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In it’s very first set, alongside the enchantment card type, Verduran Enchantress was printed, and since then, the “Enchantress” has been reprinted and reimagined time and time again. It has a simple effect: whenever you cast an enchantment, you get to draw a card. The enchantment type has undergone significant change, but the simple Enchantress has not.
In sixty card formats, pure enchantress effects are rarely good enough to see play. Commander is a different story. With three opponents and 40 life, enchantress players have plenty of time to build up card advantage, and as an eternal format, Commander has a massive pool of strong enchantments to choose from. The enchantments themselves can supplement your card draw, ensuring you never run out of cards, and even as you reach 10, 12, or 15 mana, you’ll have more cards than you can cast.
Because there are enchantments for any effect you might need, enchantress decks can accrue an ever-growing pile of buffs, ramp, draw, and stax effects until you can finally win. Are you interested? Let’s get into it.
What Makes an Enchantress?
Some MTG players use Enchantress to refer to any enchantment archetype, but I like to specify a bit more. To me, an Enchantress deck is a deck that uses enchantments or enchantment synergies to draw or filter through lots of cards and put lots of enchantments into play. Any commander that draws more cards as you play enchantments can lead an Enchantress deck, but you don’t need card advantage in the command zone if you’re willing to play lots of enchantments that draw cards in your deck.
Traditionally, enchantress decks base themselves in Selesnya. Most Enchantresses are in green or green/white, so a traditional list will want both of these colors. Green provides ramp, additional draw, big creatures, and Overrun effects to help close out games. Some green enchantments give more synergistic benefits while contributing to your ramp and draw. White also provides some draw; more importantly, it gives anthems, creature tokens, and ‘O-Rings:’ enchantments like Oblivion Ring that exile any nonland permanent when they enter, acting as versatile removal while triggering your Enchantresses.
Adding other colors will shape your game plan in different ways. Enchantress is cemented in card flow, and each color gives you a different flavor of that in enchantress decks.
- Blue is the third most supported enchantress color. Duskmourn featured strong Azorius enchantress support in a mono blue enchantress (Entity Tracker). Even without the specific support, blue enchantments provide a massive boost to your card draw. You also get counterspells to protect yourself and disrupt your opponents’ plans, and copy effects to double up your best enchantments.
- Black enchantments can provide great value over time. Stacking up enchantments like Black Market Connections and Unholy Annex won’t be as explosive as a typical enchantress gameplan, but it will still work well. Not to mention, black has some of the most dread-inducing enchantments like Grave Pact, Virtue of Persistence and Necropotence
- Red has little in the way of card advantage, but it’s received a slew of filtering and many recent cards trigger off of “noncreature” spells, not just artifacts and enchantments. Artist's Talent may take some effort to integrate, but it and many more red pieces can be very strong in enchantress builds. You also get rituals for an early burst of mana and sweet staples like Chaos Warp and Blasphemous Act.
Classic Enchantress
Sythis, Harvest's Hand is the gold standard when it comes to Enchantress commanders. In both green and white, it has access to most enchantment payoffs, and most importantly, Sythis is a two mana enchantress. By turn 5, you’ll be drawing two or three extra cards per turn, and as you find more Enchantress effects, that card advantage compounds. Alongside a healthy amount of beatdown, you’ll start to close out the game by turn 7, making this a potent Bracket 3 option.
Sythis is amazing, turning every enchantment you cast into a cantrip, but in an Enchantress deck, you need enough cards to handle three opponents and dig for finishers fast. Playing Enchantress is a speedrun strat when it comes to becoming the Archenemy. Don’t hold back. There are a few common enchantment boardwipe options, but Farewell just became a Game Changer, leaving Austere Command as the only common mono-color option, so take full advantage of your board’s relative safety.
You should be able to squeeze in 40 enchantments or more. There are plenty of cool non-enchantment synergy pieces, but if you can’t chain together enchantments, the deck can sometimes stall out. One easy way to increase your enchantment density is to swap out your removal for enchantments. There is a variety of reliable O-Ring effects, plus two mana options like Darksteel Mutation, Trickster's Elk, Sheltered by Ghosts, and Ossification.
It’s also relatively free to play enchantment-based anthems and finishers. Hallowed Haunting and similar token generators can make lots of power and toughness in short order, but don’t ignore beaters like Nyxborn Behemoth and pump sticks like Ancestral Mask and Ellivere of the Wild Court. These can help you flesh out your board presence and find more consistent kills on players you need taken out.
Sythis is the gold standard for Enchantress decks, but green/white is quite vanilla for the archetype. What other options are out there?
Enchanted By The Fae
If you’d like a more focused creature aggro plan, check out Alela, Artful Provocateur. She’s a four mana faerie in Esper who can help you consistently swing for big damage. Whenever you cast an artifact or enchantment spell, she makes you a 1/1 flying Faerie token, and she gives your fliers +1/+0.
