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If some sources are to be believed, Selesnya Enchantress (
) has slightly overtaken Mono-Blue Stiflenought as the most popular deck in Premodern.
While I don't know that this popularity is justified (Stiflenought seems still to be the strongest overall strategy), an influx of enthusiastic Brushlands-tappers probably demands some instruction in the ways of the Human Druid.
Why Play Premodern Enchantress?
The position of Enchantress as one of the top three decks in Premodern is not, at present, particularly controversial. No credible source will deny Mono-Blue Dreadnought in the S-Tier. It's largely just a question of whether or not you consider Dreadnought alone at the top.
Some people put Replenish just under Dreadnought; whereas I consider the decks essentially equivalent in power and win expectation, with the caveat that Dreadnought is a one-color deck made largely of 0-1 mana plays, versus Replenish being a two-color deck, largely of four mana plays.
Most everyone else will agree, at this point, that Enchantress is the Bronze medalist here, but still on the podium.
From a matchup perspective, Enchantress tends to do well against Burn, quite well against Dreadnought (if maybe not as well as Enchantress Stans will have you believe), but very badly against Replenish.
Its status in the Premodern metagame might in a more cynical world be justified solely on a winning game plan against Dreadnought... But Enchantress also beats out almost every Midrange strategy that the format has ever produced on the order of 60-70% win expectation against all manner of Deadguy Ale, B/W Control, GAT, Contamination, or The Rock variants.
Meanwhile, one of its historically weak matchups (Mono-Blue Control) was functionally banned from the format last year along with Parallax Tide.
Playing Enchantress in Premodern
Typically, players mostly enjoy the turns (sometimes many) that take place between the very early game where both players are essentially mana screwed, and the end game where relatively few cards retain any relevance.
During those long middle turns of the average game, Enchantress is Queen. Provided you have one (or more) of your engine cards on the battlefield, you can draw more cards than any other deck. Sometimes this just means churning through your deck -- often at speed, building a base of Enchantments and mana with Serra's Sanctum simultaneously -- but sometimes it just means slowly burying the opponent under a sea of two-for-ones.
Imagine the opponent is relying on a key Enchantment or Artifact to stay in the game; say a Survival of the Fittest or Scroll Rack. If Enchantress plays Seal of Cleansing and draws 1-2 extra with Enchantress effects? It doesn't have to do that too many times before the opponent just runs out.
The Queenly mid-game is a time of so much margin for an operable Enchantress deck that it often feels like it doesn't matter what you do, or how many mistakes you make. When your biggest decision is what to discard because you have so many cards in hand... Well, those are just problems that the opponent probably wished they had.
But you still have to win the game! Turning the corner from a material advantage in the middle turns to actually winning the game can be when newer Enchantress players fail as Enchantress may have to show its belly or neck before moving successfully to the sideboard games.
Before the Game Begins
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Let's look at a recent Enchantress deck. 4FunNoWin used this to win a Challenge just last week. The most notable things about this recent list are that it is likely to be able to keep fewer opening hands than some of the Enchantress decks you may be used to.
Selesnya Enchantress | Premodern | 4FunNoWin
- Creatures (4)
- 4 Argothian Enchantress
- Instants (4)
- 4 Swords to Plowshares
- Sorceries (3)
- 3 Replenish
- Enchantments (27)
- 1 Elephant Grass
- 4 Enchantress's Presence
- 4 Mirri's Guile
- 3 Opalescence
- 3 Parallax Wave
- 3 Seal of Cleansing
- 2 Solitary Confinement
- 3 Sterling Grove
- 4 Wild Growth
- Lands (22)
- 6 Forest
- 2 Plains
- 4 Brushland
- 4 Serra's Sanctum
- 4 Windswept Heath
- 2 Wooded Foothills
- Sideboard (15)
- 2 Aura of Silence
- 1 Choke
- 2 Gaea's Blessing
- 1 Sacred Ground
- 1 Seal of Cleansing
- 2 Tormod's Crypt
- 3 Warmth
- 3 Xantid Swarm
This deck goes from 13 "anchors" to only 12: 4 Argothian Enchantress, 4 Enchantress's Presence, and 4 Mirri's Guile.
