I know you would lose green but have you thought about making Zedruu your commander? She works well with enchantments.
The other option would be to go with one of the Gods, and just have commander damage as an alternate wincon. (Lots of enchantments provide some sort of evasion to get that damage through.)
On color choices and Generals:
The first thing is that enchantress REALLY REALLY wants to have green and white in it. I mean, white is kind of a no brainer, but green gives you the following:
The best Enchantress in the game- Argothian Enchantress
The only non-creature enchantress effect-Enchantress's Presence
Additional Enchantress options needed for redundancy- Verduran Enchantress and Eidolon of Blossoms
The almighty Earthcraft, which also grants access to Squirrel Nest combo
Wild Growth effects/mana doublers like Mirari's Wake, Mana Reflection, and such that also enable infinite combos with Sacred Mesa and Luminarch Ascension/Earthcraft Sterling Grove
Gaea's Cradle (infinite mana when comboing!)
and more!
To this end, green is a mandatory inclusion. Yeah, you can build Daxos Enchantress, but it's an entirely different deck that doesn't pack nearly as much oomph behind it since it lacks so many of these key cards. You can make up for it to some extent by looking to the Sanguine Bond/Exquisite blood combo, but you wind up with a much slower, grindier deck otherwise with more of an enchantment subtheme that is missing some real key players, as well as losing three different actual Enchantress Effects.
Suggested generals:
I used Trostani as my general when I played G/W enchantments. She was chosen because comboing out caused you to gain infinite life in addition to a million critters, so you still felt pretty safe if someone blew up the board before you could attack. Her populate ability was sometimes handy too, and she gave me an early game play as a decent ground blocker that would sometimes throw some lifepoints my way.
I like Dromoka (she hadn't been printed yet when I built my original version) as she provides a City of Solitude effect without actually having to play it. City of Solitude is a card that is either "meh" or game changing. When you need it, you really need it, but when you don't need it, it's a disappointing draw. Fortunately, Dromoka is also a solid beatstick with some lifegain attached too! She would be a strong candidate regardless.
I'm not sold on Sigarda, if you're playing Voltron, there's better ways to do that (Rafiq, Uril).
Ultimately, I think the two best choices are probably Trostani or Dromoka. There's not a lot of great choices for true Enchantress in Abzan, most of those generals cater to traditional Abzan archetypes of recursion, but, like I said, I chose Teneb for his ability to harvest creatures to recur either to get back Enchantresses or get steal some bodies from others for defensive/offensive purposes, so if you want to play WBG, I think he might be the best option.
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That's because Enchanted Evening is blue which is a less common color for Enchantress decks to run that has been minimally discussed, but it certainly does have a place. I can see it being featured as a wincon in voltron enchantress decks, like Bruna or Rafiq. I don't know if I really consider Voltron to be the same as "true enchantress" since their playstyles, despite both relying on the enchantment card type, are substantially different, but if I wanted to play enchantress with blue, I'd look to a bant general- most of which are voltron style, but I think it might be interesting to brew a bant "traditional" enchantress list though, as blue does have some nice toys to play with.
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I have the GW list made up, with most of the cards already there. I need to pick up an Earthcraft, though. Anyway, it is looking good in testing. Currently I am leaning toward Sigarda, Host of Herons for the general, just because 1) I have a gorgeous foil, and 2) sacrifice Grave Pact effects are rife in my meta. However, I also have the Dragonlord Dromoka in my binder, so I may test that out, too.
I have the GW list made up, with most of the cards already there. I need to pick up an Earthcraft, though. Anyway, it is looking good in testing. Currently I am leaning toward Sigarda, Host of Herons for the general, just because 1) I have a gorgeous foil, and 2) sacrifice Grave Pact effects are rife in my meta. However, I also have the Dragonlord Dromoka in my binder, so I may test that out, too.
-Disgusting value with Hondens (make a ton of tokens, strip hands, deal damage)
-Maze's End, if you can somehow avoid losing a Gate.
Finding ways to stay relevant (or even interact!) after you've gone epic is a neat challenge, and it's one of the most rewarding things to be able to say you stopped casting spells on turn seven and still ran the table.
Daxos is a weird one. I really have had a hard time figuring out the right direction to go- it was my friend's first EDH deck and he liked the black cards a lot, so he wanted to keep black but still play Enchantress (which is where the Teneb deck came from).
There's a lot of different ideas with Daxos. You can try and play cheap, efficient enchantments so you can cast Daxos and start gaining experience counters as fast as possible and make him a main focus, or you can focus on playing just a really good enchantment based B/W deck where he's just a 3 drop that's always in your hand so to speak.
If I were building B/W enchantments (from a competitive standpoint), I would probably go all in combo with a core shell of:
You don't get nearly as many enchantress effects anymore, so it's important to have other draw engines, and we should look to enchantment based draw engines where possible. Black gives you Phyrexian Arena and Underworld Connections for example, as well as Greed and Erebos God of the Dead, and everybody's favorite Necropotence. These should fill in the blanks nicely, but our draw is probably outclassed by other decks, so we can add some things to make it more oppressive, like Spirit of the Labyrinth, or maybe even Underworld Dreams to punish players who try to get ahead in card advantage.
You don't get access to Gaea's Cradle anymore, but you can run Cabal Coffers/Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to make up for it.
