Enduring Enchantments Precon Upgrade Guide

The headline act for Commander Masters is all the big-name reprints, giving us a much-needed chance to catch up on now-expensive cards from the precon decks of yesteryear. But that doesn’t mean this set won’t keep the cycle going with some flashy new precons of its own! So today we’re looking at Enduring Enchantments, including the best way to upgrade the deck.

MEET THE COMMANDER

It’s rather fitting that this new take on an Enchantment theme be led by Anikthea, who from what I can tell is a new character hailing from the Underworld of Theros. Her exact role as the Hand of Erebos isn’t clear, but given her noble stature and color identity it seems likely she’s a sort of peacekeeper in that strange star-specked land, watching over the common shades.

Of course, a servant of Erebos would also have the right to enter the realms of the living in order to carry out his divine will — and to command the spirits in his keeping when they do…

This cthonic role seems to be spelled out by Anikthea’s unique mechanics, which give us an unusual recursion engine for non-Aura enchantments. Bringing back even one large enchantment for no extra mana would make her a decent combo piece, as Academy Rector demonstrated for many years.

But being able to potentially cheat in a new one every turn makes Anikthea a game-winning threat out of the command zone, almost regardless of the particular cards you’re bringing back. If the Commander player base is only recently getting over its collective fear of Zur, this menacing demigod is likely to bring those old nightmares back at full strength.

I do like that there’s a little extra wrinkle of reanimating the enchantments as 3/3 creature tokens. On the one hand, you could get some serious value out of cards like True Conviction buffing themselves and Anikthea alike. But it also means your opponents probably have a slightly better chance of finding some relevant interaction to take down your Descent Into Madness or Contamination token before it completely shuts them out of the game!

This is a clever little bit of balancing which doesn’t make the card look any less exciting in my eyes. I know there’s plenty of self-mill available within this theme and color combination, so it seems like Anikthea can pretty easily load up the yard with all sorts of potent enchantments to bring back.

There’s a stark contrast between having this commander be your finisher (encouraging “cheating in” large single enchantments) and something like Sythis, despite both being very close in theme. It’s a fun twist, and one which I’m eager to explore further as we upgrade this precon.

That said, I think it’s always important to give the fresh printings some extra attention in our precon reviews. Not only are these new cards a big selling point for the precon, but they are often how the designers telegraph their intentions for the decklist. Let’s take a look.

Narci, Fable Singer

First up, our alternative commander option. Compared to Anikthea, Narci offers a much stronger and more focused deckbuilding direction: she just wants you to play a lot of Sagas.

Since Sagas are among the enchantments most likely to wind up in the graveyard, that seems like a good fit for the playstyle of the Enduring Enchantments precon. If you’re not using her as a commander, Narci should fit right into the 99 of her other Saga-centric Bard, Tom Bombadil.

Battle at the Helvault

Waiting three full turn cycles to get full value out of your six-mana saga can be a brutally long time in multiplayer! That’s why I really like the design here, which front loads the impact of the card like a color-shifted The Akroan War. It’s also another saga that’s very good if you can mess with the number of counters on it, keeping it in play to gobble up more targets.

Boon of the Spirit Realm

Classic “cheat a big enchantment into play” cards like Enduring Ideal or Academy Rector are typically paired with restrictive effects like Overwhelming Splendor, Decree of Silence and Painful Quandary. But because Anikthea specifically reanimates enchantments as 3/3 creatures, we can instead choose to use combat-focused enchantments as her targets and just beat opponents down the honest way.

Boon of the Spirit Realm will be extremely deadly in those builds, as well as other decks with lots of enchantment creatures like Daxos the Returned or Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin.

Ondu Spiritdancer

I’ll quickly stop and shout out the art on this card (and most of the other new ones). Tran Nguyen put together such a dynamic composition and color palette for this powerful Kor!

This rules text is obviously incredible, although you might need some slight deck building awareness to make sure your enchantments actually benefit from being copied. The mana cost is also a little high, but both ramp and reanimation are well within the effects we can get from our enchantments, so I’m not concerned.