You can build her into artifacts or enchantment, but if you want to swing out, we recommend packing your deck with anthem effects. There’s a wide variety of 2-3 mana anthems in Esper, plus more expensive options with bonus utility. Glorious Anthem is the classic version of this effect, but we also have Glen Elendra Liege and Inspiring Leader that give our faeries +2/+2 and Boon of the Spirit Realm that exponentially scales your board.
We also have plenty of draw effects. Piracy effects, such as Coastal Piracy, are amazing here, letting our fliers draw cards as they hit our opponents. This draw package is less all-encompassing than Sythis, but it still sees plenty of cards. Outside of our piracy effects, our draw engines all cost less than four mana, which lets us get them down before Alela comes in. Mesa Enchantress and Entity Tracker are the only reasonable enchantresses we can play in our colors, but they’re both strong options.
This list is also more resilient against hate. Because some of our anthems are stapled to Faerie typal rather than pure enchantment synergy, we can play through enchantment wipes and hate pieces like Aura Shards. In addition, many cards in this list have several purposes. The Virtue cycle from Wilds of Eldraine are awesome in enchantress lists, Caretaker's Talent draws cards and buffs tokens, and In the Trenches is an anthem that can also remove anything for six mana.
Combining Enchantress with Faerie Typal lets us take advantage of both archetypes’ strengths while decentralizing the weaknesses. Alela is a great commander if you want to build an aggressive Enchantress deck.
Bello, Bard of the Brambles
If Alela wasn’t aggressive enough for you, Bello, Bard of the Brambles is even stompier. Once again, we’re using enchantments for card flow, but Bello accomplishes this even more aggressively than the other two. For three mana, Bello turns artifacts or enchantments of MV 4 or greater into indestructible 4/4 Elementals that draw a card whenever they hit an opponent. Like with Alela, you’ll be stacking combat buffs, and as with Sythis, your enchantments compound your card draw.
Immediately, we’ll insert various anthems and damage doublers. Fiery Emancipation, Gratuitous Violence, Unnatural Growth, and Berserkers' Onslaught double and triple the damage your attacking creatures do. Collective Inferno from Lorwyn Eclipsed is an awesome mana-efficient option here because all of your enchantments are elementals. Other Bello targets can give your attacking enchantments evasion, like Gruul War Chant, Nylea, God of the Hunt, and Glorious Sunrise.
Bello’s effect makes the Overlords from Duskmorn perfect inclusions. Both of them have an effect that activates when they enter and when they attack, like the classic Titan cycle. Setting themselves apart, they can be cast for a reduced cost that removes their creature type for a few turns. Because Bello turns them into creatures anyway, you can cast them at the reduced cost for very little downside. Overlord of the Hauntwoods gives you a land with each trigger, and Overlord of the Boilerbilges deals four damage to any target.
The green Enchantress cards from Sythis are absolutely worth playing, but aren’t totally necessary. Because your card draw is built into the commander, you could opt to play a larger ramp package. With more mana, you can double spell early and worry less about hand size. As an extra bonus, Bello is a removal magnet, and more ramp will help you recast him. Whether or not you add ramp, I recommend running a higher land count. At 42-44 lands, you will make your fourth land drop very consistently.
Best Enchantresses
Before we finish, I want to shout out what I think are the best Enchantress effects. These cards should be your first priority when building an Enchantress deck in their respective color identities.
Sythis, Harvest's Hand of course, is here. A two-mana Enchantress in your command zone is very hard to compete with. Her sheer efficiency pushes out commander options like Tuvasa the Sunlit and Kestia, the Cultivator. Even if she isn’t in the command zone, she should be in every Enchantress deck that includes both green and white.
Argothian Enchantress is expensive, but if you’re willing to pay a premium price, she’s a must-have. For two mana, she’s an Enchantress with Shroud, a keyword that protects her from targeted removal. The only other two mana Enchantress permanents are Elvish Archivist”], who only triggers once per turn, and Kor Spiritdancer and Sram, Senior Edificer, who only draw cards when you cast Aura spells. Her role is invaluable.
These other Enchantresses are efficient, but one costs too much and the other requires green and white. If you don’t plan on playing 10 or more Enchantresses, the most impactful one for your deck might be Eidolon of Blossoms This four mana Enchantress has Constellation, which means it triggers when Enchantments enter, not just when you cast them. This distinction helps blink decks and is especially useful for commanders like Pharika, God of Affliction who make enchantment tokens on command. Even if this doesn’t come up, Eidolon triggers and draws a card on its own entry because it’s an enchantment.
End Step
Enchantress decks are great. Drawing a full grip of cards every turn is such a good feeling, and Enchantress decks are built to do just that. If you like filling your board and your hand with cards, give one a try.