Now that we don't have green must-play cards anymore, we have more space to run other things instead. We can look to black for enchantment based removal, like Seal of Doom, with white offering Oblivion Ring, Banishing Light, and maybe Return to Nowhere. So you can pick up a decent bit of spot removal that can also be tutored for in a pinch.
For further protection, we'll play the obviously powerful Sphere of Safety, and probably Ghostly Prison, but black also gives us No Mercy, and Grave Pact.
We also need protection to be able to beat combo decks. Leyline of Sanctity and maybe Ivory Mask help here, but so can cards like Rule of Law.
White also gives Aura of Silence, but we'll probably want to ensure we've got some more destruction that we can hopefully keep enchantment based. Let's also play Seal of Cleansing. Between Aura, Seal, O-ring, and Banishing Light, we have four different ways to deal with artifact/enchantment based issues that are all enchantments themselves. Still, Austere Command is another card I would probably sleeve up. Its versatility makes it worth playing.
So we should probably figure out ways to kill our opponent outside of Daxos tokens. Sometimes he'll get killed as soon as he's cast, or you won't be able to gain worthwhile XP, or be allowed to untap with him if you do. Let's see how enchantments can produce kill conditions.
Aside from our two card combos (that are both decent on their own), our first look should be Enchantment Creatures. There's some real good ones here, but not a whole ton since they were only in one block.
Erebos and Heliod, God of the Sun are good places to start, they're pretty good inclusions and I like that the tokens Heliod makes are also Enchantments, meaning they help fuel Serra's Sanctum and Sphere of Safety and similar cards. Ghostblade Eidolon makes just about anything quite terrifying and so does Eidolon of Countless Battles. Doomwake Giant is a house. Underworld Coinsmith gives us a nice big fat mana sink that can kill on its own when Sanctum and Cabal Coffers is online, or can be used to setup Sanguine Bond/Exquisite Blood. He's an easy inclusion. Athreos, God of Passage may or may not end up making the cut depending on the rest of the bodies we slot in, but let's just keep him in mind for now that he exists. The rest of the enchantment based creatures may not be good enough unless they play to a specific focus, but they're a good start. Let's look at non-enchantment creatures. Academy Rector provides defensive and offensive capabilities. Please, attack me while this guy is out so I can tutor up and play something really dumb, or maybe just finish assembling a combo. Easy pick. Auramancer is our version of Eternal Witness. It's an easy include, as is Odunos River Trawler. Ajani's Chosen is a card that might not make the cut in GW, but probably could here. He's worth trying at least. Blessed Spirits and Blightcaster are also good cards to feed off of your deck doing what it does. Mesa Enchantress is a no brainer. It's the only one we really get to play though. Celestial Ancient is another good choice we might look to to make our utility creatures more threatening, and Treasury Thrull is also a good beatstick.
We'll of course play Sigil of the Empty Throne and Luminarch Ascension as well for additional killcons.
That should give you a good starting point to flesh the rest of the deck out with, but the important thing is to look at the functions you need your cards to perform and then see if there's a decent enchantment that can perform that function. Powerhouse cards that enchantment themed decks scale upwards in power, and so the criteria for a card to go into the deck needs to basically be:
1) It needs to be an enchantment.
2) If it's not an enchantment, does it benefit from enchantments? (Mesa Enchantress et al)
3) If it's not an enchantment, and doesn't benefit from enchantments, it needs to be a really good card to make the cut. (Demonic Tutor is an example)
There are two concerns with this deck- there's not a lot of ways to make Sanguine Bond good on its own (Blind Obedience might be a decent start though) and focusing hard on that might take the deck off course. Sanguine Bond is probably just a card you hope you don't draw until you're ready for it.
The second is that there's little to no acceleration. The deck will be capable of producing tremendous amounts of mana mid-late game with Sanctum, Nykthos, or Urborg, but there aren't black or white wild growth effects. This leaves you with mana rocks if you want to have acceleration. There's not room for much, you don't want to dilute the deck, but you should probably sleeve up Sol Ring, mana Crypt if you have it, Orzhov Signet, and Pearl/Jet Medallions. I like the medallions because enchantress style decks really like to play several enchantments in one turn if possible and so the medallions are better at ramping several small spells as opposed to one big one. But that's just my two cents. Anyway, if I built Daxos, that's kind of the thought process I'd have for a rough draft.
Anyway, there's a skeleton of Daxos for you with plenty of free slots to figure out what else you want to play.
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Yeah, plus it's a good way to get back your Sanctum or other land that gets blown up by a strip mine or something, so I'd say Sun Titan is probably in there as well. Card is bonkers.
It's really too bad that you don't get access to Privileged Position or Sterling Grove, but Greater Auramancy is another auto-include.
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I actually ended up thinking that I have to have two Enchantress decks, one GW and one Daxos. Right now, due to the sacrifice in my meta, Sigarda is heading up the GW, but I am considering Dragonlord Dromoka.
I have a fair bit of a Daxos shell put up, and I was happy to see so many similarities in what I was mocking up and what you recommended. I will go over it and refine it some more. I am thinking about the Skybind combination with either Daxos or Heliod and how awesome that is... Heliod especially with Serra's Sanctum...
Edited to add: So what do you think of artifact mana in Daxos?