Cacophony Unleashed

This suspiciously-Sliver-looking thing is a fun mechanical throwback to the old megacycle of Hidden/Veiled/Opal “enchantment creatures,” as well as Halcyon Glaze and Daxos’s Torment more recently.

Seven mana is a lot, but still a fair rate for “board wipe everyone else” if we think we can get there. It’s sad you can’t get the ETB if you reanimate this with Anikthea, but at least the second trigger overrules the 3/3 stats she gives it to make the token a little more threatening.

Demon of Fate’s Design

This card, on the other hand, is extremely beneficial to reanimate early! These “pay life rather than mana” effects are really starting to creep into black’s toolkit with greater density, which I’m sure will please our Willowdusk and Mortarion players to no end.

In this precon, Demon of Fate’s Design is important for helping to cast cards like Cacophony Unleashed when we don’t want to just toss them in the yard. I wish the sacrifice ability cost a little less mana, but it’s still nice to have it if we really need it. Great card.

Ghoulish Impetus

A somewhat less grandiose enchantment here, but certainly a very fun effect! Ghoulish Impetus is a souped up version of the Vow cycle — either preventing a dangerous combat threat from attacking you or forcing a fragile utility creature to repeatedly risk itself in combat.

Only this time, deathtouch virtually ensures carnage for both the attacking and blocking opponents AND you get your Ghoulish Impetus back to haunt another target! We can’t recur this with Anikthea (it’s an Aura), but it’s cheap enough to cast and will definitely get you value for mana if you get it out early.

Composer of Spring

Another enchantment-focused Bard to warm my heart, and I really dig the sound this one is laying down. Constellation triggers are always going to be extra-valuable with a deck that can cheat enchantments in for free or create enchantment tokens, and the payoff here is very potent for just a two-mana setup cost.

The main bottleneck on the Composer’s power will be drawing enough cards to fully utilize the triggers. A traditional Enchantress deck may have the edge in this regard, but this is still very good in the stock precon list.

Nyxborn Behemoth

Enchantment decks can access a very nice range of threats these days, but I admit we were not able to simply field a very big dog — until now! A 10/10 indestructible trampler is not the most efficient way to murder three other players at the Commander table, but it will dominate combat early on and has some sneaky utility besides.

And not only does it serve as a sac outlet, but the large printed power and cost are useful with Greater Good and similar effects that care about those properties.

IMPROVING THE DECK

In such a well-supported and broad theme as “enchantments matter,” we have a ton of potential options for how to modify this precon. But I think the default commander-centric game plan here is intriguing enough to stick with for a little while, so I’m just going to give advice on how to refine that.

First, we should identify any obvious cuts: cards that aren’t really a close fit for our theme, or which seem to not match our desired power level for multiplayer Commander. The following is what I would cut:

Narci, Fable Singer
Mesa Enchantress
Verduran Enchantress
Kodama’s Reach
Farseek
Rampant Growth
Arcane Signet
Cunning Rhetoric
Love Song of Night and Day
Omen of the Sun

I know, I know — what a betrayal. Not only am I, the avowed Enchantress fan, advocating that you cut the Enchantresses, I’m advocating you cut recurring free card draw from your Commander deck! But it’s just a sign that we’re building a new and different kind of enchantment strategy here.

I don’t think we cast enough cheap enchantments to really want to slow down and play a three-mana 0/2, let alone cards that don’t contribute to our enchantment count and get killed by our own sweepers. Anikthea wants us to look for constellation triggers over cast triggers, and individually impactful cards over a tightly interdependent synergy engine.

Overall, very few of the cards in this precon actually feel bad or out of place (Narci and Love Song of Night and Day being my exceptions). That means that how many cards you cut really depends on how many good upgrades you think you can find.

For instance, I’m only recommending Farseek and the other land ramp be cut because we have the option to play Wild Growth, Utopia Sprawl, Carpet of Flowers and other enchantment-based ramp that actually synergizes with our deck. Even if you can’t reanimate the land auras with Anikthea, they’ll still trigger constellation, Enchantress’s Presence and other sundry effects.

