Bring the Budget Beats to Standard MTG with Selesnya Enchantments

Budget Standard Selesnya Enchantments by Darren Magnotti

Buy This Deck

 

The Deck

Selesnya Enchantments is, as the name implies, an enchantment-based midrange deck that looks to take advantage of the many synergies rewarded from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty to those willing to commit their entire deck to an enchantment theme. The deck tries to ride the line between aggressive beatdown deck and value-oriented control, and is capable of drawing nearly as many cards as it can deal damage over the course of a game. This is one of those decks that relies on inevitability to get over aggressive opponents, so drawing all of those cards just serves to get us to that crucial endgame point quickly and reliably.

Enchantments is one of those classic examples of “the midrange deck that beats other midrange decks.” In a world where white and black decks are the vast majority of your opponents, it just makes sense to try and play the versatile yet naturally resilient option that can keep pace with most of the answers available. Like similar decks before it, Enchantments can also generate such a wave of value that opposing midrange decks won’t be able to keep up even if their answers do line up well against what we’re up to. This puts Enchantments in a spot to pounce on the metagame, something that it’s started to do with regularity lately.

The Aggro Plan

Enchantments can be split fairly evenly into two segments: the aggro plan and the value plan. The aggro plan starts off at the bottom of the curve in the one-drop slot with Generous Visitor, arguably one of the most bizarrely aggressive creatures available in the format right now. Visitor plays a pivotal role in this deck, creating large threats over time either of itself or of its teammates. There isn’t realistically a turn where we won’t want to be casting an enchantment, which means that Visitor will be distributing at least one counter per turn, frequently two or three. To help facilitate this, Jukai Naturalist enters the fray to make all of your enchantments cheaper. Naturalist reduces the cost on 22 cards in the deck, which can lead to a significant mana advantage over the course of a few turns. Staple on some lifelink just to rub Mono-Red’s nose in it and you’ve got one amazing cast member that wears Visitor counters well.

The upper half of the aggro plan comes in the form of Hallowed Haunting and Katilda, Dawnhart Martyr. Katilda is honestly the backbone piece of this deck. On the front face, she’s a massive flying beater of a threat who scales up further and further the more the opponent allows your board state to develop. Then as if that weren’t enough, she can also bestow that ability onto any of the other creatures in play in the mid to later turns. She’s the best win condition available to the Enchantments player, and the game will instantly become all about her as soon as she resolves. Haunting, similarly, will generate an endless stream of token versions of Katilda though slightly worse at first. At four mana, Haunting can sit a bit awkwardly as a card that comes down after you’ve done a lot of your big flourishing, but with proper sequencing, it’s capable of generating a tremendous board state that many decks have no capacity to overcome.

The Value Plan

 As mentioned above, Enchantments is a pivot deck that wants to remain flexible. This means that the deck needs to have access to a suite of control-like cards that can deal with opposing threats or generate card advantage. Card advantage generation is also crucial to keeping the aggro plan above water in the midgame when other decks start throwing their haymakers. The strongest card here to make this happen is Rite of Harmony, which will create this sort of storm-style combo turn, where until you run out of mana, the world is basically your oyster as all of your spells cast replace themselves on top of all of their other triggers. The deck also relies heavily on The Restoration of Eiganjo for similar lines spread out over longer amounts of time. With Restoration, the plan will primarily be to ramp out additional mana sources via a combination of the first and second abilities, though buying back a Teachings of the Kirin or Ossification later game is also very solid. Restoration then flips over into the deck’s tertiary win condition, yet another go-wide token generator.

Another way to outpace an opponent is to answer their threats or trade with their resources for a lower cost than what they’ve invested into them. The only meaningful way in the main deck for Enchantments to get this done is with Ossification, a clean two-mana answer to any creature or planeswalker in the format. Rounding things out in a less blatant way, we have the incremental card advantage cards in Spirited Companion and Teachings of the Kirin. Companion is as simple as it gets: two-mana to play a card and get a card. Neutral on its own, this little doge turns on the other larger-impact advantage generators to really double down on their overall impact. Teachings is a very interesting yet unexciting piece who also looks to play nicely with the other spells in the deck rather than be a haymaker spell on its own. Milling in the first chapter interacts favorably with Katilda and the Spirit in the first chapter draws two cards off of a Rite, the second chapter provides a buff to whatever Generous Visitor has been building up, and the flip side makes all of these happen repeatedly. All of these effects combined sort of create a snowballing effect where the deck continually builds on itself until it gets out of hand and quickly overtakes the opponent.

How Does It Play?

Selesnya Enchantments is, for all intents and purposes, a deck that does a very simple thing in a fairly complicated way. On the surface, none of the cards are very flashy or exciting, but working with the deck from the driver’s seat showcases a decision tree that’s a mile long and wide. Being a snowballing deck, it can build on all or any of its previous plays in such a way that it sort of doesn’t matter which route you take, but in the face of any disruption, the deck still has a non-zero amount of game and choices to make. With the end result typically being the same – swinging in with a huge Katilda or army of Spirits – you aren’t particularly punished for being interacted with, but the deck can definitely punish poor piloting. The trick is to foresee your board state a turn or two in advance, and try to figure out all of your different paths to take on a turn by turn basis to get there.

Against the metagame on the whole, the deck performs very well against both the midrange piles and the red decks that many players have been defaulting to. Enchantments can gain a ton of life between Naturalist and Katilda, so outpacing red isn’t a huge challenge, and beating on midrange decks is what this list has always been up to anyway. As the Standard landscape continues to shift, there may be some necessary alterations to the list and specifically to the sideboard, but in a land without meaningful enchantment interaction, a deck like this will never have trouble surviving or even thriving.

Upgrades