The Red and White color pair of Magic: the Gathering - commonly known as Boros - has been a somewhat cursed combination of colors for years in Commander.

Ask just about anyone with a Boros-colored deck in a Commander pod and they'll tell you one of a few things. Likely, it'll be themed around Equipment, Auras, or both. These cards were so common, in fact, that Wizards would even poke fun at these kinds of Commanders with an Unknown Event card at MagicCon Barcelona in 2023.

If not those, then odds are it'll be leaning into a super aggressive strategy centered around lots of tokens and going wide. You likely had very little middle ground between these strategies, which made the color pair feel incredibly shallow as a result.

This made Lorehold such a huge breath of fresh air when the original Strixhaven: School of Mages came out. The school focused on history and thus cared about cards leaving your graveyard. When they did, you'd earn various effects that would benefit your gameplay.

No longer could Red-White be only hyper aggressive strategies. You could instead utilize nuance in your plays and your decision making, going as far as making your games turn into a veritable grind.

Lorehold Spirit

Now with the return to Arcavios with Secrets of Strixhaven, we get to see the Lorehold once again.

The history school's Commander deck - Lorehold Spirit - is helmed by everyone's favorite Loxodon, Qunitorius Kand. Since the first Strixhaven, Quintorius's Planeswalker spark ignited during the March of the Machine story. As a result, when we see him here, he is a Planeswalker that you can play from your Command Zone.

As you might expect of a Lorehold Commander, he cares about stuff leaving your graveyard. When this happens, you make a 3/2 Spirit token that acts as a mascot for Lorehold. Quintorius also helps to fill your graveyard in the first place so you can set up to make plenty of those Spirits. Once you have a solid board, his ultimate will let you land a devastating blow.

The concept of this deck is rather intricate and unusual among Commander precons, but this is an awesome strategy for experienced players to mess around with.

Let's take a look at what the list has to offer and go over its concepts.

Lorehold Spirit | Commander | Wizards of the Coast

• Commander (1)
• 1 Quintorius, History Chaser

• Creatures (36)
• 1 Angel of Indemnity
• 1 Anger
• 1 Ao, the Dawn Sky
• 1 Atsushi, the Blazing Sky
• 1 Augusta, Order Returned
• 1 Balefire Liege
• 1 Claim Jumper
• 1 Conspiracy Theorist
• 1 Containment Construct
• 1 Drumbellower
• 1 Excava, the Risen Past
• 1 Guardian of Faith
• 1 Guardian Scalelord
• 1 Hofri Ghostforge
• 1 Kami of Ancient Law
• 1 Karmic Guide
• 1 Kirol, History Buff
• 1 Laelia, the Blade Reforged
• 1 Lorehold Archivist
• 1 Millikin
• 1 Moonshaker Cavalry
• 1 Naktamun Lorespinner
• 1 Quintorius, Field Historian
• 1 Quintorius, Loremaster
• 1 Relic Retriever
• 1 Remorseful Cleric
• 1 Selfless Spirit
• 1 Serra Paragon
• 1 Skyclave Apparition
• 1 Spirit of Resilience
• 1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
• 1 Sun Titan
• 1 Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle
• 1 Vanguard of the Restless
• 1 Venerable Warsinger
• 1 White Orchid Phantom

• Instants (3)
• 1 Lorehold Charm
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Swords to Plowshares

• Sorceries (9)
• 1 Ceaseless Conflict
• 1 Faithless Looting
• 1 Fateful Tempest
• 1 Rip Apart
• 1 Secret Rendezvous
• 1 Seize the Spoils
• 1 Sevinne's Reclamation
• 1 Tragic Arrogance
• 1 Wave of Reckoning

• Enchantments (4)
• 1 Advanced Reconstruction
• 1 Monologue Tax
• 1 Primary Research
• 1 Tocasia's Welcome

• Artifacts (10)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Archaeomancer's Map
• 1 Bitterthorn, Nissa's Animus
• 1 Currency Converter
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Patchwork Banner
• 1 Perpetual Timepiece
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Staff of the Storyteller

• Lands (37)
• 6 Mountain
• 11 Plains
• 1 Battlefield Forge
• 1 Clifftop Retreat
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Emeria, the Sky Ruin
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Fabled Passage
• 1 Fields of Strife
• 1 Furycalm Snarl
• 1 Glittering Massif
• 1 Lorehold Campus
• 1 Lotus Field
• 1 Mistveil Plains
• 1 Radiant Summit
• 1 Rugged Prairie
• 1 Sacred Peaks
• 1 Study Hall
• 1 Sunscorched Divide
• 1 Temple of Triumph
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Turbulent Steppe

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Examining the Decklist

By and large, this deck does what it says right on the tin. You put stuff into your graveyard and then make it leave the graveyard.

