Let’s Make an Enchantment!

First off, if you’re reading this early Friday and haven’t yet voted in the runoff between land and enchantment for You Make the Card 4, please hear me out and then go over there and vote ENCHANTMENT!

I’m really glad that we get to make a permanent for this round. See, the cards we get to help craft in You Make the Card typically have great artwork and do cool stuff, so you want that card to be something you get play on your board that sticks around. Vanish into Memory had fantastic artwork, yet you’d play it, and then it would get buried in the graveyard. I always wished that art could have been on an enchantment or creature.

Now, I get the appeal of wanting to make a cool new land card. A land can theoretically go in any deck, and having a land that does something cool is getting something "for free" without costing you precious card slots outside of the mana/land count.

Robbie at MTG Color Pie really does a great job outlining the reasons why picking a land for this exercise will result in a wasted opportunity to make something super cool. There are limits to what a land can reasonably do and still be "cool," especially one that’s going to be in the Standard environment. Comparatively, there are really few limits to what an enchantment can potentially do.

And here’s another point. Consider the recent past, and think about lands that have been very popular and powerful in Standard. It certainly isn’t hard to do: Kessig Wolf Run, Gavony Township, Cavern of Souls, Inkmoth Nexus, Celestial Colonnade, Creeping Tar Pit, Raging Ravine, Tectonic Edge, Valakut… We could go on and on.

Now think about enchantments that have been very popular and powerful in recent Standard. Hmm…it’s hard right? I mean, Rancor is probably one of the best enchantments ever printed, and it doesn’t even see play in the G/x aggro decks! Blind Obedience has some potential but seems to mostly find homes in sideboards. You gotta dig for the occasional hexproof deck to find any enchantments of note in maindecks. We can stretch back a bit and make an argument for Splinter Twin and Pyromancer Ascension.

So here’s the deal: think of You Make the Card 4 as our chance to make a kickass, cool, and powerful enchantment that will see maindeck play in Standard. Let’s make it good enough to warrant people running some number of maindeck Naturalize. Lands don’t really need our help—we all play lands in every deck. Let’s give enchantments something to smile about!

I Didn’t Make It to Dc

Sadly, I didn’t make it to the SCG Standard Open in DC this past weekend. It turned out that my kids had a packed day of activities at the same time but at different locations, and my ex asked if I could help out. For a single dad who kids are growing up so fast, getting some bonus time with my daughter was too good to pass up.

But leading up to DC, I was struggling to figure out what deck I wanted to play. I had a really weird G/W/B deck I called "Terrible Twos" that performed well at a small FNM and had been doing okay testing online. But it relies quite heavily on card synergy over card power, and I wasn’t sure it had the oomph needed to perform at a huge event like a SCG Open. I also had a BUG Zombie deck I really liked—featuring the awesome Grimgrin, Corpse-Born—but it was definitely not quite ready for prime time.

Then there were all these great G/W/B and Bant midrange decks that had been doing well recently, stuffed to the gills with cards I love: Thragtusk, Angel of Serenity, Restoration Angel, Garruk, Primal Hunter, Prime Speaker Zegana… The siren song of these sweet netdecks just kept getting louder and louder in my ears. SO MUCH MIDRANGE GOODNESS.

I discussed my dilemma with my friend Jay, and his reply blew my mind:

"When you want to play all the cards, then play all the cards. Wasn’t Battle of Wits in the last base set?"

*head asplode*

First, a double check, and yes—Battle of Wits is indeed in M13. Could I really make a giant Bant deck with Battle of Wits stuffed to the gills with all the midrange goodness a mage could possibly want?

But wait—how in the world do you actually make a Battle of the Wits deck? After looking around at previous Wits deck, I found this basic formula:

241 cards
96 lands
145 nonlands

This gives you 40% lands, which should be enough, and a big enough deck that if you find Battle of Wits during the course of a reasonable game, you should be able to win with it.

I brewed up the following list with this curve: 25 one-drops, 45 two-drops, 25 three-drops, 25 four-drops, 16 five-drops, 6 six-drops and 3 seven-drops.

Bant Battle of Wits

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 03-17-2013

Standard

Creatures (70)

Planeswalkers (12)

Lands (96)

Spells (63)

One thing that immediately occurred to me was how much fun you can have with this deck against those who are trying to win with Nephalia Drownyard—yeah, good luck with that! But just to help prevent Battle from being a dead draw against those decks, I wanted to add Elixir of Immortality and Memory’s Journey to the mix.

So… I’ve got Rancors and Ulvenwald Trackers, I’ve got Zameck Guildmage to bleed +1/+1 counters off undying creatures, I’ve got Gyre Sage to try to grow to large proportions and/or make mana, I’ve got all the sweet charms, I’ve got Blind Obedience shenanigans, I’ve got the awesome Frontline Medic, I’ve got Restoration Angel goodness with a dash of Conjurer’s Closet, I’ve got planeswalkers with Supreme Verdict, I’ve got the potential to go buck wild with Sublime Archangel, I’ve got Prime Speaker Zegana and Angel of Serenity…and Staff of Nin! Yep, I managed to squeeze in so many different deck ideas in here with a Battle of Wits finish.

