Deck Tech - Marina Vendrell
Break down the door in 5 color budget enchantments!
Deck Techs
$100 decks that are cheap, fun, and competitive.
Total cost: $95.99 (at time of publication)
After a few times of playing an enchantress deck, you will discover a few things:
- You draw lots of cards
- You take lots of game actions
- You may struggle to win.
There have not been many consistent ways to win with enchantress builds that are not just pillow fort until you are the last person standing.
Marina Vendrell is a new commander from Duskmourn that does the first two bullet points extremely well. She can potentially draw you up to 7 cards when she enters and activating her tap ability triggers a lot of other things to happen on the board.
Side note: Watch the excellent Rhystic Studies video on Duskmourn. Apparently Marina Vendrell lived in the house on Duskmourn but was corrupted by Valgavoth and now lives in her own fake reality of sorts? Pretty cool world building if you ask me.
Specifically, Marina's second ability locks or unlocks a room. What is a room? It is a double sided enchantment where, as you cast it, you pick one side to "unlock," immediately getting its effect upon entering. You can unlock the other side anytime at sorcery speed, as a special game action, triggering its other ability. Some are static effects, and others are one time uses. With Marina, for those one time uses, you can re-lock and unlock the same room as many times as you can tap and untap her!
With the release of the Room enchantment type, WOTC gave us a new way to win stapled on a room itself and a few really good payoffs for messing with rooms. There are more ways to win in this deck than in normal enchantress builds, so let us dive in!
Win conditions
With a deck based around rooms, our primary win condition would ideally be a room itself. Thankfully, Promising Stairs answers the call! If you have just 8 unlocked doors, not even 8 rooms, you win the game at the beginning of your upkeep! This means you just need 4 fully unlocked rooms to stick around for this to trigger.
However, once people see a card that explicitly says "win the game" on it, they will likely focus all of their efforts on removing it.
Our backup plan is enchantress aristocrats. With a card like Balemurk Leech on the field, whenever you fully unlock a room or cast an enchantment, each opponent loses 1 life. Grim Guardian and Tatsunari, Toad Rider have similar effects. Once everyone is at a low enough life total, you can finish them off with creature tokens.
Archon of Sun's Grace and Sigil of the Empty Throne generate creatures whenever you cast enchantments.
Using Marina's ability, you can repeatedly create X/X flyers with Misty Salon or 6/6 demons with Ritual Chamber.
Create enough of these flyers and swing in overhead for the win!
Ramp
Our ramp package consists of the usual suspects when it comes to enchantress builds. Herald of the Pantheon, Jukai Naturalist, and Inquisitive Glimmer all reduce the cost of our enchantment spells by 1 generic mana. Inquisitive Glimmer is the new all star because it also reduces our room unlock abilities by 1.
Wild Growth and Fertile Ground are great auras that allow our lands to tap for extra mana.
Sanctum Weaver is busted in any enchantress deck as it will add mana for each enchantment you control.
Moldering Gym is a new room spell that is over-costed Rampant Growth but synergizes perfectly with Marina.
A couple oddities are Patriar's Seal and Composer of Spring. Patriar's Seal untaps our commander, allowing for multiple room unlocks per turn. Composer of Spring is great because, since you will draw tons of cards, your hand will be filled with plenty of lands to put into play when you also cast enchantments.
Card draw
Enchantress decks are known for drawing cards, and ours will be no different!
Whenever we cast an enchantment, Mesa Enchantress, Verduran Enchantress, Satyr Enchanter, Sythis, Harvest's Hand, Eidolon of Blossoms, Enchantress's Presence, and Setessan Champion will draw a card.
A new card from Duskmourn which, in this deck, is an even better engine is Entity Tracker, as it also triggers whenever you fully unlock a room.
In terms of rooms themselves, Locker Room is a Coastal Piracy effect.
Charred Foyer is Outpost Siege part 2.
Derelict Attic is on overcosted Sign in Blood.
Steaming Sauna and Unholy Annex are odd versions of Phyrexian Arena.
Do not forgot that every time Marina Vendrell enters, her ability to put up to 7 enchantments into our hands is basically card draw! This is why there are a few flicker spells in here, Far Traveler and Teleportation Circle, to trigger her ability each turn.
Interaction
Our interaction will be mostly stapled to enchantments.
Bottomless Pool is a bounce spell.
Glassworks can take out 36 of the top 50 commanders on EDHREC.
Grasp of Fate, Ossification, and the new Trapped in the Screen are all variations of each other.
Touch the Spirit Realm pulls double duty as a removal spell but can also flicker our commander.
For board wipes, we have 3 enchantment based ones:
Doomwake Giant is a classic.
Split Up is great because Marina will likely end the turn being tapped, so this can be a one sided wipe.
And Restricted Office is a room itself!
Are enchantments overpowered? They interact with the board, draw you cards, and ramp you. They literally do everything!
Lands
Fitting a 5 color mana base into a $100 budget is pretty tricky. It requires the right balance of basics with enough multi color lands where you are not waiting for, for example, one of only a few blue sources in your deck.
I am a big fan of the Checklands, like Clifftop Retreat, which are lands that come into play if you have a land with a correlating basic land type. And what are some cheap dual lands with basic land types? The original Kaldheim snow lands! Sticking primarily to these two sets of duals, along with some basics, really improves your chances of at least 27 of the 37 lands coming in untapped (this, of course, includes lands like Command Tower and Exotic Orchard).
Outside of the usual suspects like Command Tower, Plaza of Heroes is still cheap enough to fit into our budget restrictions. And because a majority of the cards in the deck are either green or white, adding some extra Selesnya dual lands is helpful in Razorverge Thicket and Horizon Canopy.
One of the best tools on Moxfield is the area that shows the colors your lands produce vs the amount of each color in your deck. This updates in real time so you can see what happens when you change even a single land. It was absolutely invaluable in building this mana base.
Alternate win conditions
It is never good to be without a backup plan. One of the best new win conditions for enchantress is the Gruul commander from Bloomburrow, Bello, Bard of the Brambles.
In this deck, you should be dumping enchantment after enchantment onto the battlefield. Bello can then turn them into 4/4 indestructible creatures (which also draw you cards!). Imagine swinging with 10 4/4s! That is a hefty amount of damage. Best of all, they revert to enchantments on your opponents' turns, saving them from mass creature removal.
Don't get fooled
- You should be wary of cascading into rooms or tutoring for anything based on mana value. In your deck, hand, or graveyard, the mana value for rooms is the combined total. On the stack, the mana value is whatever room you decided to unlock. For instance, Bottomless Pool // Locker room has a mana value of 6 in your hand, but if you unlock Bottomless Pool, you cast a one mana spell.
- Not all rooms work well in this deck. Spiked Corridor // Torture Pit really only works in decks that deal noncombat damage. In this build of Marina, our payoffs are loss of life.
- Sterling Grove is a non-bo. I really enjoy adding Sterling Grove to any enchantress deck because it is both a form of protection and a tutor. However, Marina's ability does target, meaning it can not get around the shroud provided by Sterling Grove.
- Cards like Drumbellower do not work well here, because you can only activate Marina as a sorcery.
Clean up
The only sad part about building Marina Vendrell is that we will likely have to wait a few sets for more rooms, and there are only 28 now. Any potential upgrades to this deck will come from general enchantress cards. Regardless, Rooms are very cool and provide lots of value. I would advise picking these up since the likelihood of them being reprinted any time soon is low!
With 4 ways to win in this deck, venture forth to your LGS and be confident that you have the keys to unlock the win!