Besides just straight upgrades to existing cards, we really need to add effects that load the graveyard for Anikthea. Yes, the stock list has a bunch of enchantments you can play for value and then sacrifice. But trying to get cards to the graveyard by going through the battlefield is like traveling by ocean liner when international flights exist.

If we want to reliably generate early token copies of Sandwurm Convergence and Mirari’s Wake, we’re going to need a serious commitment to discard and self-mill. Here are some possible grave-fillers at different price points.

$2 or less:

$10 or less:

More than $10:

Some of these effects are quite polarizing, and including them most likely involves tweaking the overall direction of the deck to ensure you can make best use of them. Solitary Confinement demands reliable draw engines while Midnight Oil and Manabond represent much heavier commitment to playing from the yard over the hand.

The self-mill sagas are probably a more moderate option to start with, along with the beautifully-illustrated Torment cycle of Hypochondria, Mortiphobia and Narcissism. These cards are all trying to ensure we can really get the most juice for our squeeze when Anikthea triggers. So next, let’s see if we can identify a few more high-value enchantments to be our 3/3 zombie payloads.

$2 or less:

$10 or less:

More than $10:

I honestly wasn’t sure about even making recommendations for payoffs here. Basically, any huge enchantment is going to feel good when you cheat it in for free. Plus, getting to be the kid in the metaphorical candy shop, picking out pet finishers is half the fun of this sort of deck! But I’ll still take a moment to pick out some broad categories to look into.

The luxury option here is to play Doubling Season and its various cousins, which have a power ceiling like nothing else in this deck. If you’ve never personally controlled 12 token copies of Legion Loyalty, which are all themselves creatures (with 12 instances of myriad), that’s something you now have the chance to try! Of course, the dollar price of these cards might be a little rich for your blood, in which case Growing Ranks and Song of the Worldsoul make good stand-ins.

Even if you aren’t doubling up on Anikthea’s tokens, you can still pump up their combat potential — both with normal combat enchantments and a few Zombie-specific ones like Liliana’s Mastery or Necromancer’s Covenant. You can then protect your army with Privileged Position, Greater Auramancy or Steely Resolve.

Necromancer's Covenant — Necromancer’s Covenant

If your metagame is more powerful or combo-centric, however, you’ll probably want to stick with the kind of disruptive and interactive enchantments I hinted at earlier: Leyline Binding, Contamination, Ritual of Subdual, Rule of Law, Stony Silence, Painful Quandary, Suppression Field and so forth.

Most of the important,early upgrades I would make to this deck can be neatly lumped into either graveyard enablers or enchantment payoffs. You just need to decide on which subthemes suit your taste and wallet.

Fortunately the underlying chassis of the deck is flexible enough that you can’t really go wrong, so I recommend experimenting with a few different builds before you settle on your personal favorite.

End step

I’m always very excited to see new enchantment-focused cards in the game, even if it doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to poach any of these for my Legacy Enchantress deck. Most of them do offer a lot of power in Commander, and of course Anikthea is the pick of the bunch (as she should be).

Enchantress's Presence — Enchantress’s Presence

Eidolon of Blossoms — Enchantress’s Presence

Sitting at the junction of grindy, recursive midrange; aggressive self-milling and even weird enchantment-creature aggro gives this precon an amazing range of potential customization. It’s able to pivot into almost any playstyle you can think of while sticking to its enchantment theme.

It’s as good a product as I can imagine when you’re adding to the legacy of such a storied archetype — something that will hold its own alongside its forebears and help to define that legacy for years to come.

Tom Anderson

Tom’s fate was sealed in 7th grade when his friend lent him a pile of commons to play Magic. He quickly picked up Boros and Orzhov decks in Ravnica block and has remained a staunch white magician ever since. A fan of all Constructed formats, he enjoys studying the history of the tournament meta. He specializes in midrange decks, especially Death & Taxes and Martyr Proc. One day, he swears he will win an MCQ with Evershrike. Ask him how at @AWanderingBard, or watch him stream Magic at twitch.tv/TheWanderingBard.