Once you have a Daxos, put it up! I'd love to look at it. Also, for a different spin on the Daxos idea, one with no immediate combo gibs but with a silver bullet answer toolbox and a heavy suite of cards symmetrically impairing everybody's ability to play spells (while you funnel your unused mana into Daxos bodies), feel free to use my primer as a starting point.
Thanks! I will check it out. What is your view of mana rocks for Daxos, too? I know he is super mana-hungry. Coffers/Urborg and Serra's Sanctum seem like a good start, but are the rocks any good with him?
You absolutely need mana rocks. Honestly, I found Daxos to be too mana hungry. Too often did I have to decide between playing cards and creating tokens. He can't keep up with ramp which means he is often behind on things, and, because he can't use the resource denial that black and white are so good at (because they are symmetrical), he loses out on some of the stronger aspects of the colors. I would love to play Stony Silence/Null Rod or even Death Cloud, but nope. Finally, because of his reliance on rocks, when someone boardwipes, it hurts a lot. He was a really disappointing general to play for me.
Oh, that would explain why you stopped showing up in the thread yeah, Daxos sure likes his mana, and the rocks that go best with him are the ones that come into play untapped and make coloured mana, preferably lots of it. Gilded Lotus is the greatest rock for that approach. Another thing which you can do, which doesn't hurt quite as much when something sweeps nonlands, is focus on getting lands in play. Sword of the Animist, Burnished Hart and Wayfarer's Bauble all create more lasting ramp, and Weathered Wayfarer, Land Tax and Expedition Map help hit land drops.
Well, the nice thing about the deck is that it's a pretty easy General swap that you can make depending on who you're playing against and include the other as part of the 99. Bear in mind that a lot of your card draw is fueled by your life- Dromoka's lifelink is a pretty good selling point, but if Sigarda is really relevant in your meta due to Grave Pact effects, etc, that's totally justifiable, she's a fine general. You may choose to add something like Eldrazi Conscription, or pack more Bestow creatures than you might normally if you opt to rock Sigarda as these are obviously powerful effects for her.
Revisiting Daxos and mana rocks-
Mana rocks are almost your only form of accelerant available to you. Almost. Land Tax is a nice little enchantment to play to make sure you're going to at least be hitting your land drops solidly, and you can always also opt to play Crucible of Worlds to recycle fetchlands as well as protect your Sanctum/Coffers and also provide the vicious Strip Mine lock capabilities. Rumpy mentioned some others, but the concern is that they're not enchantments and have nothing to do with them either. You'll see how much space we really have later on in this post.
So basically, the tricky thing is that if you play too many mana rocks, you start diluting the enchantment theme of the deck, which is already experiencing dilution from our tutor package (which will usually grab enchantments, but still) as well as our non-enchantment creatures (as much as they might be fueled by enchantments or augment them). We need to select the absolute best mana rocks we can play and determine where they will be most useful to us- are we trying to ramp up early game, or do we want them to accelerate our mid/late game?
Our black tutor package can help us find Sanctum/Coffers/Urborg/Nykthos if we need it to, since we're missing green's Crop Rotation, but our early game is really lacking and this is where the focus should be. We're also not going to accelerate Daxos much unless we have mana rocks to play on T1, so if we're looking to spit out Daxos early, that's a lost cause except for the lucky games where we get a T1 Sol Ring or Mana Crypt.
So let's look at the rocks that can accelerate Daxos to hit the board on T2, meaning they must be played on T1.
Sol Ring (duh)
Mana Crypt (also probably duh)
Mana Vault
Lotus Petal
Chrome Mox
Mox Diamond
aaaand not much else!
Normally, I like Mana Vault, but the colorless boost is less relevant in this deck than normal and we have no real ways to cheat its untapping. We could play Voltaic Key, but it has no real other synergies with the deck and thus I find Key/Vault may not be worth playing.
Getting Daxos out early probably isn't worthwhile enough to warrant having to blow a card that could have been an enchantment that would actually get you some XP, especially on a small bodied dude that has no real protection. No to Chrome Mox for this reason, and I generally don't like Lotus Petal in EDH unless the deck really really really wants to play its general early.
Mox Diamond is interesting depending on how we build the rest of the deck. It's terrific in the context of Land Tax, and reasonable outside of those as well. If you have one, feel free to test it, but if not, I don't think it's groundbreaking enough to warrant going out and getting one.
So we've picked up Sol Ring and Mana Crypt.
It looks like outside of sheer luck draws, we're not playing Daxos on T2, and then that begs the question of "Just because he's a 3 drop, does that mean that's what we want to be doing on T3?"
The answer is honestly probably not a chunk of the time. It may not be advisable to spend T3's mana on just playing Daxos. After all, he's pretty mortal, so wouldn't it be better to spend T2/3 preparing to play Daxos and an enchantment or two on T4, so at least you're getting an XP even if he just bites the dust. If you're capable of doing this, then you're also capable of recasting him next turn if you like. We should be looking at 2 and 3 cmc rocks.
These are basically our 3 CMC and less options. Please note that colored mana is strongly preferred over colorless since we're trying to play a spell the same turn we play Daxos, meaning that at least 3 of our 5/6 mana we'd like to have on T 3/4 to have available needs to be colored. However, if the card is good enough, colorless may be ok too.
Orzhov Signet is another auto include, it's cheap, ramps, and color fixes.