Putting cards into the graveyard can seem easy enough, provided you have Quintorius on the battlefield. It might seem counterintuitive to just discard cards and mill cards like this if you're a newer player, but you just have to trust the process on this one. It's all a part of the grand scheme.

From there, there are a variety of ways to get stuff out of the graveyard. You can exile cards for an effect, reanimate them, or just put them back into your hand.

A great example of this is Squee, Goblin Nabob. If you have a copy of him in your hand, you can discard him every turn to Quintorius or some other effect and then put him back in your hand during your Upkeep. When you do, you'll make a Spirit token from Quintorius. Not a bad deal for a card that you'll almost certainly never cast.

The other core element of this deck is the fact that many of the Creatures here happen to be Spirits. By and large, this doesn't offer a major play element for the deck's overall strategies. However, playing into the typal theme just a hair allows you to ensure that your Quintorius ultimate activations will always hit super hard.

I don't plan on covering Spirits in the upgrades for this list, but as you go through and make your upgrades, I'd recommend taking this into consideration. Try finding interesting Spirits that can enhance your strategy as opposed to removing them and taking away such a key aspect.

That having been said, why don't we take a look at some methods for upgrading now.

Upgrading the Deck

This is quite possibly one of the trickier of the Commander precons from this set in terms of upgrading. The reason for this is that playing with the graveyard is such an oddly niche thing for Red and White to be doing. The fact that it's so unusual is what makes Lorehold such an appealing concept in the first place and drew many fans towards it.

On the flip side, though, it is ultimately just that: a niche concept. Cards that put stuff into your graveyard are a dime a dozen, but are often somewhat linear and lean toward Red's color pie. Similarly, White dabbles in returning stuff from the graveyard, but only does so in small doses from time to time. Moreover, it's not really something Red does at all outside of oddball cards like Goblin Welder.

I had such a tough time analyzing the deck to find spaces to improve that I did something I don't always do and did some solitaire play-tests. Usually, I can apply my long-standing knowledge of the game to easily discuss a deck, but this is a weirdo. I had to analyze things like finding ways to get stuff into the graveyard, ways to get them out, and then ways to synergize with them as well.

Putting Stuff Into Your Graveyard

As I played through the deck a couple of times, I noticed something rather critical: I was having trouble getting stuff into the graveyard quite often. A lot of the time, this was because I simply didn't play Quintorius. After all, he is your Commander, so the idea is that you'll play him and churn through your deck.

In practice, though, there are a number of times where you won't be able to utilize him well. Planeswalkers, while cool, are notoriously difficult to keep on the battlefield for long periods of time in games of Commander. If you try to rely solely on Quintorius, you'll likely find yourself unable to cast him again.

One way to go about this is to lean into a variety of cards which allow you to discard and then draw, or rummage. This is the most common type of effect for Red to discard and is a fun means of card filtration.

The problem with this strategy is that leaning too heavily into one-shot effects makes it far more difficult to enact your game plan. You can only fit so many copies of Thrill of Possibility in your deck before it's diminishing returns. Instead, look for the bigger and flashier version such as Thrilling Discovery, Pursue the Past, and Electric Revelation.

You can also find a variety of cards which allow you to rummage repeatedly. Some of these allow you to simply tap to rummage like Rummaging Goblin or Mad Prophet. Personally, though, I'm a fan of Merchant of the Vale. It's a bit more costly, but having the option to repeatedly rummage is huge, especially when you can get the first one as a spell without even having to cast the Creature side.

Graveyard Recursion

One other core aspect of Lorehold is not just putting the cards into the graveyard, but also finding ways to get them back out.

The deck already has a handful of solid repeatable reanimation options. Sun Titan, Serra Paragon, and Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle are all fantastic for this. You even get some less limited options with the likes of Karmic Guide and Venerable Warsinger.

I'd definitely look around to see if you have some more reanimation options to flesh the deck out a bit, but honestly this is a pretty solid mix of cards. There's even pseudo reanimation effects like Lorehold Archivist and Hofri Ghostforge which still enable the "leave your graveyard" clause of Quintorius and your other Lorehold cards.