I have four-ofs of everything up the curve to five, with a single copy of a card at each mana point. Jay said, "I love the one-ofs at each mana cost. It’s so over the top Japanese that it has to be right."

I ran the idea by my friend Brandon Isleib, and while he liked the idea, he threw a huge bucket of cold water in my face by pointing me to an article by Matt Sperling who claimed you can’t run a Battle deck and sufficiently randomize the deck each time you search. He made quite a convincing argument, leading me to replace some cards from the deck:

-4 Farseek, +4 Mana Bloom

-4 Borderland Ranger, +4 Azorius Keyrune

-4 Evolving Wilds, +1 Island, +1 Plains, +2 Forest

I believe that just leaves Garruk Relentless as the only search card left in the deck, but I can’t recall ever flipping him and having him live long enough to search up a creature!

I sent the idea over to my friend Kenny Mayer, who’s been known to rock Battle decks at StarCityGames Opens. Here’s his most recent one:

Aggro Battle of Wits

Kenny Mayer

32nd Place at Star City Games Legacy Open on 05-01-2011

Legacy

Creatures (104)

Planeswalkers (8)

Lands (94)

This is what he said:

The biggest challenge of playing a deck like this is most certainly the shuffling aspect of it. If you’re very aggressive in shuffling and try to minimize the time spent on each individual decision throughout a match, you should be fine. I wouldn’t depower the deck by removing what is likely the single best card in the deck (Farseek) just because of Sperling’s article. I felt like I could do it in Legacy with 40 fetches and numerous other cards that also search, so you’ll be good in Standard for sure.

As for the card inclusions, the hard part about building this type of deck for Standard right now is keeping a certain theme consistent throughout the build. Specifically, right now it appears that there are both beatdown and ramp elements together, which will sometimes bring about awkward draws. Cards like Young Wolf, Rancor, Ulvenwald Tracker, Feeling of Dread, Zameck Guildmage, Civilized Scholar, Frontline Medic, Ajani Caller of the Pride, Gideon Champion of Justice, Sublime Archangel, and Simic Charm are probably a bit out of place here.

Cards I would also try to find room for are Centaur Healer, Ranger’s Path, Urban Evolution, Simic Keyrune, Selesnya Keyrune, Azorius Keyrune, Cyclonic Rift, Jace Architect of Thought, Syncopate / Dissipate (maybe?), Armada Wurm (if you think the mana can handle it), Sphinx’s Revelation, Chromatic Lantern, Rhox Faithmender (sideboard), Alchemist’s Refuge, Somberwald Sage (possibly, depending on how the final build looks), Terminus, Dungeon Geists, Drogskol Reaver, and Scorned Villager. I would also max out on power cards like Garruk, Primal Hunter, Prime Speaker Zegana, and Angel of Serenity and probably go up to at least 96-97 lands to be roughly at 24 lands for a 60-card deck.

There are a ton of other options available even within just these colors. The possibility of adding an additional color, aka red, gives you infinite additional options that would likely power up the deck with not a huge drop off in the consistency of the mana base. Mostly, the best advice I can give in short is to focus on a game plan (beatdown or ramp/control) and try to make every card choice in the deck reflect that decision because you will draw tons of different card combinations and you want them to all work together well on at least some level.

Beatdown or ramp/control… Well shoot, what about midrange? Is a midrange Battle of Wits deck possible? Is a Battle of Wits deck of any variety viable in Standard? I’m certainly curious to hear what you think in the comments below. Even though I didn’t get a chance to run it in DC, I hope to bring it to some FNMs soon.

Before I go, I want to give a shout-out to Jeremie De Witt. Last year, he held the Magic tournament Cards Against Cancer to benefit the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. He’s doing it again this year in September, so check out his website for this year’s event and either make plans to be there or, if you can, chip in something to help make it even more awesome than last year!

Take care,

Bennie

starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com

Make sure to follow my Twitter feed (@blairwitchgreen). I check it often so feel free to send me feedback, ideas, and random thoughts. I’ve also created a Facebook page where I’ll be posting up deck ideas and will happily discuss Magic, life, or anything else you want to talk about!

New to Commander?
If you’re just curious about the format, building your first deck, or trying to take your Commander deck up a notch, here are some handy links:

Commander Primer Part 1 (Why play Commander? Rules Overview, Picking your Commander)
Commander Primer Part 2 (Mana Requirements, Randomness, Card Advantage)
Commander Primer Part 3 (Power vs. Synergy, Griefing, Staples, Building a Doran Deck)
Commander Starter Kits 1 (kick start your allied two-color decks for $25)
Commander Starter Kits 2 (kick start your enemy two-color decks for $25)
Commander Starter Kits 3 (kick start your shard three-color decks for $25)

My current Commander decks (and links to decklists):

Previous Commander decks currently on hiatus:

A Tale Of Two Enchantments