Coalition Relic can ramp quite nicely with colored mana as well, it's quite valuable and makes the cut easily.
Chromatic Lantern ramps and provides color fixing, it's possible we might be lacking BB for some of our black heavy spells and it's a welcome inclusion.
The various monoliths are tough, but get the nod over Mana Vault because you can untap them any time, whereas Mana Vault can only be paid to untap during your upkeep. If you have Grim Monolith, it's probably good enough to make it in. If not, you can test with Basalt and see how you like it, but I probably wouldn't play both.
Pristine Talisman is a nice card that makes Sanguine Bond more relevant and can help set off our combos, ramp us a little, and if nothing else, gain life at any opportunity. I think it's worth playing.
Mind Stone is a great card because it can ramp you early game, and replace itself when no longer needed, or when drawn late game. Even though it only ramps for 1 colorless, it's one of the better rocks and Commander's Sphere and Orzhov Cluestone are in the same vein. You can sleeve all, none, or some of these up, but I'd probably recommend at least Mind Stone, it's cheaper cmc makes it pretty valuable as a T2 play when Daxos is not generally doing much.
I don't think the keyrune, however, is worth playing. It will be a long time before its animate ability becomes feasible and is not generally that particularly useful.
Jeweled Amulet is another tempting inclusion. I keep seeing this card but have never played it myself. Let me know how it works if you try it.
As previously mentioned, I'm a big fan of the Pearl/Jet medallions. They give the deck more T2 plays, and go well in decks designed to play more than one spell a turn and that's exactly what we want to be doing when we play Daxos. At least one or both are worth including.
Lastly we have our 4CMC and up rocks. These are basically the fattest rocks in the game and where we don't need the help as much, between our early game rocks, Sanctum, and other mana producers, I don't think we'll be needing these quite as much.
Thran Dynamo doesn't help much, but Gilded Lotus might fuel us well enough when Daxos is online to help churn out more spirits. We'll test the Lotus.
So what else can we do for enhancing mana production? Well, we can always play Ancient Tomb and Temple of the False God. Both of these are pretty worthy. If you wanted to get real brave you could even sleeve up Lake of the Dead, but as a general rule, lands that make you sacrifice in order to enter play are very juicy strip mine targets.
So 13 cards. For every two rocks, I tend to cut a land slot. Starting with 37 land, this would mean cutting land slots (we're now occupying 6 spell slots and 6 land slots)
This means playing 31 land which is kind of low for my tastes, and given the low land count we know we're going to be playing, I think this makes Mox Diamond less appealing to run. Let's axe it and give ourselves 3 slots back and test with 12 rocks (excluding Diamond), and 34 land.
Okay! We've got the manabase shaped up to some extent. Bear in mind that out of the 65 nonland slots the deck has, 12 of these are now occupied by rocks and 16 are non-enchantment spells, even if they run off of enchantments or tutor them up. This means that 37 slots remain as enchantment slots, and we've already figured out about 20-25 enchantments we're running. This means the remainder of our spells really need to be some dope enchantments that will really bring the deck together. A little over 1/3rd of the deck is enchantments, a little over 1/3 is land, and a little less than 1/3rd for everything else is the balance we're looking at right now. If, when playing the deck, we find that we'd like to add more enchantments, we can do so by cutting mana rocks that aren't performing, or redundant rocks (like cutting Pearl or Jet medallion) or redundant non-enchantment effects (do we need Auramancer AND Odunos River Trawler AND Sun Titan AND Treasury Thrull?)
Let's talk about Daxos himself and how we're going to be aiming at playing this deck and his role within it.
This deck by no means is "all in on Daxos" but we still want to empower him to perform as a threat in his own right. So when is he a threat? When you have enough mana to make a 4/4 every turn? Or two 6/6s? Do we want our threats to be tall or wide? Or maybe both?
This helps us flesh out the rest of our deck, and we can choose enchantments and cards that can make your threats both taller and wider. Like Crusade effects. Now we have good reason to play Dictate of Heliod and Spear of Heliod. Both of these will give you XP counters and even if Daxos can only make one or two bodies, they're much more threating bodies. One other card that might help our threats go wider is Heartstone. Heartstone synergizes heavily with Daxos, and also helps out Heliod and helps us go wider. Unfortunately, that's all it helps with. But depending on what you sleeve up, it might be more beneficial, so I thought I'd mention it.
Our deck wants to make Daxos A threat but not necessarily THE threat. While people are busy worrying about the XP you have and keeping him dead and offline, you're quietly assembling a combo that just wins on the spot behind the scenes. I think this is where the deck wants to be, and trying to make the deck all about daxos himself results in playing subpar cards you wouldn't otherwise consider. Let's just try and play Daxos and then go about our business normally, letting him get XP counters as we simply just play Magic with the rest of the deck. If he starts cranking out 3 7/7s a turn, fine. If he gets murdered and never makes a single one, fine, that just means your opponent had to expend resources to repeatedly deal with Daxos instead of on the cards from your library.
Oh one thing to keep in mind about Daxos (and somewhat Enchantress in general, however, I find the U or G deal with it better due to counters and hexproof/shroud) is that he gets hammered by one of the most difficult to control aspects of the game, namely poor threat assessment. There were too many games where, because I had a bunch of permanents down (even non-threatening permanents) people would target me. Bad players can't think outside of the battlefield and because that is what Enchantress interacts with the most, it is at a disadvantage. If the people who you play with have poor threat assessment, I would avoid playing enchantress.
