Of all the Marvel Super Heroes Commander precons, Wakanda Forever has the most going on in it. This deck is a wild mish-mash of different elements, offering themes of big artifacts, the Monarch, and go-wide tokens out of the box. While playing such a diverse deck can be rewarding in its own right, leaning harder into a singular theme will likely yield better results.
If you want to do this and fully unlock this precon’s potential, then we’ve created three different upgraded decklists to help you. Whether you want to ramp, leverage the Monarch, or go wide with tokens, the following upgrades can focus MTG Wakanda Forever into your chosen playstyle.
Crushing It With Big Artifacts
One of the best upgrade paths for Wakanda Forever is to lean harder into face Commander T’Challa, the Black Panther, and build the deck out into a full-on artifact ramp list. T’challa provides both repeatable ramp to help you cast your big hitters and a payoff for doing so, so it’s an ideal starting point.
When pursuing this route, the first thing you’ll need is more top-end artifact payoffs, like Portal to Phyrexia. An advantage to blending artifacts and ramp is that you also get to enjoy unparalleled protection, with cards like Krang, Utrom Warlord. Since they can be cast with no issues off of your Vibranium tokens, high-end artifacts like this are the perfect finishers here.
You’ll also want to expand Wakanda Forever’s ramp suite to better facilitate powering your artifacts out, with mana dorks like Delighted Halfling. The base deck ramps mainly through Vibranium tokens, which are excellent, but classic ramp like this should also be added for consistency. Paired with T’Challa, this will let you cast your big threats ahead of time and take control of the game.
Once you’ve got your big artifacts in play, you’ll want to find ways to leverage them for extra value. Blink effects are a great option here, and so are cards like Tune Up that can reanimate your big artifacts post-removal. With effects like this in the mix, Wakanda Forever goes from an all-in strategy to a deck capable of sustaining itself in the long run.
Thanks to this flexibility, upgrading Wakanda Forever in this way should let it perform well in most pods. Where this deck may have trouble, however, is in metagames hostile to artifacts, where cards like Vandalblast and Farewell are common sights. Vibranium tokens being Indestructible helps shore this up somewhat, but you’ll definitely want some protection if your regular playgroup is like this.
Taking Over With Monarch
Another direction you can take when upgrading Wakanda Forever is to double down on the Monarch synergies in the base deck. For this build, T’Challa is the better Commander pick, since the incidental ramp it offers makes casting the often-pricey Monarch support cards easier.
For those unfamiliar with the mechanic, Monarch is all about generating and protecting an emblem that draws you an extra card each turn. Opponents can steal the Monarch if they connect with you for damage, so it’s vital that you run ways to prevent that. Attack deterrents like Ghostly Prison are a good start here, or you can encourage opponents to attack each other with cards like Mangara, the Diplomat.
Even with all the defenses in the world, you’re likely to lose the Monarch eventually, so you’ll also want to ensure you can take it back. Running cheap evasive creatures is a great way to do this, or you can lean on evasion granters like Rogue’s Passage instead. Whether you do it defensively or offensively, securing the Monarch will give you a big card advantage lead on your opponents.
The other major upside to playing a Monarch deck is getting to take advantage of all the Monarch support cards on offer. Creatures like Regal Behemoth offer huge upsides when you’re the Monarch, letting you pull way ahead on board. When paired with the extra draw, it’s easy to dominate games just by holding it for a while.
While a Monarch-focused Wakanda Forever will shine in longer games, it does lag a bit early on. Many of the necessary pieces are expensive mana-wise, which leaves you vulnerable to early rushes and combos. In slower metagames, however, this upgrade will serve you very well indeed.
Going Wide With Artifact Tokens
Of course, you can also build around Wakanda Forever’s other face Commander, Shuri, the Black Panther. Shuri offers both card draw and an Overrun effect on attack, with the caveat that you need a critical mass of artifacts to access each. For this reason, building her as a dedicated Artifact Tokens deck seems the best move.
For this upgrade, the goal is to generate as many artifact creature tokens as possible as quickly as possible, then ride Shuri’s abilities to an early victory. Pair cheap token generators with doublers like Parallel Lives, and six artifacts is a trivial threshold to reach. You can then leverage your board further by generating scaling tokens with cards like Digsite Engineer, to go tall as well as wide.
As with all Token decks, this upgrade has a serious weakness to board wipes, which can undo turns of progress in one blow. You can shore up this weak point to an extent with protection pieces like Heroic Intervention and by simply drawing tons of cards with engines like Skullclamp. If board wipes are king in your playgroup, then this may not be the best upgrade for you.
Overall, while it’s definitely a scattered MTG deck out of the box, Wakanda Forever offers a ton of options for upgrades. If any of the builds we’ve showcased today pique your interest, then picking up the precon will get you most of the way to all of them.
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