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Captain America's precon, Avengers Assemble, has a clear, likable plan: flood the board with Heroes, pile up +1/+1 counters, and swing as a team. The trouble is that the stock deck actively fights its own plan. It ships several board wipes that blow up your own army, its removal is slow, and it runs out of cards right when an aggressive deck needs to keep going. So here are two ways to fix it: an affordable budget pass anyone can build, and a premium baller build if you want to push it. Every swap below is grounded in the official decklist, community consensus, and the card's actual rules text.
How Captain America actually wins
Captain America, Team Leader reads: whenever another Hero you control enters, it gains vigilance and haste, and you put a +1/+1 counter on it and a +1/+1 counter on Captain America. So every Hero that lands buffs itself, buffs Cap, and comes in ready to attack. The plan is simple and strong: go wide with Heroes, snowball counters, and swing. Every good upgrade pushes one of those axes: more Heroes, more counters, a payoff that turns a wide board lethal, and protection so a single wrath does not end the game.
Where the precon is soft
The community flags the same handful of problems, and the packages target each one:
- Board wipes that hurt you as much as them. The precon runs symmetrical sweepers in a go-wide deck, which is self-defeating. The upgrades cut them for one-sided answers.
- No protection for the board. The whole plan is a wide team, so an opposing wrath is devastating and nothing guards against it.
- Slow, clunky removal. The stock interaction is a beat behind what a Jeskai deck wants.
- It runs out of gas. Aggressive decks need a refill engine, and this one is thin on card draw.
- No real finisher. The deck can mostly only grind out combat damage, so it wants payoffs that close the game.
The budget pass
An affordable set of swaps, each one replacing a specific weak card and pushing the go-wide counters plan:
- Skullclamp · card draw is Jeskai's biggest hole. Equip it, the creature dies, you draw two. Because Cap hands every Hero a counter, the toughness hit rarely even kills the creature.
- Shared Animosity · each attacker gets a boost for every other attacker sharing a type, so a board full of Heroes scales the alpha strike hard.
- Vanquisher's Banner (named Hero) · a tribal anthem for your whole team and a card drawn every time you cast a Hero.
- Felidar Retreat · a landfall engine that either makes a body or puts a counter on your entire board, duplicating Cap's payoff on every land drop.
- Path to Exile, Generous Gift, and Chaos Warp · clean, efficient removal to answer a blocker or a problem permanent before you swing.
- Unbreakable Formation · the fix for the precon's worst card, a symmetrical "destroy all creatures." Formation instead gives indestructible to dodge a sweeper, plus a counter and vigilance on your team.
- Basri Ket · a go-wide counters planeswalker: protect a Hero, double your attackers into tokens, and an overrun ultimate. It comes in for the least reliable of the deck's too-many mana rocks.
- Dictate of Heliod · a flash anthem that ambushes a blocker or turns the counter-boosted swarm into a surprise lethal attack.
Those come in for the precon's self-defeating wipes, its slow removal, and a couple of redundant mana rocks.
The baller build
If you want to spend, this is the premium version of the same plan: the best counters payoff, one-sided answers to the exact weaknesses above, real card advantage, and insurance for a wide board.
- Cathars' Crusade · the best on-plan payoff there is. Every creature that enters, including each Hero from Cap's own trigger, puts a counter on your whole board. It compounds go-wide and counters at once.
- Cyclonic Rift · the one-sided reset the deck actually wants, bouncing everything your opponents control while your counter-loaded army stays put. It replaces one of the symmetrical sweepers.
- Esper Sentinel · the premier white one-mana card-advantage engine, patching Jeskai's chronically thin card flow.
- Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines · makes Cap's "whenever a Hero enters" trigger a second time (two counters per Hero and two on Cap) while shutting off every opponent's enter-the-battlefield effect.
- Andúril, Narsil Reforged · colorless and Jeskai-legal, it puts a counter on each of your creatures on every attack, a repeatable board-wide engine that mirrors the commander.
- Teferi's Protection · the insurance a glass-cannon go-wide board needs. Phase your whole team out to dodge a wrath or a lethal swing.
- Jeska's Will · a burst of red mana and three cards of impulse draw, powering a huge multi-Hero turn (red is Jeskai's weakest color for card flow).
- Akroma's Will · the one-sided finisher: turn a wide, counter-boosted board into an unblockable, un-killable alpha strike, or an unbreakable wall on defense.
On lands and mana
Neither package changes the land base, and that is deliberate. A premium three-color mana base is expensive for a low-visibility gain, so both the budget and baller dollars go further on payoffs and interaction. The precon's mana is functional out of the box. If anything it over-ramps, running eight mana rocks for a three-mana commander, so the packages right-size it by cutting the most redundant rocks for threats and card advantage. A full mana-base pass is its own topic, offered as a comment-driven follow-up in the video.
A note on prices
We keep prices off this guide on purpose, because singles move constantly and any number here would be stale within a week. The budget pass is built to be genuinely affordable and the baller build is the premium version. For current, live prices on any of these cards, check them at the store.
Build it
Want the full walkthrough with the reasoning on every card? Watch the video here. When you are ready to build, you can grab the singles at arcanearena.net.
Which precon should we upgrade next? Tell us, and we will put it on the table.
Unofficial fan content. Magic: The Gathering is © Wizards of the Coast; Marvel characters © Marvel. Not affiliated with or endorsed by either. Card and synergy data from EDHREC and Scryfall.