If I had to recommend one card, though, I'd suggest you try out Adarkar Valkyrie. It's an awesome card that's perfect for Commander, as it allows you to save a Creature from death. When you do so in this way, though, it first hits the graveyard and then re-enters the battlefield from there, allowing abilities to trigger in the process.

Past reanimation, though, I wanted to turn the attention to some mechanics that make using them from your graveyard essential. There's lots of examples of this, including Flashback, Escape, Jump-Start, and Unearth.

Flashback is definitely the most versatile of the bunch. It's frequently cited as one of the best mechanics in Magic period and has repeatedly come back as a result. Cards like Battle Screech, Seize the Day, and Rally the Peasants can be positively back breaking and still lean into your core strategy well.

I'm also a rather big fan of Call the Mountain Chocobo myself. This is a deck that could use more ways to get more mana and being able to search up Mountains while also making a token is huge. If you want to go big with your token making, Increasing Devotion is the way to go, giving you a massive Flashback payoff that can decimate opponents and put you firmly in the driver's seat.

Also, it's a little weird that Tragic Arrogance is in here. That's the sort of card that resets games pretty hard. I'd lean into a softer touch that still wraths the board with Divine Reckoning. This only hits Creatures, but also has the benefit of being a great Flashback tool in your toolbox.

Unique Recursion Effects

While the aforementioned mechanics are going to be your best way to pull cards out of your graveyard, there are some more interesting ways to do so.

One such card I want to make sure I give a shout-out to is Reito Lantern.

This card was once a staple of the early days of Commander as a way to get lots of cards back into your deck but largely seems to have fallen by the wayside. Here, though, it's a great way to fuel your Lorehold synergies while restocking your deck.

The card Reito Sentinel from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty was a fun callback to this. It also fills your graveyard, but I'd caution against playing it over the Lantern since it's a Creature and therefore quite fragile.

The other card that caught my attention as I went through cards was Mimic Vat.

This sweet Artifact allows you to exile a Creature from a graveyard when it dies, allowing you to then make token copies of it. This is great as you can swap between them and if you lack synergy, you can even pull from your opponents' Creatures as well. Personally, though, I'm hoping to skip the Echo cost on Karmic Guide and repeatedly abuse its reanimation effect.

Add More Ramp

Finally, I want to touch on something that may seem a bit obvious. As I tested with the deck, I often found myself casting either fairly irrelevant cards early on (Rip Apart, Kami of Ancient Law) or having bigger spells languishing in my hand.

Red and White aren't colors known for the most amounts of mana ramp. There are a few ways to help here with the likes of Monologue Tax and Bitterthorn, Nissa's Animus, but it's far from the focus. Get a few mana rocks like Boros Signet, Talisman of Conviction, or some Mirage Diamonds.

It might not be much, but every little bit goes a long way in a deck like this even if you add just a handful of additional cards. Better still, if you have an excess of mana then you can discard them to Quintorius's +1 and buy it back with something like Sun Titan later on.

Is Lorehold, the Historian Worth Adding?

As with all of these Secrets of Strixhaven Commander precons, I find myself once again asking if the latest Elder Dragon is appropriate for this deck. It's been pretty hit and miss among the options for the other decks, so how does this Red-White option stack up?

I think it should go without saying just from a cursory glance at Lorehold, but she's definitely one of the options that's better suited to something built around her. What I mean by this is that you want lots of big Instants and Sorceries to cheat on mana using the Miracle-granting effect. Something game-ending like an Insurrection or the like.

This deck just doesn't have the density of Instants and Sorcery cards you'll need to make Lorehold work. It's why this deck doesn't even have the original Velomachus Lorehold in it when all of the other Commander precons have their original Elder Dragons in them. Lorehold herself just is a bit of a non-bo with everything else the deck is trying to accomplish.

I'd highly recommend trying to build something around Lorehold, the Historian. She's a fun Commander that lets you do some truly serious nonsense. Just don't put her in here unless you're trying to add in some seriously high tier spells to your list.

Conclusion

Much like how Lorehold is a much more advanced way to play the Red-White color pair, so too is this deck tricky to play and upgrade. There are a lot of moving parts and it's not as simple as make Creatures and turn them sideways.

This is very much a case where I'd highly recommend getting some reps under with the deck before even trying to change things up. The more you play with it, the better you'll grow to understand what you feel are its strengths and weaknesses. Take some of the concepts and ideas here and apply them in a way that seems the most fun to you.

It's great to see Wizards doing unique and interesting things with this color pair once again. I can't wait for when we get to see them come back to Lorehold once more, and hopefully sooner than later.

Paige Smith

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