault’s staff would experiment on its residents until the resulting Mutants broke free and took over, forcefully mutating everyone inside, their rampage only halted by a Nuke landing right outside its door. This kept the Mutants trapped for years, but once they cleared the way the radioactive fallout rendered the Vault an impregnable fortress. A problem for the player character when Fallout 3 requires them to find a way in to secure a vital piece of technology.

BPhillipYork:  Well this is weird. Grabbing control of a commander is always nice, but not entirely sure what the sort of intended play is here. Suppose it’s just take something, buff something, sacrifice the thing you took, then draw, maybe one of green’s “sacrifice a creature, tutor for a creature.”

Marcy: A somewhat expensive “borrow a creature” with extra benefits, the bigger side of this card is likely to be the ability to hopefully draw yourself a lot of cards at the end. Even better though if you can steal something valuable and get rid of it, ignoring the loss of an extra card for doing so.

 

Vexing Radgull

Steel Mentor: What’s worse than the average seagull, a creature born from spite and malice with an endless hunger for the food in your hand right that second? A radioactive mutant seagull, duh. Found primarily along the East Coast of post-Nuke America, their food-snatching tendencies have only gotten worse with the addition of radioactive mutation.

BPhillipYork:  Solid 1/2 flyer that is liable to be proliferating from time to time, if that is useful for your game plan, and also forcing rad counter is solid enough. 2 mana is cheap if this is what you want to be doing.

Marcy: What an annoying card for such a low cost. I think the only thing that stops this from turning a poison/infect deck into a real nuisance is that it does Rad counters first, so it wouldn’t proliferate right away. Still, in THIS deck, this is a great way to start building your rad counters and then selectively growing them.

 

Viridescent Bog

Steel Mentor: When we say Super Mutants are made from dipping humans in FEV goop, we mean literally dipped. This card represents the underground complex beneath Mariposa, and a nice lil’ reference to one of the original Fallout’s most infamous moments: an alternate ending where you can volunteer to be mutated for a non-canon bad ending. Shivers just looking at it.

BPhillipYork:  Well this is filter lands, solid enough.

Marcy: These enemy filter lands are good, simple as.

 

Watchful Radstag

Steel Mentor: Yet another entry of mutant, but otherwise normal animals, the majestic Radstag. Now with a second head to watch for predators, Radstags have flourished in areas such as Appalachia, though some herds have been rendered aggressively addled by the radiation than others and can become quite the invasive threat, as represented here by their numbers growing with each new mutation.

Loxi: I think this card is absolutely bonkers. If you’re playing a deck that can reasonably trigger evolve effectively on curve, this can get out of hand really fast. Obviously requires some buildup, but think of it this way: after one trigger, you played a three-mana spell that generate 5/5 of stats.

I think? I believe the copy won’t have counters, but I’m sure my lovely editor can tell me that I’m bad at Magic here.

BPhillipYork:  Wow this is potentially pretty nasty. Funny to build an elk horde as a deck archetype, but if you are down for it, there you go.

Marcy: This is a potentially scary card in a deck that has a lot of ETB triggers and ability to generate iteratively larger creatures.

 

Young Deathclaws

BPhillipYork:  Not anywhere near as good as the alpha. Fine enough if you want to scavenge onto something else, but there seem to be a lot better ways to generate +1/+1 counters.

Marcy: This card has the potential to be very dangerous, especially in a deck like this that is looking to load up its graveyard with a lot of creatures. Menace is some small protection too, but this could easily grow to being a huge threat, or enabling your other creatures to grow, which might even be more dangerous.

 

Next Time: Hail, Caesar

That wraps up our look at the second preconstructed deck. Join us next time as we review the Mardu Hail Caesar deck, picking out our favorite cards, and talking about the future build-arounds. In the meantime, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.