The Enchantress anchors are the cards that justify a keep. The likelihood you should keep a seven-card hand without an anchor is generally low. I've seen a great player keep triple removal (but no Enchantress effect) against Elves and just run out of gas after trading one-for-one three times.
That's because most of the cards in Enchantress are not good in the abstract. Yes, the deck can trade with advantage if it's exchanging something like a Seal of Cleansing or Aura of Silence one-for-one, but that's usually because the "one-for-one" trade is anything but. An Enchantress effect is fundamentally giving you a two-for-one or better.
Therefore, opening hands with Argothian Enchantress and Enchantress's Presence are easy to understand. When almost half your deck is Enchantments, Argothian Enchantress and Enchantress's Presence turn half your topdecks into the deck's signature engine. Because many of these cards don't do very much in isolation, you need one or more of the engine anchors in play to start building your Stage Two advantages. But what about Mirri's Guile?
Mirri's Guile
Mirri's Guile is not an intuitive card to understand. Why play it at all? 4FunNoWin removed Sylvan Library entirely (Sylvan Library was previously the 13th anchor), but long ago the Ancients played Sylvan Library over Mirri's Guile.
It's kind of easy to understand Sylvan Library. It's just the better card. The Oath Ponza and TerraGeddon folks figured this out already! You can use it as an Enchantress proxy to draw extra cards, and in some versions of the deck, it combined with Words of Wisdom or Words of War to take over the battlefield. Why has it been replaced with the "clearly inferior" Mirri's Guile?
Simple: Guile costs one mana.
As an anchor, it does two things: First, you get to make an actual play on turn one. Its ability to look at three cards -- specifically on turn two -- has become one of the major unlocks of the Enchantress archetype. You can keep more hands, in part, because you can try to find an Argothian Enchantress for turn two that didn't start in your opener.
Or maybe you kept a tooth-gritter with both Mirri's Guile and Argothian Enchantress, but only one Land. The Guile can help you find the second Land, land the Enchantress, and ultimately be off to the races.
Further, this deck has "only" 22 Lands, which is down from the 23 that Dr. Rich Shay used to win LobsterCon in 2025.
In addition to playing one fewer Land, 4FunNoWin has two Wooded Foothills in this deck, subtly reducing the mana count even more. You may notice that this deck has no Mountains. Ergo, Wooded Foothills is kind of a worse Forest in this deck.
Except with Mirri's Guile. There are going to be times when you know the next two cards on top of your deck, and you don't want either of them. Maybe you have no Enchantment coming and you want to start spilling the dominoes. Or maybe you're digging for your first Enchantress effect, which is not in the next 2-3 cards.
In any of these cases, the ability to shuffle and look at not one random card but three fresh ones via Mirri's Guile can be game changing.
Winning the Game
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In its current incarnation -- i.e. not a Sacred Mesa deck, not a Words of War or Words of Wisdom Lockdown deck, not focused on bouncing your own Cloud of Faeries a thousand times -- Enchantress typically wins by playing Opalescence; and then attacking with however many Enchantments (which are now Creatures).
Opalescence's partner in crime is the same here as in Replenish: Parallax Wave. With Opalescence in play, even a lone Parallax Wave becomes a nigh-unstoppable threat in Premodern. Infinite Creature removal; infinite Vigilance; a 4/4 that just won't quit.
You can target almost anything (even an opposing Enchantment), respond by having the Wave target itself, and permanently Exile whatever you went after in the first place. Because the Wave (a Creature, thanks to Opalescence) can target itself, it will reset to five Fading Counters over and over again, so the ability to Exile potential blockers is essentially infinite.
The problem for Enchantress is that it has relatively few ways to actually win. 4FunNoWin actually expanded this a bit with their more recent version. 3 Opalescence and 3 Replenish.
