Landchantress
- bonzaientertainmen
- 10 hours ago
- 7 min read
I was looking back at my Make EDH Weird Again series and feeling pretty proud that I was able to complete a deck in every color combination. There are some real standouts in the series that pushed the boundaries of what a color combination can offer a player. Decks like Kellan Curses, Companion Bonanza, Spicy Vanilla, and Myrkul Stal and Sac have really left their mark, and there are even more decks that could be added to that list.
There was one outlier for me when I was doing this review. It was my Mardu deck. The deck profits from cards leaving the graveyard. It doesn’t care if the cards exile or return to play, just that they move on from the graveyard. That differentiation was enough to separate it from a traditional reanimator in my mind, but after some consideration I felt I needed to do better. That’s what I’m doing here today.
What should I do to make Mardu weird? Lucky for me, I was brainstorming an enchant land deck at the same time. Keep in mind, I wasn’t going to choose Red White Black for that enchantress deck at first. My search of land auras turned up that I had the largest card pool in Abzan and Jund. It makes sense, Green has a lot of Wild Growth effects that would up my own mana production. More resources lead to winning more games, but that wasn’t what I was envisioning for the deck. I wanted to use enchantments to enable land destruction. Someone said land destruction, everyone gasp and cue the Armageddon horror stories that no one actually experienced first hand.
This will not be mass land destruction, just efficient targeted land destruction. I’m not going to be doing the removal though, my opponents will. I’m doing the set up piece and then let the chips land where they may. That was the spark of the deck idea. I focused my search on auras that animate lands. There were 2 cycles of cards that do this very well: Zendikon and Genju.
Zendikons are not the enemies of the Autobots, they’re auras that hail from Zendikar. I like to think of this cycle as a reverse Generous Gift. Generous Gift will destroy a land and give an opponent a 3/3 as a reward. With these Auras, opponents get the creature up front. The nice thing about this deck idea, once you kill the creature you kill the land too. Corrupted Zendikon turns a land into a 3/3, a very fragile 3/3. It might not die to Doom Blade as the old adage goes, but it does die to removal. It gets worse from there. Once that enchanted land dies, it goes back to its owner’s hand. These auras are best used against lands that enter tapped and when you have exile based removal available. Bounce lands are some of my favorite cards to enchant with this cycle.
The Genju work even better but are a little narrower. Let's examine Genju of the Fens. It’s super cheap at only 1 mana but requires me to pay to activate the ability to animate the land. That’s a good bit of balance in design, and I don’t really need the land to be a creature all of the time, just when someone is ready to remove it. There is another set of tradeoffs in the card design to notice. The card is limited to enchanting a land of the associated type. This black Genju of the Fens is limited to enchanting Swamps. The next bit of upside is huge; the Aura returns to my hand when the land creature is destroyed. I get to repeat this all over again once that happens. It’s a welcome inversion of what Zendikons do.
I was limited after that. There were a few one off auras that animate lands, but not many. Awaken the Ancient is the standout here. It puts a lot of power on the board but does have a restrictive casting cost. I needed a way to lean into the kill the land before it kills you energy I was channeling for the deck. There may not be a lot of forced land animation spells out there, but there are killer land spells. It just so happens that a lot of these effects say when you tap this land, it gets destroyed. Blight and Brink of Disaster are poster children for these effects. They’re simple. They deny opponents that resource and when someone chooses to tap into it, pun intended, it’s gone after that. Opponents have a hard time when this happens. The effect is downplayed the first or second time, but once four or more lands bet boobie trapped a player starts to panic. It’s like they’re stuck in quicksand and any movement will cause them to sink further. It’s even worse when a big land like Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx gets enchanted.
How else could I hamstring my opponents? The easiest way was to attach a cost to using the land. Contaminated Ground and Corrupted Roots are perfect poster children for this. If the enchanted land becomes tapped, expect to lose some life. They work great together because one needs to enchant a Swamp and the other makes the land a Swamp. Don’t double up on the same land though, unless it’s a value land that is going to be taped every turn cycle. There is room to do tapping/untapping shenanigans with effects like these, but I haven’t explored that.
I can really take a chunk out of an opponent or two with these land based auras. I like to target an opponent playing similar colors to me to get the most out of my Zendikons and Genju cards. Anyone playing a 5 color deck is priority #1. There’s more going on in the deck though that provides a density of threats and advantage for me. It just so happens this group of cards are Legendary Creatures.
