Hail, Caesar Mutant Menace Science! Scrappy Survivors

Precon comparison · Fallout

Which Fallout precon should you buy?

Hail, Caesar is the Fallout deck I'd buy to play unchanged, and Science! is the one I'd buy to rebuild. Caesar's box carries plenty of creatures for his attack trigger to eat, and his guide asks the least money of the four. Dr. Madison Li's box earns her far more energy than one tap a turn can spend, and that ceiling is what her guide's fifteen swaps go after.

Art, left to right: Alexander Gering, Sergei Leoluch Panin, Zuzanna Wużyk and Kieran Yanner

Fallout's four Commander decks came out on 8 March 2024, and each one is three colours. Three of them play red and white and part ways on the third colour, while the fourth has neither. Wizards of the Coast set no suggested retail price for these four, so neither this page nor the deck pages can judge a box against its price on release day. Here's who each one suits:

• Hail, Caesar (white, black and red), to play untouched. Caesar turns one of your creatures into two attacking Soldiers every time you attack, and 31 other creatures come in the box to feed him. Its guide is the cheapest of the four, and the first change it asks for costs nothing.
• Science! (white, blue and red), for a rebuild. Dr. Madison Li gets an energy counter from each of 36 artifact spells and taps for every ability she has, so she spends it one ability a turn. Its guide lifts that cap and leaves three of the box's nine always-tapped lands, a deeper cut than any other guide makes.
• Scrappy Survivors (red, green and white), for a first Commander deck or a love of Auras and Equipment. Its curve is the lowest here, 2.82, and it wins by attacking. Dogmeat pays out per dressed attacker, though, and the box holds more gear than creatures, which is why its guide adds six bodies.
• Mutant Menace (blue, black and green), for +1/+1 counters and proliferate. Four counter multipliers and eight proliferate cards ship with The Wise Mothman, so his engine is complete on day one. The mana is the slowest in the set, and its guide is the dearest of the four while leaving the curve almost where it was.

Singles and swaps for the four Fallout decks

Singles value is the TCGplayer market price of the printings each box shipped, summed, as of 24 October 2026. It moves every day, and each deck’s own page carries the current figure. Wizards of the Coast published no suggested retail price for any of the four. It stopped listing them in February 2019 and did not resume until November 2024, so there is no release price to set these totals against. None of the four sets a bracket floor: no box has a Game Changer or mass land denial.

What each commander needs the box to keep supplying

Every Fallout commander turns one resource into another, and the resource has to come from the other 99 cards. How well each box keeps its commander supplied is the clearest line between them.

• Caesar needs creatures. Whenever you attack, he lets you sacrifice another creature, and if you do you get two of three rewards: two 1/1 Soldiers with haste that enter tapped and attacking, a card for 1 life, or 1 damage to one opponent for each creature token you control. The Soldiers replace what you spent with interest, and 31 creatures ship beside him. Nothing in this box runs short.
• Dr. Madison Li needs artifact spells, and her box has 36 of them, more than any other Fallout deck. Each one cast gives you an energy counter. The bottleneck is on the spending side. One energy gives a creature +1/+0, trample and haste, three draw a card, five return an artifact from your graveyard to play tapped, and all three begin by tapping her.
• The Wise Mothman needs nonland cards milled, and anyone's mill counts. He gives every player a rad counter when he enters and again each time he attacks, so the whole table starts milling itself on its own turns. Each of those mills hands out one +1/+1 counter for every nonland card it turned up, each on a different creature. He supplies himself.
• Dogmeat needs creatures wearing something. Every enchanted or equipped creature that attacks makes him a Junk token, one per creature, and his box has 24 Auras and Equipment that fit a creature against 18 creatures to wear them. What he needs most is what the box has least of.

Two of the guides spend most of their swaps on that supply line. Science!'s buys Dr. Madison Li a second activation each turn and a copy of each one, and Scrappy Survivors' adds six creatures and drops seven pieces of gear, finishing with 24 creatures besides Dogmeat and 20 attachments that go on one. The other two commanders were never short, so Hail, Caesar's guide spends on cards that reward a wide board and The Wise Mothman's on more ways to add counters and on green mana.

Path of Ancestry in every box, and eleven Temples

Path of Ancestry is one of the seven cards all four boxes share. It enters tapped, taps for any colour your commander has, and you scry 1 whenever its mana casts a creature spell with a type in common with your commander. That rider is worth a lot or nothing depending on who's in charge:

• Caesar is a Human Soldier, and 26 of the 31 other creatures in his box share a type with him.
• The Wise Mothman is an Insect Mutant, and 23 of the 28 others are Mutants.
• Dr. Madison Li is a Human Scientist, and 8 of the 23 others share a type with her.
• Dogmeat is a Dog, and he's the only one in his box.