If the opponent Counterspells your three Opalescence and however many Replenishes you have in your deck, then that's all she wrote! It won't matter how many more cards you drew during the mid-game. You won't actually be able to actually win.
Make sure to watch for this: Because every competent Dreadnought player knows how to beat Enchantress Game One, and decks like LandStill and other Counterspell decks are trying to play for the same game plan.
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Enchantress tries to correct this in the sideboard games with Gaea's Blessing and Xantid Swarm. Most Blue decks can't realistically contend with the Enchantress engines. So, they save their Counterspells for the Enchantress kill cards. But Gaea's Blessing -- especially when you can force it through with a Xantid Swarm attack -- removes that as an option.
Sterling Grove
Sterling Grove is perhaps the most matchup-changing card available to Enchantress. In most cases, Enchantress is badly behind Replenish heads-up. To the tune of 20/80 in favor of Replenish.
The reason for this is that Replenish does "the same thing" (Opalescence + Parallax Wave) but can do it faster. For what it's worth, Replenish not only has more copies of all the relevant four mana spells -- Opalescence, Parallax Wave, and Replenish itself -- but is Blue, so can sometimes disrupt Enchantress with permission.
Replenish has Ancient Tomb, so can realistically play a turn two Attunement, then cast Intuition, then lock up the whole game before Enchantress can even play one of its key four mana spells.
In the ancient times of last year, Replenish could also Exile all of Enchantress's Lands with Parallax Tide, but contemporary Replenish decks with Decree of Silence do a perfectly fine job of locking down any opponent's ability to play.
The thing that can mess up Replenish's dominance is having two copies of Sterling Grove in play. Two! It has to be two, or more. If you only have one Sterling Grove in play, they will just Exile it with Parallax Wave and then go about their business normally.
But if you have two Sterling Groves in play Replenish will not be able to interact with any of your permanents. Argothian Enchantress itself starts off with Shroud, don't forget.
Having two Sterling Groves in play doesn't mean that Enchantress automatically wins, but it does mean that Replenish can't just Exile everything. Enchantress is the superior actual card advantage deck, so having double Grove is a game-changer.
Here's the thing about Sterling Grove though: Having even one Sterling Grove in play messes up your own Opal/Wave combo. With one Sterling Grove you'll have to, at a minimum, temporarily Exile the Grove before trying to target your Parallax Wave with its own ability (as it will have Shroud). Just something you need to know if you want to properly operate the now-most popular deck in Premodern.
Conclusion
Most of the sideboard is intuitive. Warmth beats Mountains; Choke beats Islands; Sacred Ground keeps your Forests and Plains in play... But what about Tormod's Crypt?
I am not normally a huge Tormod's Crypt fan. Personally, I think that Phyrexian Furnace is one of the best cards in the Premodern format. But Crypt is specifically good in Enchantress. This is a deck that has so much card advantage that the difference between 0 mana and 1-2 can be very material.
That difference can represent two extra actions in a turn. Further, Enchantress's worst enemy -- Replenish -- largely wins on being faster. Tormod's Crypt is fast and specifically cuts off Replenish's namesake Sorcery while Enchantress continues to draw extra cards, fair and square.
Woe upon Dreadnought in the sideboarded games. Dreadnought has two ways to win in Game One (jamming quickly on the play, or countering all the ways to win in the very long game) but has almost no purchase in Game Two.
Enchantress presents Xantid Swarm from turn one, and between Swords to Plowshares, Aura of Silence, and Seal of Cleansing, presents among the very best anti-Dreadnought defenses.
Gaea's Blessing (especially forced through with Xantid Swarm) beats the Dreadnought Gear Two exhaustion plan; and Blessing's very presence can counter a Brain Freeze kill. Every time I've won this matchup from the Blue side, I lost Game Two, un-sideboarded, and just tried to jam on turn two. Your mileage may vary.
LOVE
MIKE
