Hey cowpokes! Welcome back to another precon guide here on EDHREC. We’re digging through the preconstructed decks from the new Western-themed Magic set Outlaws of Thunder Junction to see which ones strike it rich, and which are merely fool’s gold. Today we’re checking out Quick Draw, the blue and red deck led by Stella Lee, Wild Card.

Who Are the Commanders for Quick Draw?

Stella Lee is a 2/4 Human Rogue for three mana that exiles the top card of your library when you cast your second spell for the turn, and you can play that card until the end of your next turn. You can also tap her to copy an instant or sorcery spell you control, but only if you’ve cast three or more spells this turn. So….Storm deck? We should expect a lot of cheap spells, and ways to cast cards for free or discounted.

Our backup commander is Eris, Roar of the Storm, a 4/4 Elemental Warlock for ten mana. Yes, ten mana. But they cost two generic less for each different mana value among instant and sorcery cards in your graveyard. They have flying and Prowess, and make a 4/4 Dragon Elemental token with flying and Prowess whenever you cast your second spell for a turn.

Here’s the full list for Quick Draw:

What Are the Themes and Strategies of the Deck?

This deck is basically a “greatest hits” of Spellslinger precons. The two biggest themes are card draw and tokens, with a little bit of copying and direct damage sprinkled in. 

Let’s start with the draw. The deck has over 20 cards that are meant to get you more cards to play with. We’ve got the usual suspects of one-mana card draw, with Opt, Ponder, Preordain, and Serum Visions. These are crucial to get you to the three spells in a turn that you want for Stella’s spell copy payoff. But if you find the well running a bit dry, there are also some big-mana card draw spells, like Finale of Revelation, Dig Through Time, and Treasure Cruise.

These big-mana spells may take up a whole turn, but they’re great for making flying Sharks with Shark Typhoon, the best token-maker in the deck. Of course, we can’t have a Spellslinger precon without Young Pyromancer, Talrand, Sky Summoner, and Murmuring Mystic. We even have the more recent Third Path Iconoclast. And of course, there’s our backup commander, Eris, Roar of the Storm.

These token-makers aren’t the only cards getting triggered off of our spells. The Magecraft ability from Strixhaven is making a big return here, with inclusions like Archmage Emeritus, Octavia, Living Thesis, and Veyran, Voice of Duality. Veyran has a huge impact on the deck, doubling all the Magecraft triggers, in addition to other instant and sorcery triggers like Electrostatic Field and Guttersnipe.

Even our ramp suite is benefitting from Magecraft, with Storm-Kiln Artist making Treasure tokens. The rest of our ramp suite consists of classic mana rocks, as well as cards focused on making our instants and sorceries cheaper, like Goblin Electromancer, Haughty Djinn, and Kaza, Roil Chaser. And to help with casting extra spells, we’ve got Rousing Refrain, which recasts itself every three turns from exile with its Suspend ability. Starting your turn with a free spell and free mana is a big way to get to Stella’s payoff.

How Do You Play Quick Draw?

The deck’s goal is obvious: cast at least three spells each turn. Sounds easy right? Well, no. Not really. At least, not with the package we’ve been given in this precon. Although, to be fair, most decks would have a hard time doing that before turn seven or eight.

So how do we set ourselves up for success with this deck? Focus on starting hands with low-mana cards. Ramp is particularly important, since we can’t cast multiple spells without it. Starting hands with cheap cantrips like Opt and Ponder is also crucial, since you need those cheap spells to get yourself to multiple spells a turn, while also keeping your hand full. But don’t cast them on your first turn! You wanna hold onto those cantrips for when Stella’s on the board. Start with your ramp, get Stella out, then play the cantrips into other spells. 

Even with a stellar opening hand, don’t expect three spells a turn anytime soon. It’s just not possible in the first few turns. But, thankfully, Stella also gives us impulse draw on our second spell, so she’s certainly not useless if we’re not storming off.

How does the deck win? Honestly, I’m not totally sure. We’ve got seven cards in the deck that make tokens. At the top of that heap is Eris, who makes 4/4 flyers with Prowess, and Shark Typhoon, which makes X/X flyers. Flying tokens is certainly one way to victory, but that’s just two cards in the deck, with no way to tutor for them. The 1/1s you get from Young Pyromancer and Third Path Iconoclast will be nice for blocking, but you’re not likely to amass enough to win a game with them. 

So you need additional ways to lower opponent life totals. This will come in the form of Guttersnipe, Electrostatic Field, and Niv-Mizzet, Parun. Direct damage will help you get life totals low enough for your tokens to sneak in to knock out your opponents.

The hard truth here is that you’ll never have enough mana with this deck. It’s simply not designed to make excessive mana, even though that’s what it needs to fulfill the promise of its commander. So even if you can’t get the three spells, it’s not the end of the world. Both Stella and Eris are perfectly happy if you can cast just two in a turn, which is a much more realistic goal. And don’t overextend yourself to three spells if it’s not worth the payoff, or leaves you without the mana to remove an incoming threat.

What Are the New Cards in Quick Draw?

In addition to the two legends, this precon comes with eight new cards, plus three bounties. Surprisingly, five of the eight new cards aren’t instants or sorceries.

Thunderclap Drake reduces the cost of our instants and sorceries and can sacrifice itself to copy an instant or sorcery for each time we’ve cast a commander. Casting Stella multiple times in a game is certainly not where we want to be, but having more options for spell copies is welcome. Crackling Spellslinger comes in at instant speed and gives Storm to the next instant or sorcery spell we cast the turn it comes in, but only if we cast it. The problem here is that this creature costs five mana. So you not only have to either cast, or hope for an opponent to cast, multiple spells in the turn, you also have to have five mana available to cast Spellslinger, plus whatever it costs to cast another spell, which is hopefully a really good one. If we were making infinite mana, this might be good. Otherwise, it’s gonna be a tough job to make it do more than just make a single copy of out next spell.