The guides split along exactly that line. The Hail, Caesar and Mutant Menace guides keep Path, and the Science! and Scrappy Survivors guides cut it.

The scry lands from the Temple cycle make a second test. Eleven ship across the four boxes, and the guides cut seven: both of Science!'s, all three of Hail, Caesar's and two of Scrappy Survivors' three. The Mutant Menace guide keeps its three and finds its untapped lands elsewhere, in a deck that runs 39 lands, the most of the four. Temple of the False God ships in Mutant Menace and Scrappy Survivors with no scry at all and no mana before your fifth land, and both of their guides cut it.

Caesar first, the Mothman last

For most readers, this is my buying order. The exception is anyone who already knows they want to rebuild a deck, who should start with the second.

Hail, Caesar: the engine is fed from the first turn

Almost everything Caesar asks for is printed elsewhere in his box. Feeding him need never shrink your board, because one of his rewards hands back two creatures for the one you spent, and the deck's own token makers keep the supply topped up between attacks. What its guide finds missing is speed and payoff: nine always-tapped lands, and little that rewards a board this wide for being wide. Ruinous Ultimatum needs three white, two red and two black, and the guide cuts it first.

The eleven swaps in its guide came to about $35.80, priced in September 2026 off TCGplayer's market figure for each default printing, the least of the four guides. Ashnod's Altar (about $15.67) and Cathars' Crusade (about $9.36) are the two dear ones. Before any of that it moves one Mountain to a Plains, which costs nothing and lifts white, the colour 34 of the box's spells ask for, off a source count that sits exactly on the line. What it leaves unsolved is {W}{W}: six cards in the finished list need it, and having it by turn three nine times in ten would take 36 white sources against the 25 the deck ends with. The curve finishes at 3.10, down from 3.24.

Science!: plenty of energy, and one tap to spend it with

Dr. Madison Li will bank energy faster than she can use it. Thirty-six artifact spells feed her, and every ability she has needs her to tap, so she gets one use a turn, whether that's a pump, a card or an artifact back. Her five-energy ability wants artifact cards in your graveyard, and the box puts few there early. Its two big graveyard cards, Wake the Past and Open the Vaults, cost seven and six, and her guide cuts both.

That's the case for buying it to rebuild, because its guide's fifteen swaps aim straight at the ceiling. Thousand-Year Elixir lets her use her abilities the turn she arrives and untaps her for {1}, Illusionist's Bracers copies each ability she activates while she wears it, at no extra cost, and Goblin Engineer and Emry stock the graveyard. Six of the nine always-tapped lands go, keeping the three artifact Bridges, and the curve drops from 3.24 to 3.08. Fourteen of the fifteen adds came to $41.41 on the same September 2026 basis (TCGplayer market, default printings). Chaos Warp had no market price, so the real total sits above that, and the Elixir and the Engineer make up over half of it. The guide is also honest about what the lands cost: with fewer blue sources, the chance of two blue by turn three falls from 78.5% to 74.2%.

Scrappy Survivors: the lowest curve, and too few creatures to dress

Averaging 2.82 mana value, this is the cheapest box in the set to cast from, and it wins by attacking, one of the reasons its guide gives for handing it to a new player. The catch is the ratio Dogmeat cares about. Three creatures each wearing one Aura make three Junk tokens when they attack, and one creature wearing three makes one, so the box's 24 pieces of creature gear against 18 creatures is the wrong way round. It also packs Blasphemous Act, Megaton's Fate and Single Combat, three cards that clear your creatures along with everyone else's in a deck that piles its cards onto its creatures.

Its guide's fifteen swaps take out all three and seven pieces of gear, and add six creatures, each with a reason to want Auras or Equipment around: Sram, Senior Edificer and Kor Spiritdancer draw off them, and Ardenn, Intrepid Archaeologist can move gear from one creature to another every time you go to combat. The curve falls from 2.82 to 2.48, the largest drop in the set. The fifteen adds came to $49.32 in September 2026, again at TCGplayer market for default printings, more than half of it Hammer of Nazahn and Bear Umbra, and by the guide's count the fifteen cards it cuts were worth $10.02 together.

Mutant Menace: the engine came whole, the mana came slow

The Wise Mothman's box is already built around him. Hardened Scales and Winding Constrictor add a counter to each batch, Branching Evolution and Corpsejack Menace double it, and eight cards proliferate, which grows your +1/+1 counters and every player's radiation in one go. Of the four commanders, he needs the least help from his guide.

