The official Grand Larceny preconstructed deck from the MTG Outlaws of Thunder Junction expansion introduces a stealthy, opponent-punishing strategy to the Sultai (Black-Green-Blue) color identity. Moving completely away from standard self-mill or graveyard recursion layouts, this deck operates as an elite corporate heist engine that treats your opponents‘ libraries as your personal secondary hand. At the absolute center of this calculated operation stands its legendary face commander: Gonti, Canny Acquisitor.
Gonti, Canny Acquisitor completely rewrites how you approach the combat phase and manipulate hidden information:
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The Heist Coordinator: Whenever one or more of your creatures deal combat damage to a player, Gonti allows you to look at the top card of that player’s library, exile it face down, and cast it later. Best of all, it scales across multiplayer games—hitting three different opponents in one swing nets you three stolen cards!
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The Rogue Underwriter: He provides a generic passive discount of less to cast any spell you don’t own, while effortlessly fixing your mana requirements so you can spend your colored resources as if they were mana of any color to play your stolen goods.
In this PreconForge Guide, we will analyze the official out-of-the-box product, sweep away the slower high-mana clones and rock variants, and pinpoint the best upgrades to turn Gonti, Canny Acquisitor into an inescapable card-stealing value engine.
The Strategy: Exploiting Evasive Aggro & Disadvantage
Out of the box, Grand Larceny is a beautifully constructed shell packed with premier high-value staples like Felix Five-Boots, Fallen Shinobi, and Villainous Wealth. However, because it is a multiplayer precon, it still dedicates several slots to slow high-mana theft engines, generic political removal variants, and heavy artifact mana rocks that do not help you get small creatures under enemy shields early.
When optimizing strictly for Gonti, Canny Acquisitor, your goal is to speed up the clock. You want to drop low-mana, hyper-evasive threats on turns one and two that guarantee unblockable combat damage, reliably trigger your commander’s heist mechanic on multiple opponents simultaneously, and immediately drop the table’s own tools against them before they can develop a defense.
Top 5 Cards to Cut from the Official Precon
To optimize your deck’s velocity and focus entirely on a rapid combat-theft and evasion strategy, remove these five lower-synergy cards from your official default decklist:
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Darksteel Ingot: A slow, obsolete three-mana artifact mana rock. Since our strategy relies heavily on casting low-mana unblockable creatures on the first two turns, paying three mana for a generic rock grinds your early-game momentum to a halt.
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Diluvian Primordial: A massive seven-mana avatar creature that relies completely on your opponents having high-value instant or sorcery cards sitting in their graveyards. We want our high-cost threats to consistently push our active heist synergy forward.
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Stolen Goods: A chaotic four-mana sorcery that exiles random cards from a single library until you hit a non-land. Because it is completely random and acts as a one-time sorcery effect, it lacks the precision and repeatability of combat-based theft.
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Bladegriff Prototype: A slow, five-mana artifact creature that requires your opponents to cooperate politically in order to destroy specific targets. This deck wants absolute, dictatorial control over what gets exiled and destroyed.
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The Mimeoplasm: A generic five-mana ooze clone that functions out of graveyards. While a strong card in vacuum, this deck is heavily tuned around stealing cards directly from libraries and attacking with low-power evasive rogues, making graveyard-cloning anti-synergistic.
Budget Upgrades (Under $3 per card)
These highly affordable additions allow you to exploit Gonti, Canny Acquisitor‚s combat triggers to secure premium utility cards and trigger devastating card-theft loops.
The Hyper-Evasive Infiltrators
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Triton Shorestalker: An absolute must-have budget inclusion for this deck. For just a single blue mana, it is fundamentally unblockable, acting as a foolproof asset to guarantee a Gonti card-theft trigger on every single turn cycle.
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Slither Blade: Another premier low-cost creature that cannot be blocked. Dropping these low-profile threats early ensures that the moment Gonti enters the battlefield, you can immediately swing and steal cards without risking your creatures in combat.
Premium Upgrades (The Sovereign Accoutrements)
If you want to inject high-end competitive tools, unstoppable combat modifiers, and foolproof cost-reducers into your deck, prioritize these premier assets:
Elite Combat Multipliers & Enablers
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Felix Five-Boots: The ultimate multiplier upgrade included in the core shell. His unique static ability dictates that if a creature you control dealing combat damage to a player causes a triggered ability to trigger, that ability triggers an additional time—effectively doubling all your Gonti thefts.
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Edric, Spymaster of Trest: A phenomenal legendary asset for widening your resource advantage. He rewards you by drawing a raw card into your own hand whenever your cheap, unblockable creatures successfully strike an opponent, giving you double rewards alongside Gonti’s exile triggers.
Unconditional Mana Base Optimization
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Yavimaya Coast (alongside Underground River and Drowned Catacomb): Upgrading your mana base to ensure you can deploy blue unblockables, green ramp, and black theft cards seamlessly is critical. These efficient dual options enter the battlefield untapped, providing immediate color precision exactly when needed.
PreconForge Verdict: Is it worth it?
The official Grand Larceny precon is an absolute masterpiece for players who love tempo control, combat manipulation, and using their opponents‘ prized win-conditions against them, offering massive staples like Culling Ritual and Baleful Strix straight out of the box. By cutting out the clunky high-cost clones, lowering your overall mana curve, and maximizing hyper-evasive attackers, you transform this split-focus deck into a lethal Sultai powerhouse under Gonti, Canny Acquisitor.
Slip beneath the enemy defenses, pick lock after lock on their libraries, and let us know in the comments below how many of your opponents‘ own win-conditions you managed to manifest on your side of the battlefield!
Are you keeping your Grand Larceny build strictly focused on cheap, unblockable creatures to maximize Gonti’s raw card advantage, or are you scaling up with massive spell-theft enchantments to steal entire turns? Let’s keep the strategy discussion moving forward!
