Upgrading Commander Precon: Eternal Might (Temmet, Naktamun's Will)

Was I the only one who wanted a good, old Zombie deck again?

Aetherdrift gave us two new Commander precons (if you'd like to see them, click here).

In this article, we'll show you how to upgrade the Esper precon in this set, which uses Temmet, Naktamun's Will as the commander. At the end of this article, we'll also show you an alternative list with this commander.

Commander: Temmet, Naktamun's Will

In life, Temmet was a cleric and vizier of Oketra in Amonkhet. In Aetherdrift, we found out Basri was looking for his body because he wanted to bring him back to life. His hope was that Temmet would know how to bring back Oketra and that she would help unite the people of Amonkhet.

Temmet, continuing the good work he did in life, left his sarcophagus to command this deck and buff all creatures in his path to victory.

This deck's sub commander is Hashaton, Scarab's Fist, a legendary card that was the topic of many debates in the spoiler season, and stood out to Zombie fans.

Besides these two, this list includes:

Temmet's ability states that, whenever you attack, you'll draw a card and then discard a card. Whenever you draw a card, Zombies get +1/+1 until the end of the turn.

As this is a Zombie precon, we will play many strong interactions with our graveyard to make this deck even more recursive, and Reanimate our creatures.

On the other side, this list is built around the buff our commander gives to our creatures whenever we draw a card. So, the idea is to defeat our opponents with just a few attacks, and extract as much as we can from Temmet's effect.

Card Draw

The precon includes some card draw:

These are good choices, but they can be better.

Cards Added

Luckily, there are many cards in Magic: The Gathering that draw a considerable number of cards in one turn. With Temmet in play, any one of these spells can be a way to finish the game.

These spells are known as wheels. We added a few of them as well as other incredibly interesting spells to this deck.

I'd like to highlight Whispering Madness, a sorcery that has Cipher. Thanks to this ability, we can exile this spell encoded in a creature under our control. When this creature deals combat damage, we'll be able to cast a copy of Whispering Madness without paying its cost.

Cipher only happens after combat, after all the damage that turn has been dealt and resolved, but it will give us a free spell that, in turn, will get us more resources from our deck.

Another important card is Echo of Eons, which, besides drawing seven cards, also shuffles our graveyard back to our deck, and has Flashback.

Now, about wheels: casting any one of them before combat will buff your Zombies, so, with them, they'll really hurt our opponents.

These cards interact really well with other cards as well:

Archfiend of Ifnir puts -1/-1 counters on each creature our opponents control whenever we discard or recycle another card. Depending on which spell we cast, this can clear all enemy boards entirely, including indestructible creatures like Toski, Bearer of Secrets.

Yes, our deck's sub commander!

When we discard a powerful creature, like Grave Titan or Rot Hulk, we can use Hashaton, Scarab's Fist's ability to create a token copy of that creature - but it will be a 4/4 Zombie.

Teferi's Ageless Insight makes any card draw even stronger. By itself, this enchantment doesn't do much, but, if it is in play when we draw seven extra cards in a turn, it will draw us 1 extra card for each time we draw, so we'll draw 14 cards in total.

Cards Removed

To open some space in the original list, we needed to let go of a few things that don't have a lot of synergy with the rest of the cards.

We removed:

Interesting Zombies

We're talking about a Zombie deck. The original list already plays powerful cards that interact with these creatures, but we can add even more.

Cards Added

Besides the Zombie queen, Varina, Lich Queen (which we mentioned when we discussed card draw), we added another incredibly popular commander to make this deck even more fun: Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver!

If you'd like to see more about Wilhelt, click here.

Wilhelt creates Zombie tokens with Decayed whenever we attack with Zombies that don't have Decayed. In the ending phase, we can sacrifice a Zombie (any Zombie) and draw a card.

By itself, Wilhelt will draw us extra cards and creates tokens we won't mind losing.

This is the type of creature that goes in play and makes all our opponents upset.

Besides buffing Zombies, this lord also gives them Deathtouch.

Imagine attacking with the tokens Wilhelt creates and forcing our opponents to make a difficult decision: they can either take damage or lose a considerable part of their board to creatures that aren't that relevant to us - yet they kill their creatures if they deal even a single point of damage.

This list might not play many legendary cards, but it does play Ratadrabik of Urborg, which gives Vigilance to any Zombie under your control. As we want to attack with them constantly, this keyword will be critical - it will give us blockers.

Cards Removed

After we reviewed the synergies in this deck, we decided to remove the following cards:

Enchantments

The original precon includes four interesting enchantments that are very useful to Zombies, but we decided to add cards that help the entire strategy in different ways.

Cards Added

Rooftop Storm is essential in any deck centered around Zombies. It lets us cast any Zombie spell for no cost at all.

As this list plays many nonlegendary creatures and a few creatures with incredibly cool ETBs, Necroduality is also essential in this list.

Finally, we added the classic Smothering Tithe to create more mana and remove some resources from our opponents, as, with this card, they'll have to pay mana to prevent you from creating a Treasure.

Cards Removed

Honorable Mentions

In other decks, Wand of Orcus is a generically great equipment card if you want to fill your board. In a Zombie deck, this artifact truly shines. To add it to this list, we removed God-Pharaoh's Gift.

Living Death is one of the best black boardwipes around. To add it, we removed Commence the Endgame.

Upgraded List

This is our final list:

The list above includes fun interactions with extra draws so you can buff your Zombies, but this one focuses a lot more on creating and interacting with tokens. With this list, your table will have no choice but to face a Zombie apocalypse.

The original precon already creates a considerable number of tokens, so we just added cards that multiply that, like Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation and Anointed Procession. With them, you'll create a lot more tokens from each creature.

A new commander for Zombies is really great, particularly one that includes abilities as valuable as card draw and buffs.

Unlike Varina, Temmet has Vigilance and Menace, two critical keywords for any commander. And, because this is an Esper commander, we can play the best Zombie support released so far with it.

What did you think of this list? Tell us your thoughts in our comment section below.

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!