The trouble is speed. The box's curve is the highest in the set at 3.55, it runs 39 lands, and green, the colour of 34 of its spells, has 23 sources, one short of what finds a first green pip by turn two nine games in ten. The thirteen swaps in its guide came to $58.29, at September 2026 TCGplayer market for default printings, the most of the four, and three of them are lands. Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth, the dearest single add at $16.56, makes every land a Forest. The rest go mostly into more counters, led by Master Biomancer at 81 cents, and the curve ends at 3.52, barely lower. I'd buy it for someone who loves counters, knowing the mana is the first thing to fix.

Three boxes in red and white, and one that shares a colour with each

Hail, Caesar, Science! and Scrappy Survivors all play red and white, and add black, blue and green respectively. Mutant Menace is blue, black and green, so it shares exactly one colour with each of the others and neither red nor white with any. No deck's colours contain another's, so a card can only move between two boxes if it's colourless or in a colour both play.

The boxes themselves barely overlap. Seven cards ship in all four: Command Tower, Path of Ancestry, Ash Barrens, Evolving Wilds, Terramorphic Expanse, Arcane Signet and Sol Ring. Seven more turn up in two or three boxes, and apart from Talisman of Conviction every one is a land. No pair shares more than ten cards besides basic lands, and Hail, Caesar and Mutant Menace share only the seven.

The guides overlap more than the boxes do. All three red and white guides add Battlefield Forge, so upgrading two of those decks means buying it twice. Swords to Plowshares ships in Science!, and the Hail, Caesar and Scrappy Survivors guides both add it. Science!'s guide adds Chaos Warp, which ships in Scrappy Survivors. Each box's own guide keeps the card the other wants, so lending it means opening a hole where it came from. Generous Gift is on both the Science! and Scrappy Survivors lists as well.

If you're buying two to play against each other, Hail, Caesar and Mutant Menace overlap least and play nothing alike: one sacrifices creatures to make more of them, the other hands the whole table radiation and grows off every mill.

FAQ

Which Fallout Commander deck is the safest one to buy?

Hail, Caesar. Its commander needs only another creature and an attack, and 31 other creatures come in the box, so it does what it's built to do the day you open it. Its guide is the cheapest of the four as well, about $35.80 for eleven cards at TCGplayer market prices in September 2026, and its first suggestion is to swap one Mountain for a Plains.

Which Fallout precon would make a good first Commander deck?

Scrappy Survivors. Its average mana value is 2.82, lower than any other Fallout deck, and it wins by attacking with creatures wearing Auras and Equipment, a plan that's easy to read from across the table. Know its two flaws going in: it has more gear than creatures to carry it, 24 pieces against 18 creatures beside Dogmeat, Ever Loyal, and Blasphemous Act, Megaton's Fate and Single Combat clear its own side along with everyone else's.

What does it cost to follow each Fallout upgrade guide?

Each guide priced its adds in September 2026, using TCGplayer's market figure for each default printing. Hail, Caesar's eleven came to about $35.80, Science!'s to $41.41 for fourteen of its fifteen (Chaos Warp had no market price, so that one is a floor), Scrappy Survivors' fifteen to $49.32 and Mutant Menace's thirteen to $58.29. The Scrappy Survivors guide adds that its fifteen cuts were worth $10.02 together.

Is there a Game Changer in any Fallout precon or its upgrades?

No. Not one of the four boxes has a Game Changer, an extra-turn spell or mass land denial, so the bracket rules put no floor under any of them, and none of the 54 cards the four guides add is a Game Changer either. Two of those adds search your library, Open the Armory for an Aura or Equipment and Goblin Engineer for an artifact, and neither is on the list. A floor is the lowest bracket a deck can honestly claim, not a measure of how hard it hits.

Do the four Fallout decks have any spells in common?

Barely. Seven cards are in every box: Arcane Signet, Sol Ring, Command Tower, Path of Ancestry, Evolving Wilds, Ash Barrens and Terramorphic Expanse. Seven more appear in two or three boxes, and apart from Talisman of Conviction all of them are lands. No two Fallout decks share a creature, an instant, a sorcery or an enchantment.

Which Fallout decks can lend each other cards?

The three red and white ones, mostly. Swords to Plowshares ships in Science!, and the Hail, Caesar and Scrappy Survivors guides both add it, while Chaos Warp ships in Scrappy Survivors and the Science! guide adds it. Mutant Menace shares a single colour with each of the others (blue with Science!, black with Hail, Caesar, green with Scrappy Survivors), and nothing its guide adds ships in another Fallout box.