The Commander Decks For Nauctis, MTG's New Underwater World, Have Just Surfaced

Nauctis will be the first Magic: the Gathering set on the 2027 release schedule. When Nauctis launches in February next year, players will be able to experience MTG's first ever entirely aquatic plane, as 'the sunken realm of Nauctis' is an oceanic realm teeming with sea life.

Nauctis was announced this July, but details about the set have been scarce in the months since. That all changed today, though, as Wizards of the Coast has now officially unveiled the four Commander decks that will release when we submerge ourselves in Magic's latest world next year. Let's brave the cold waters and take a look...

You may remember blue/red sharks as one of the draft archetypes in 2025's Aetherdrift. Well, now they're back, and they're hungry for blood.

Resuming the tradition started in their first appearance, sharks are a discard deck, enabling you to send cards from your own hand to the graveyard to gain a variety of benefits.

Nauctis expands this discard theme by incorporating blood tokens, just like the Secret Lair Jaws card. Blood tokens can be sacrificed for one mana in order to discard a card and then draw another one to replace it. This fits perfectly with the discard centric strategy that the deck is built around, enabling effects that require cards to be sent into the graveyard while still leaving plenty of cards in the hand ready to be played.

Currently, there are exactly three creatures with the typline 'seal' in MTG: Howler's Heavy, Turtle-Seals, and Tiger-Seals. Nauctis looks set to ramp this number up significantly, with a salvo of seals making their way into the game with the Seal the Deal commander deck.

Seal the Deal brings seals into red and white. It also gives them a political theme, encouraging players to make deals with their opponents, utilising treasure tokens.

Out of all four Nauctis decks, Seal the Deal is currently the most mysterious. While we've had political Commander decks before, like Silverquill Statement and Elven Council, Seal the Deal offers something new. The deck's flavour text states that players will "trade pain for treasure", but whether you'll be encouraging opponents to sacrifice theirlife to generate treasure tokens, or you'll be paying that cost yourself, isn't currently clear.

The unexplored depths of the oceans are filled with all manner of mysterious aquatic life. This is true on earth, but it's even more accurate on Nauctis, where eldritch sea monsters haunt the darkest and deepest corners of the plane.

Terrors of the Abyss is a black, green, and blue deck that will allow daring players to descend into the dark core of Nauctis and call upon the power of the ancient and forgotten things that dwell there. It's a reanimator deck, focussed on getting massive creatures into the graveyard, and then using spells to bring them into play, in the process avoiding the need to hard cast them by paying their expensive mana costs.

This is a deck for aspiring Necromancers looking to bring the most fearsome sea monsters in all of Nauctis under their command.

Just like the seas of Nauctis, the selection of different strategies here has plenty of depth. There's a classic merfolk typal build, a shark deck that loves discard effects, a graveyard focussed sea monster brew, and a mysterious seal-based political precon. We only know the deck's themes at the moment, but full spoilers are inevitably on their way.

In the lead up to the release of Nauctis, we'll cover more information about the set as it comes through. That content will be published here on our blog, but also on the Magic Madhouse Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram pages. You can also scroll down to subscribe to our newsletter in order to get even more MTG updates.