I actually run a Pillow Fort Queen Marchesa deck that uses these cards as the wincon. You can turtle up and ping your opponents to death while also swinging with whatever tokens you might have available and still leave behind some defense as well.
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-Disgusting value with Hondens (make a ton of tokens, strip hands, deal damage)
-Maze's End, if you can somehow avoid losing a Gate.
Finding ways to stay relevant (or even interact!) after you've gone epic is a neat challenge, and it's one of the most rewarding things to be able to say you stopped casting spells on turn seven and still ran the table.
Do you have a list posted somewhere? I'm putting this deck together at the moment.
I've built enchantress decks with all three available shards/wedges that include GW and I personally like Bant the best. I find it to be the best from a control standpoint and offers a number of quite powerful win conditions and combinations. Also Omniscience and now Tamiyo, Field Researcher. My win condition of choice in the deck is a 3 card combo involving Doubling Season, Wheel of Sun and Moon, and Jace, Architect of Thought. For those unfamiliar, it basically results in you being able to cast every nonland card out of your opponent's decks for free and at will. Despite being a 3 card combo, it is relatively easy to assemble with the amount of card draw that is enabled in conjunction to the numerous tutors at my disposal. Apart from that there are some neat stack tricks you can pull off with Parallax Tide and Seal of Primordium / Seal of Cleansing which can all but take 1 person out of the game relatively early.
Edit: I use Jenara, Asura of War as the general. Perhaps a bit unconventional at first glance, until you realize how easy it is to 1-shot somebody with the help of Serra's Sanctum.
Just dug out some W.Growth effects to add! Bummed I couldn't find my Stony Silence!
(U/B)(U/B)(U/B) JUMP IN THE LINE, ROCK YOUR BODY IN TIME
(R/W)(R/W)(R/W) RISING FROM THE NEON GLOOM, SHINING LIKE A CRAZY MOON
(U/R)(R/G)(G/U) STEALIN' WHEN I SHOULD HAVE BEEN BUYIN'
The other option would be to go with one of the Gods, and just have commander damage as an alternate wincon. (Lots of enchantments provide some sort of evasion to get that damage through.)
Club Flamingo Wins: 1!
The first thing is that enchantress REALLY REALLY wants to have green and white in it. I mean, white is kind of a no brainer, but green gives you the following:
The best Enchantress in the game- Argothian Enchantress
The only non-creature enchantress effect-Enchantress's Presence
Additional Enchantress options needed for redundancy- Verduran Enchantress and Eidolon of Blossoms
The almighty Earthcraft, which also grants access to Squirrel Nest combo
Wild Growth effects/mana doublers like Mirari's Wake, Mana Reflection, and such that also enable infinite combos with Sacred Mesa and Luminarch Ascension/Earthcraft
Sterling Grove
Gaea's Cradle (infinite mana when comboing!)
and more!
To this end, green is a mandatory inclusion. Yeah, you can build Daxos Enchantress, but it's an entirely different deck that doesn't pack nearly as much oomph behind it since it lacks so many of these key cards. You can make up for it to some extent by looking to the Sanguine Bond/Exquisite blood combo, but you wind up with a much slower, grindier deck otherwise with more of an enchantment subtheme that is missing some real key players, as well as losing three different actual Enchantress Effects.
Suggested generals:
I used Trostani as my general when I played G/W enchantments. She was chosen because comboing out caused you to gain infinite life in addition to a million critters, so you still felt pretty safe if someone blew up the board before you could attack. Her populate ability was sometimes handy too, and she gave me an early game play as a decent ground blocker that would sometimes throw some lifepoints my way.
I like Dromoka (she hadn't been printed yet when I built my original version) as she provides a City of Solitude effect without actually having to play it. City of Solitude is a card that is either "meh" or game changing. When you need it, you really need it, but when you don't need it, it's a disappointing draw. Fortunately, Dromoka is also a solid beatstick with some lifegain attached too! She would be a strong candidate regardless.
I'm not sold on Sigarda, if you're playing Voltron, there's better ways to do that (Rafiq, Uril).
Ultimately, I think the two best choices are probably Trostani or Dromoka. There's not a lot of great choices for true Enchantress in Abzan, most of those generals cater to traditional Abzan archetypes of recursion, but, like I said, I chose Teneb for his ability to harvest creatures to recur either to get back Enchantresses or get steal some bodies from others for defensive/offensive purposes, so if you want to play WBG, I think he might be the best option.
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WU Bruna UW | R Kiki-Jiki R | RB New Chainer BR
Legacy - Burn | Pauper - Reanimator | Aristocrats | Burn
@votechainer2016
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
WU Bruna UW | R Kiki-Jiki R | RB New Chainer BR
Legacy - Burn | Pauper - Reanimator | Aristocrats | Burn
@votechainer2016
And I think I want to build Daxos the Returned, too.
Share a list once you finish!
Marath, Will of the Wild
Friendly Kess Twin Combo
Tatyova - Sir Bounce A Lot
Gonti's Luxury Pie
Prime (Eldrazi) Speaker Zegana (Retired)
Enduring Ideal.