I have some heavy hitters here. Eriette of the Charmed Apple, Daxos, the Returned, Neva, Stalked By Nightmares, and Victor, Valgavoth’s Seneschal. I learned a lot about Eriette in building a deck around her. I may only be taking advantage of her 2nd ability, to drain life from opponents, but that provides enough added synergy with my strategy she was a must include. Daxos lets me flood the board with token creatures which can close out the game. Neva may not have a great stat line at first, but she adds additional pain when an opponent loses a land to one of my Auras. Victor does a bit of everything, if I can cast enough Enchantments in a given turn. Orhzov legends for the win.
So, who could headline such a deck? Ghen, Arcanum Weaver of course. He’s a classic Curse commander in Mardu colors, so it was an easy jump to swap one aura type for another. I need to sacrifice one enchantment to get another back so I added in some effects to improve my Enchantment count. I really like Smoke Spirit’s Aid for this. Even if Ghen isn’t around these token Auras hit opponents’ life totals Ondu Spiritdancer doubles up my Enchantments at no additional cost. This works great with my Enchantment Creatures. Making 2 Doomwake Giants and Grim Guardians are backbreaking.
Back to the land destruction plan. I wanted to push the strategy, but I had exhausted my main card pool. I needed to broaden my search. With land destruction I want to get ahead of opponents with my resources. In my search of Land Auras I found Conquer. This just lets me steal a land from someone. My main targets are value lands and ones that generate multiple mana. Sometimes I don’t even need it, I just don’t want you to have it. Geomancer’s Gambit and Cleansing Wildfire replace the land that gets destroyed, but sometimes you just need to clear away troublesome lands. These play out similarly to Ghost Quarter and its associated lands. People don’t run as many basics as they should. I’ve gotten into multiple instances where opponents fail to find a basic land after one of these Ghost Quarter variants.
Let's check out the deck
Spectral Steel | Danitha Capishen, Paragon | |
Rise to Glory | Starfield Mystic | |
Redress Fate | Crusher Zendikon | Starnheim Courser |
Auramancer | Genju of the Fens | |
Cavalier of Dawn | Genju of the Spires | |
Crystal Chimes | Genju of the Fields | |
Crystal Dragon | Blight | |
Dawn to Dusk | Ashiok's Reaver | |
Ghostly Dancers | Destructive Urge | Archon of Sun's Grace |
Lotus-Eye Mystics | Conquer | |
Restoration Specialist | Uncontrolled Infestation | |
Cursed Land | ||
Brought Back | ||
Caustic Tar | Wicked Visitor | |
Boros Charm | Barbed Field | Defiled Crypt/Cadaver Lab |
Rakdos Charm | Brink of Disaster | |
Nettle Vine Blight | ||
Destructive Urge | Extinguish All Hope | |
Noxious Field | Damn | |
Requisition Raid | Steam Vines | Wear/Tear |
Vandalblast | ||
Field of Ruin | Tectonic Edge | |
Strip Mine | Wasteland | Demolition Field |
Volatile Fault | Scavenger Grounds | Bojuka Bog |
Shattered Lands | Forgotten Cave | Barren Moore |
Secluded Steppe | Canyon Slough | Terrain Generator |
Myriad Landscapes | Desert of the True | Desert of the Fervent |
Desert of the Glorified | Swamp x5 | Plains x4 |
Mountain x5 | Murganda Raceway | Avishkar Raceway |
Ghen added some real strength to the deck and I added some good tech to take advantage of his ability. Patriar’s Seal has a weird name but good effect. It makes mana or for a small cost I can use it to untap my commander or another legend. Battlemage’s Bracers doubles up on activated abilities. They also provide haste to speed up Ghen. Both work great with Magewright’s Stone since it untapped Ghen.
The deck had some hidden synergies I really enjoyed as well. I added in Extinguish All Hope because it saves my Grim Guardian, Doomwake Giant, and Underworld Coinsmith to name a few. Court of Ardenvale and Brought Back really push my land destruction plan. If I use a Ghost Quarter and other similar cards I can bring them back with these cards. It keeps my own land count high and keeps my opponents on guard to expect more lands to be blown up. I also added Blightcaster because he can weaken creatures to the point of removal.
What do you think? The deck has a nice surprise factor to it. It can be a little oppressive on one opponent if I focus all my land destruction on him. Sometimes, that’s just how it shakes out. Overall, it plays pretty fair and leans into an underused strategy. I think this is a better attempt at Make EDH Weird again than my original Mardu deck.
Thanks for reading and all the support to date. I have affiliate links with Mana Pool and TCG Player to help fund these off the wall strategies. It's what makes all this possible,
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