Doom has arrived to Magic the gathering in an epic way, introducing Doctor Doom, King of Latveria included within the 29 new-to-Magic cards inside the Doom Prevails deck.
The Spotlight commander of this new deck is the one and only Doctor Doom himself. A brand-new card that synergies with villain tribal and discarding cards. Doom pings all opponents for 2 with every discarded land, with a deck to support this it results in large damage to anyone foolish enough to let Doom go unchallenged on the board. Even without support, Doom’s second ability allows a villain (including himself) to connive, resulting in a convenient way to discard. A Doom commander really excels in a deck that loots (draws and discards) or connives. Luckily a lot of villains already do the latter and looting type spells are cheap and easy to add to the deck. Out the box doom is not my recommendation till some changes are made to fully support his mechanics, but even after a few substitutes, Doom becomes a powerful commander.
The secondary commander for this deck is Loki, the Deceiver. Instead of including mechanics related to discarding, Loki solely cares about villains and thus makes for an excellent villain tribal commander. Loki’s attack trigger allows you to create a copy of another villain attacking till the next end step. This lets you get double the value out of large attacking creatures or extra triggers. The downside is that Loki and the copy must attack and without any evasion Loki is a target for blockers. However, if you get through to deal damage Loki rewards you with very good card advantage in return. Overall Loki’s synergy with every villain in the deck makes him the better choice for commander out of the box, and only requires a few evasion additions to make the commander decently viable.
The rest of the deck:
All but one of the creatures in the deck are villains, with many having villain synergy or discard/connive synergy. Unfortunately, this is where the decks biggest problem arises as the deck is split between two archetypes. Connive synergy excels in a Doom led deck but is devalued in Loki deck due to the lack of payoff. Likewise, cards without any discard synergy don't excel in the doom deck. This results in a quarter of the deck not being useful for your commander to synergies with. This makes it out of the box by far the weakest deck of the four-commander decks to play with. I personally recommend deciding quickly which commander you prefer and making changes immediately. After my first game with the deck, I cut over twenty cards to make the deck completely synergistic with Doom. Luckily, most of these additions can be found in the spider-man or marvel set, so if you wish to keep the deck on theme it's easy to do so.
My key additions for Doom:
I’ll be giving here only additions for a doom deck as Loki only requires villains the deck can be tailored as you wish. Doom, however, requires more specialised cards to optimise his usefulness. Firstly, I recommend cutting any card that doesn’t synergise with other villains, discarding or conniving. Cards like The Frightful Four or Helmut Zemo, Mastermind. These are interesting cards but don’t do anything with Doom so are cut. Once you’ve gone through these, I have a list of marvel themed add-ons to replace them with. First, Norman Osborn // Green Goblin. His front side offers cheap and easy connive triggers, whilst his flip side gives your cards a discounted mayhem cost offering a way to play freshly discarded cards out your graveyard at a reduction. Next is Leader super-genius; he allows you to draw every time you connive; in Doom a deck built around conniving his ability allows for incredible card advantage. Finally, there’s M.O.D.O.K, a card that connives at the cost of 3 life, this card is a game-ender if you have copies of Doom out as usually you can out race your opponent's life total. These are the main 3 auto include but more expensive cards like Loki, lord of misrule and Doom variant take this deck to incredible heights. If you wish to expand away from just marvel, a flood of looting cards excel in the Doom deck. Equally discard synergies like monument to endurance also excel.
Whether you build Doom with only marvel cards or expand out to the rest of magic with a couple dozen changes, you can build a very viable deck with great synergy and enjoyable mechanics. The deck also has great upgrade potential over the years and, with multiple marvel sets on the way, new villains to upgrade the deck are not far away.
