Commander Deck Tech: Sythis, Harvest's Hand
With many choices on Commander options how do we decide on which Commander to build around? I think for some of us we see a video of a Commander deck that sparks our interest. For others you may have walked by a table at your local gaming store and seen some people playing different Commanders. The one thing that excites me the most when brainstorming a new Commander is, what will the deck do? What cool interactions will there be? And how will you win? I get ideas all the time, but for this one I just wanted to draw cards. I did not want to do it in a Blue deck because lots of the decks I've built are Blue. That brings us to a card from Modern Horizons 2, Sythis, Harvest’s Hand. It’s all about drawing cards and creating a massive board state. The other really cool thing about Sythis is the card only costs between $2 and $3.
That's an affordable Commander!
So we want to draw lots of cards and we want to do it within White and Green. This is an Enchantment enchantress deck that adds a tool box of spells to be versatile and have some different win conditions. The deck most certainly needs to be annoying. The downfall is that the annoyance of your cards will eventually create opponents attacking you. We have several protection spells like Teferi's Protection and Heroic Intervention with spot removal here and there. You may run into the circumstance of jamming out Enchantments and holding Creatures. This is because you want your opponents to create their boardstate (Creatures) then play Wrath of God or Day of Judgment. We can wipe out all their creatures all while stocking up on Creatures in our hand that create card advantage.
The enchantress Creatures that the deck utilizes are: Argothian Enchantress, Femeref Enchantress, Mesa Enchantress, Satyr Enchanter, Setessan Champion, Verduran Enchantress, and Eidolon of Blossoms. We also can gain card advantage from a few individual Enchantments in Sylvan Library and Enchantress's Presence. In addition, there are a few different cards that let you look at the top of your library to find an Enchantment. We also have several different Enchantment tutors to choose from as well. I think the tutoring will be one of the toughest things to do in the deck as you learn how to play it. What you tutor for may vary from Commander opponents in one match to the next. Maybe in one match you’ll go for something annoying like Blind Obedience, and the next match you’d go for something like Oblivion Ring to kill an early Creature.
When I was looking for cards to put into the deck I saw several different ways you could build a Sythis or enchantress type of deck. You can go the way I took sticking true to enchantresses. You can also go the proliferate / token type of build. There are so many different options on Enchantment cards that double the amount of tokens you make. You could also go Creature-less or mostly Creature-less with some sort of lock-out, but for that I think you would need to add Blue for several key cards. I wanted to stick to quick, cheap, and simple. Sythis is all of those and recasting is still fairly cheap from the command zone.
This build is going to win by attacking your opponent either with normal Creatures, or with tokens created by many of the Enchantments within the deck. Some of the win conditions in the deck are: Felidar Retreat, Hallowed Haunting, Sigil of the Empty Throne, Luminarch Ascension, and Archon of Sun's Grace. Other than that we do have lots of normal Creatures, but they most likely won’t be winning you a ton of games. You're going to win from overwhelming your opponent with Creature tokens or +1/+1 buffs.
The newer cards that I ended up using in this build are: Hallowed Haunting, Overgrown Farmland, Katilda, Dawnhart Martyr, Rite of Harmony, and several Modern Horizons 2 cards. I’d also like to reiterate that when building any new Commander deck I always seem to find several Modern Horizons 2 cards going into the build. The set is amazing and should age very, very well.
So what's the downfalls or stuff to be concerned about with the deck? Well wrath effects, and cards that exile Enchantments. We have several options to get Enchantments back from the graveyard, but if they are exiled you are doomed. We did add the protection spells which should help prevent some of this from happening. Do your best to minimize overextending if you feel an opponent has a wrath or board wipe effect. I’d save back an enchantress and an Enchantment spell when I can, or when I want to be cautious.
The cost of this build is expensive but it can easily be made quite a bit cheaper if you are on a budget. You’ll have to swap out Serra's Sanctum, Savannah, Argothian Enchantress, Replenish, and Academy Rector, which can all be substituted for something else. There’s also several $15 to $20 cards in this build which is where most of your budget should go toward.
Overall the deck looks very efficient to play only being a 2 color deck. I ran about 15 test hands to see what different types of hands the deck would randomly come up with. There were only 2 hands that I would have most likely taken a mulligan which is pretty low. I hope this article gives you a start at building your own Sythis or enchantress style deck.
Until Next Time,
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