I have a 5-color list that is all about pillowforting it up until you can go epic. Then you can take your pick of sweet win conditions:
-The "typical" lockdown/slow death strategy with Dovescape, Meishin, the Mind Cage, and Form of the Dragon
-Disgusting value with Hondens (make a ton of tokens, strip hands, deal damage)
-Maze's End, if you can somehow avoid losing a Gate.
Finding ways to stay relevant (or even interact!) after you've gone epic is a neat challenge, and it's one of the most rewarding things to be able to say you stopped casting spells on turn seven and still ran the table.
There's a lot of different ideas with Daxos. You can try and play cheap, efficient enchantments so you can cast Daxos and start gaining experience counters as fast as possible and make him a main focus, or you can focus on playing just a really good enchantment based B/W deck where he's just a 3 drop that's always in your hand so to speak.
If I were building B/W enchantments (from a competitive standpoint), I would probably go all in combo with a core shell of:
You don't get nearly as many enchantress effects anymore, so it's important to have other draw engines, and we should look to enchantment based draw engines where possible. Black gives you Phyrexian Arena and Underworld Connections for example, as well as Greed and Erebos God of the Dead, and everybody's favorite Necropotence. These should fill in the blanks nicely, but our draw is probably outclassed by other decks, so we can add some things to make it more oppressive, like Spirit of the Labyrinth, or maybe even Underworld Dreams to punish players who try to get ahead in card advantage.
You don't get access to Gaea's Cradle anymore, but you can run Cabal Coffers/Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to make up for it.
Now that we don't have green must-play cards anymore, we have more space to run other things instead. We can look to black for enchantment based removal, like Seal of Doom, with white offering Oblivion Ring, Banishing Light, and maybe Return to Nowhere. So you can pick up a decent bit of spot removal that can also be tutored for in a pinch.
For further protection, we'll play the obviously powerful Sphere of Safety, and probably Ghostly Prison, but black also gives us No Mercy, and Grave Pact.
We also need protection to be able to beat combo decks. Leyline of Sanctity and maybe Ivory Mask help here, but so can cards like Rule of Law.
White also gives Aura of Silence, but we'll probably want to ensure we've got some more destruction that we can hopefully keep enchantment based. Let's also play Seal of Cleansing. Between Aura, Seal, O-ring, and Banishing Light, we have four different ways to deal with artifact/enchantment based issues that are all enchantments themselves. Still, Austere Command is another card I would probably sleeve up. Its versatility makes it worth playing.
So we should probably figure out ways to kill our opponent outside of Daxos tokens. Sometimes he'll get killed as soon as he's cast, or you won't be able to gain worthwhile XP, or be allowed to untap with him if you do. Let's see how enchantments can produce kill conditions.
Aside from our two card combos (that are both decent on their own), our first look should be Enchantment Creatures. There's some real good ones here, but not a whole ton since they were only in one block.
Erebos and Heliod, God of the Sun are good places to start, they're pretty good inclusions and I like that the tokens Heliod makes are also Enchantments, meaning they help fuel Serra's Sanctum and Sphere of Safety and similar cards. Ghostblade Eidolon makes just about anything quite terrifying and so does Eidolon of Countless Battles. Doomwake Giant is a house. Underworld Coinsmith gives us a nice big fat mana sink that can kill on its own when Sanctum and Cabal Coffers is online, or can be used to setup Sanguine Bond/Exquisite Blood. He's an easy inclusion. Athreos, God of Passage may or may not end up making the cut depending on the rest of the bodies we slot in, but let's just keep him in mind for now that he exists. The rest of the enchantment based creatures may not be good enough unless they play to a specific focus, but they're a good start. Let's look at non-enchantment creatures.
Academy Rector provides defensive and offensive capabilities. Please, attack me while this guy is out so I can tutor up and play something really dumb, or maybe just finish assembling a combo. Easy pick.
Auramancer is our version of Eternal Witness. It's an easy include, as is Odunos River Trawler.
Ajani's Chosen is a card that might not make the cut in GW, but probably could here. He's worth trying at least.
Blessed Spirits and Blightcaster are also good cards to feed off of your deck doing what it does.
Mesa Enchantress is a no brainer. It's the only one we really get to play though.
Celestial Ancient is another good choice we might look to to make our utility creatures more threatening, and Treasury Thrull is also a good beatstick.
We'll of course play Sigil of the Empty Throne and Luminarch Ascension as well for additional killcons.
That should give you a good starting point to flesh the rest of the deck out with, but the important thing is to look at the functions you need your cards to perform and then see if there's a decent enchantment that can perform that function. Powerhouse cards that enchantment themed decks scale upwards in power, and so the criteria for a card to go into the deck needs to basically be:
1) It needs to be an enchantment.
2) If it's not an enchantment, does it benefit from enchantments? (Mesa Enchantress et al)
3) If it's not an enchantment, and doesn't benefit from enchantments, it needs to be a really good card to make the cut. (Demonic Tutor is an example)
There are two concerns with this deck- there's not a lot of ways to make Sanguine Bond good on its own (Blind Obedience might be a decent start though) and focusing hard on that might take the deck off course. Sanguine Bond is probably just a card you hope you don't draw until you're ready for it.