How about some artifacts? Smoldering Stagecoach is a Vehicle with Crew 2 and its power is equal to the number of instants and sorceries in our yard. When it attacks, our next instant and sorcery (can be one of each) get Cascade. So, for example, you could cast a sorcery, and if that Cascades into an instant that instant spell will also Cascade. Otherwise you can certainly hard cast both types. This is an excellent way to get us casting more spells without expending our obviously limited sources of mana, and easy to Crew with creatures we don’t want to send into combat, like Archmage Emeritus or Veyran, Voice of Duality.

Leyline Dowser mills us for one card, and if it’s an instant or sorcery card we can put it in our hand. We can also tap an untapped legendary creature to untap it to repeat this. I’d like it a lot better if the activation was free, but this can be a pretty significant source of card draw if we’ve got extra mana and untapped legends at the end of our opponents’ turns. There’s also Forger’s Foundry, which taps for a blue, and if it’s used to cast an instant or sorcery with MV three or less, we exile that card instead of putting it into the yard when it resolves. Then we can pay five and tap it to cast any number of cards exiled with it without paying their mana costs, but only at sorcery speed. Yeah, this is one way of getting us to three spells in a turn. But it’s so cost and time intensive, I’m just not sure if, as they say, the juice is worth the squeeze. I’m sure it can lead to a huge blowout if you get it going in the really early game, but it’s probably dead after turn six or seven.

Onto the nonpermanents. First up is Lock and Load, which draws you cards in a quasi-Storm fashion. Obviously the goal with this is to Plot it early so you can cast it later for free when you already have a high storm count. But the problem with it is the high Plot cost. Four mana to exile this means that’s likely all you’re going to be doing for that turn. Spending your third or fourth turn Plotting a spell feels really bad at a point in the game when you should be building your board. You’re probably better off just holding onto it for the late game when you have a lot of mana and hard casting it for three.

Pyretic Charge also has a Plot cost of four, but in this case the alternate cost is cheaper than its regular cost. The spell discards your hand and draws you four cards, then boosts your creatures +1/+0 for each card you discarded. For the deck’s token strategy, this is a huge boost, but I think it’ll be better in more dedicated go-wide decks. Speaking of tokens, our last new card is Elemental Eruption, an almost color-shifted Hunting Pack. Obviously this is much better than the green spell since it’s one mana cheaper and gives you flyers with Prowess. But, as with Hunting Pack, it’s a big ask to put Storm on such an expensive card. It just feels like the deck is once again asking us to have more mana than it’s giving us. Still, if you can chain Opt into Ponder into this, you’ll have three 4/4 flyers for six mana. Not a terrible ROI. Could see potential play in Dragon decks with Dragon Tempest.

But wait! We’ve still got some bounties to talk about. For a full explanation on this mini-game, please see my review of Desert Bloom, where I went into full detail on how to use these extra cards.

As with the other Thunder Junction precons, this deck gives us three bounties. They are:

• Rissa “Blades” Lee - if you cast an instant or sorcery this turn while you had two or more instant or sorcery cards in your graveyard, collect
• Sleepy Sovka - if you cast no spells this turn, collect
• Miron Tillas Jr. - if the opponent to your left was dealt combat damage this turn, collect

Is Quick Draw Worth Buying?

Is this deck any good? Here’s my final grade:

C

This is a pretty cookie-cutter Spellslinger precon. Honestly, I could’ve told you before they released the deck list that this precon would have Young Pyromancer, Murmuring Mystic, Guttersnipe, and Talrand, Sky Summoner. It’s disappointing to see Wizards revisiting the same old cards every time they make this kind of deck.

The big problem with Quick Draw is that while Spellslinger is a strategy, it isn’t a win condition in itself. You can play spell after spell after spell and all you’ve really done is draw a few cards and make a few 2/2 Drakes. A handful of flying 2/2s can be nice to have, but they’re unlikely to win the game when you’re trying to kill three players. This deck doesn’t seem to understand that, and it’s a bit all over the place because of it. There’s tokens, and there’s direct damage, but neither is significantly present enough to ensure victory. You’ll have fun playing the deck, but you’ll be left wondering how it ends games while your opponents are swinging massive creatures at you or draining your life with a Gary.

There’s also the contradiction of cards wanting instants and sorceries in the yard (Eris, Roar of the Storm, Octavia, Living Thesis, Smoldering Stagecoach), and other spells wanting to take them out (Treasure Cruise, Bloodthirsty Adversary, Dig Through Time, Arcane Bombardment). This isn’t always a huge problem, but can certainly impact things when you wanna cast Eris, but you just emptied your graveyard with Dig Through Time.

The new cards are a mixed bag. Some of them will find homes in other Commander decks, but are just okay here (Pyretic Charge, Forger’s Foundry), while others are just too costly for a deck trying to be efficient with mana (Elemental Eruption, Crackling Spellslinger).

On the plus side, these commanders are really good. Stella Lee is efficiently costed so she can come out early, with a strong defense for blocking and built-in card advantage, while Eris gives you one of the deck's few ways to actually hurt your opponents. The grade is also helped by the reprint value, with some great inclusions like Veyran, Voice of Duality, Shark Typhoon, Archmage Emeritus, and Bloodthirsty Adversary.

Can I make this deck better? Find out in my Upgrade Guide. And keep checking back for more precon guides here on EDHREC.

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