How to lose friends and alienate people with Magic’s new group slug Commander deck

No one is safe when Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls spreads his massive, mothlike wings. This is the terrifying reality in the world of Duskmourn, Magic: The Gathering’s newest horror-themed expansion. In the latest collection of preconstructed Commander decks, Magic’s primary multiplayer format, the legendary elder demon is on full display in the red-black deck Endless Punishment, a first-of-its-kind design for preconstructed Commander decks.

“This is a group slug deck. This deck wants to hurt all of your opponents; you are clearly the villain,” said Gavin Verhey, senior game and product designer at Wizards of the Coast, during a recent press event. “You’re damaging all of your opponents at once, making them all discard cards, making them all angry, and you are cackling.”

Although group slug is a familiar strategy among Commander players at large, the Valgavoth deck covers new ground as a preconstructed Commander product.

“We haven’t done a red-black group slug deck before,” Verhey added. “Players have asked us for it.”

For some, group slug might seem part and parcel to Commander’s very identity. After all, a typical game involves four players duking it out in a last-person-standing deathmatch. Any alliances formed are only temporary, and doing equal damage to all players simultaneously can be a nice shortcut to sidestep the politics that emerge during multiplayer games.

As it turns out, for Magic’s design team, having a potential villain in the room also seems to make games a bit better — especially in a biodome, which is what Wizards calls the environment where a release of preconstructed decks are played against one another.

“I led three different Commander products at this point, with Fallout, Bloomburrow, and Duskmourn. […] I started to notice when people play with these [preconstructed] decks together in a biodome, it really helps to have one deck that’s doing its thing,” said Annie Sardelis, senior game designer at Wizards. “Not just solitaring itself, but influencing all three people at once.”

Although this might be one of the first group slug strategies the Magic team has designed as a preconstructed product, the archetype will be familiar to Commander players. Legendary creatures such as Mogis, God of Slaughter or Kaervek the Merciless, which actually appear in the Endless Punishment deck, have been the backbone of previous iterations of red-black group slug decks, and senior game designer Daniel Holt leaned on that archetype history to help shape Endless Punishment.

“For this deck, when we decided it was black-red group slug featuring Valgavoth, I had just built a Hidetsugu, Devouring Chaos deck that was kind of a group slug theme, so I kind of just took my personal deck and tested that at the very first playtest,” Holt recalled. “It was very mean. Maybe a little too mean, so we had to make it play a little nicer.”

By definition, the group slug player can quickly become the persona non grata of a Commander game, in part because the engines behind these strategies often rely on enchantment cards to establish their ruthless game plan. The team behind Endless Punishment chose to revise this approach, both in the cards selected for the product and in the cards designed exclusively for this Commander release.

“When we first start, usually we’ll whip up a brand-new face card design and then say ‘build the rest,’” Sardelis explained. “If this deck feels like it’s missing X or Y effect, maybe we can make that. It’s good to suss out where Magic’s history has its gaps or has its old cards that are really weird.”

As card and deck design unfolded, the Commander team sought to replace some of the classic group slug enablers with cards that would be easier to manage for the deck’s players, as well as their opponents.

“One of the things we’ve done to really help group slug feel approachable is that a lot of the effects are tied to creatures,” Holt explained. “We avoided a lot of enchantments because a lot of decks can’t handle enchantments, or other card types that are hard to deal with for certain colors. But creatures will get wiped away. Most decks can answer them in some form.”

This design philosophy becomes apparent on Barbflare Gremlin, a brand-new creature that appears in this deck, which combines the rules text from two older enchantments, Manabarbs and Mana Flare.

Don’t let the apparent symmetrical benefits fool you, though. While the Mana Flare effect might appear to help opponents as well, this is all part of group slug’s sinister plan. As Holt puts it, “nothing comes for free for other players.”

In a way, this also helps capture the horrific setting of Duskmourn, and tie Endless Punishment back to the overarching theme of the corresponding Magic set.

“In horror, they’re always making people make hard choices, where there is no winning. You’re either losing a limb or Betty’s gonna get it,” Sardelis said. “There’s additional trope space we can play in as well that the setting brings to the game, and we love designing cards to our settings.”

Endless Punishment highlights the potential for this trope space to open doors for more creative design that doesn’t have to be a perfect fit for the overarching group slug deck. Especially if the card is good and impactful by itself.

“Suspended Sentence I pitched originally as top-down ‘the suspense is killing me,’” said Holt. “I just top-down designed the whole text box to be that quote. So that’s why a card like that is in the deck, that doesn’t really fit the theme of the deck. Though it does make a player lose three life, so you’ll get them over time.”

Endless Punishment is one of four Duskmourn Commander decks released worldwide on Sept. 27. Experience the spooky season with this new release of decks at an official Duskmourn Commander Party taking place in local game stores Oct. 4-10 and again Nov. 1-7.

Disclosure: This article is based on a Magic: The Gathering - Duskmourn event held at Wizards of the Coast’s headquarters in Washington state. Wizards provided our freelancer’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.