The second is that there's little to no acceleration. The deck will be capable of producing tremendous amounts of mana mid-late game with Sanctum, Nykthos, or Urborg, but there aren't black or white wild growth effects. This leaves you with mana rocks if you want to have acceleration. There's not room for much, you don't want to dilute the deck, but you should probably sleeve up Sol Ring, mana Crypt if you have it, Orzhov Signet, and Pearl/Jet Medallions. I like the medallions because enchantress style decks really like to play several enchantments in one turn if possible and so the medallions are better at ramping several small spells as opposed to one big one. But that's just my two cents. Anyway, if I built Daxos, that's kind of the thought process I'd have for a rough draft.
Anyway, there's a skeleton of Daxos for you with plenty of free slots to figure out what else you want to play.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
Marath, Will of the Wild
Friendly Kess Twin Combo
Tatyova - Sir Bounce A Lot
Gonti's Luxury Pie
Prime (Eldrazi) Speaker Zegana (Retired)
It's really too bad that you don't get access to Privileged Position or Sterling Grove, but Greater Auramancy is another auto-include.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
I actually ended up thinking that I have to have two Enchantress decks, one GW and one Daxos. Right now, due to the sacrifice in my meta, Sigarda is heading up the GW, but I am considering Dragonlord Dromoka.
I have a fair bit of a Daxos shell put up, and I was happy to see so many similarities in what I was mocking up and what you recommended. I will go over it and refine it some more. I am thinking about the Skybind combination with either Daxos or Heliod and how awesome that is... Heliod especially with Serra's Sanctum...
Edited to add: So what do you think of artifact mana in Daxos?
Revisiting Daxos and mana rocks-
Mana rocks are almost your only form of accelerant available to you. Almost. Land Tax is a nice little enchantment to play to make sure you're going to at least be hitting your land drops solidly, and you can always also opt to play Crucible of Worlds to recycle fetchlands as well as protect your Sanctum/Coffers and also provide the vicious Strip Mine lock capabilities. Rumpy mentioned some others, but the concern is that they're not enchantments and have nothing to do with them either. You'll see how much space we really have later on in this post.
So basically, the tricky thing is that if you play too many mana rocks, you start diluting the enchantment theme of the deck, which is already experiencing dilution from our tutor package (which will usually grab enchantments, but still) as well as our non-enchantment creatures (as much as they might be fueled by enchantments or augment them). We need to select the absolute best mana rocks we can play and determine where they will be most useful to us- are we trying to ramp up early game, or do we want them to accelerate our mid/late game?
Our black tutor package can help us find Sanctum/Coffers/Urborg/Nykthos if we need it to, since we're missing green's Crop Rotation, but our early game is really lacking and this is where the focus should be. We're also not going to accelerate Daxos much unless we have mana rocks to play on T1, so if we're looking to spit out Daxos early, that's a lost cause except for the lucky games where we get a T1 Sol Ring or Mana Crypt.
So let's look at the rocks that can accelerate Daxos to hit the board on T2, meaning they must be played on T1.
Sol Ring (duh)
Mana Crypt (also probably duh)
Mana Vault
Lotus Petal
Chrome Mox
Mox Diamond
aaaand not much else!
Normally, I like Mana Vault, but the colorless boost is less relevant in this deck than normal and we have no real ways to cheat its untapping. We could play Voltaic Key, but it has no real other synergies with the deck and thus I find Key/Vault may not be worth playing.
Getting Daxos out early probably isn't worthwhile enough to warrant having to blow a card that could have been an enchantment that would actually get you some XP, especially on a small bodied dude that has no real protection. No to Chrome Mox for this reason, and I generally don't like Lotus Petal in EDH unless the deck really really really wants to play its general early.
Mox Diamond is interesting depending on how we build the rest of the deck. It's terrific in the context of Land Tax, and reasonable outside of those as well. If you have one, feel free to test it, but if not, I don't think it's groundbreaking enough to warrant going out and getting one.
So we've picked up Sol Ring and Mana Crypt.
It looks like outside of sheer luck draws, we're not playing Daxos on T2, and then that begs the question of "Just because he's a 3 drop, does that mean that's what we want to be doing on T3?"
The answer is honestly probably not a chunk of the time. It may not be advisable to spend T3's mana on just playing Daxos. After all, he's pretty mortal, so wouldn't it be better to spend T2/3 preparing to play Daxos and an enchantment or two on T4, so at least you're getting an XP even if he just bites the dust. If you're capable of doing this, then you're also capable of recasting him next turn if you like. We should be looking at 2 and 3 cmc rocks.
These are basically our 3 CMC and less options. Please note that colored mana is strongly preferred over colorless since we're trying to play a spell the same turn we play Daxos, meaning that at least 3 of our 5/6 mana we'd like to have on T 3/4 to have available needs to be colored. However, if the card is good enough, colorless may be ok too.
Orzhov Signet is another auto include, it's cheap, ramps, and color fixes.
Coalition Relic can ramp quite nicely with colored mana as well, it's quite valuable and makes the cut easily.
Chromatic Lantern ramps and provides color fixing, it's possible we might be lacking BB for some of our black heavy spells and it's a welcome inclusion.
The various monoliths are tough, but get the nod over Mana Vault because you can untap them any time, whereas Mana Vault can only be paid to untap during your upkeep. If you have Grim Monolith, it's probably good enough to make it in. If not, you can test with Basalt and see how you like it, but I probably wouldn't play both.
Pristine Talisman is a nice card that makes Sanguine Bond more relevant and can help set off our combos, ramp us a little, and if nothing else, gain life at any opportunity. I think it's worth playing.
Mind Stone is a great card because it can ramp you early game, and replace itself when no longer needed, or when drawn late game. Even though it only ramps for 1 colorless, it's one of the better rocks and Commander's Sphere and Orzhov Cluestone are in the same vein. You can sleeve all, none, or some of these up, but I'd probably recommend at least Mind Stone, it's cheaper cmc makes it pretty valuable as a T2 play when Daxos is not generally doing much.
I don't think the keyrune, however, is worth playing. It will be a long time before its animate ability becomes feasible and is not generally that particularly useful.
Jeweled Amulet is another tempting inclusion. I keep seeing this card but have never played it myself. Let me know how it works if you try it.
As previously mentioned, I'm a big fan of the Pearl/Jet medallions. They give the deck more T2 plays, and go well in decks designed to play more than one spell a turn and that's exactly what we want to be doing when we play Daxos. At least one or both are worth including.
Lastly we have our 4CMC and up rocks. These are basically the fattest rocks in the game and where we don't need the help as much, between our early game rocks, Sanctum, and other mana producers, I don't think we'll be needing these quite as much.
Thran Dynamo doesn't help much, but Gilded Lotus might fuel us well enough when Daxos is online to help churn out more spirits. We'll test the Lotus.
So what else can we do for enhancing mana production? Well, we can always play Ancient Tomb and Temple of the False God. Both of these are pretty worthy. If you wanted to get real brave you could even sleeve up Lake of the Dead, but as a general rule, lands that make you sacrifice in order to enter play are very juicy strip mine targets.
So here's the rock assortment:
So 13 cards. For every two rocks, I tend to cut a land slot. Starting with 37 land, this would mean cutting land slots (we're now occupying 6 spell slots and 6 land slots)
This means playing 31 land which is kind of low for my tastes, and given the low land count we know we're going to be playing, I think this makes Mox Diamond less appealing to run. Let's axe it and give ourselves 3 slots back and test with 12 rocks (excluding Diamond), and 34 land.
Okay! We've got the manabase shaped up to some extent. Bear in mind that out of the 65 nonland slots the deck has, 12 of these are now occupied by rocks and 16 are non-enchantment spells, even if they run off of enchantments or tutor them up. This means that 37 slots remain as enchantment slots, and we've already figured out about 20-25 enchantments we're running. This means the remainder of our spells really need to be some dope enchantments that will really bring the deck together. A little over 1/3rd of the deck is enchantments, a little over 1/3 is land, and a little less than 1/3rd for everything else is the balance we're looking at right now. If, when playing the deck, we find that we'd like to add more enchantments, we can do so by cutting mana rocks that aren't performing, or redundant rocks (like cutting Pearl or Jet medallion) or redundant non-enchantment effects (do we need Auramancer AND Odunos River Trawler AND Sun Titan AND Treasury Thrull?)
Let's talk about Daxos himself and how we're going to be aiming at playing this deck and his role within it.
This deck by no means is "all in on Daxos" but we still want to empower him to perform as a threat in his own right. So when is he a threat? When you have enough mana to make a 4/4 every turn? Or two 6/6s? Do we want our threats to be tall or wide? Or maybe both?
This helps us flesh out the rest of our deck, and we can choose enchantments and cards that can make your threats both taller and wider. Like Crusade effects. Now we have good reason to play Dictate of Heliod and Spear of Heliod. Both of these will give you XP counters and even if Daxos can only make one or two bodies, they're much more threating bodies. One other card that might help our threats go wider is Heartstone. Heartstone synergizes heavily with Daxos, and also helps out Heliod and helps us go wider. Unfortunately, that's all it helps with. But depending on what you sleeve up, it might be more beneficial, so I thought I'd mention it.
Our deck wants to make Daxos A threat but not necessarily THE threat. While people are busy worrying about the XP you have and keeping him dead and offline, you're quietly assembling a combo that just wins on the spot behind the scenes. I think this is where the deck wants to be, and trying to make the deck all about daxos himself results in playing subpar cards you wouldn't otherwise consider. Let's just try and play Daxos and then go about our business normally, letting him get XP counters as we simply just play Magic with the rest of the deck. If he starts cranking out 3 7/7s a turn, fine. If he gets murdered and never makes a single one, fine, that just means your opponent had to expend resources to repeatedly deal with Daxos instead of on the cards from your library.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
My favorite win-con is Warstorm Surge + Impact Tremors + Purphoros, God of the Forge + Sigil of the Empty Throne + Rite of the Raging Storm + Assemble the Legion, in varying combinations of course. If you role Jeskai you also gain access to Bident of Thassa for card draw and Thopter Spy Network for further card raw and token production. Mardu is likely better for Pillow Fort shenanigans I think.
I actually run a Pillow Fort Queen Marchesa deck that uses these cards as the wincon. You can turtle up and ping your opponents to death while also swinging with whatever tokens you might have available and still leave behind some defense as well.
https://pucatrade.com/invite/gift/86097
Do you have a list posted somewhere? I'm putting this deck together at the moment.
Edit: I use Jenara, Asura of War as the general. Perhaps a bit unconventional at first glance, until you realize how easy it is to 1-shot somebody with the help of Serra's Sanctum.