Enhancing the Precon Commander - Enduring Enchantments (Anikthea, Hand of Erebos)

Turning value into power is everything for this commander. Anikthea, Hand of Erebos aims to exploit a packed list of enchantments, light graveyard interaction, and a lot of aggressiveness to pave its way to victory.

With the Abzan colors , Anikthea, Hand of Erebos presents the best attributes of the combination, exploring the defensive aspects and synergy with white-offered enchantments while leveraging the support provided by the other colors.

Anikthea, Hand of Erebos features a 4/4 body and the menace ability, making it an efficient attacker or blocker. Furthermore, it also possesses the ability that whenever it enters the battlefield or attacks, you may exile a non-Aura enchantment card from your graveyard and transform it into a 3/3 Zombie creature with menace, clearly showcasing its strategy - aggression and value.

The deck's stance can be divided into several steps due to the number of pieces the deck needs to assemble to set its gears in motion. Let's carefully explore them below:

Card Draw

Drawing cards is an extremely important part of keeping our game plan going, and fortunately, the preconstructed deck already includes some high-quality cards for this archetype.

With effects that allow us to draw cards whenever an enchantment enters our side of the battlefield, the deck's card draw consistency can turn each enchantment we cast into two or more cards using cards like Mesa Enchantress and Satyr Enchanter.

Worth highlighting for their "different" functions, Sythis, Harvest’s Hand not only grants us a card draw for each cast enchantment but also gives us 1 life, while Erebos, Bleak-Hearted allows us to pay 2 life to draw a card each time a creature dies.

Ramping Your Game

Advancing our game so that we can cast multiple spells or more powerful spells as early as possible is a crucial part of our strategy, making good accelerations important.

Dryad of the Ilysian Grove and Farseek directly accelerate us with lands, while Sanctum Weaver has the ability to turn our array of enchantments into an enormous amount of mana all at once, evolving alongside our battlefield.

Putting Cards into the Graveyard

This is possibly the most complex part of the deck, as in a preconstructed deck, the access to cards capable of putting the pieces we want into the graveyard is quite limited. This leads us to occasional "self-mill," essentially putting one or more cards from our deck directly into the graveyard at certain moments (and always hoping for it to be an enchantment).

Nyx Weaver is an example of this kind of action, milling a card from the top of our deck into the graveyard once each turn, and the Nyx spider can also retrieve any card from the graveyard directly to our hand for just 3 mana.

Finishing the Game

If there's one thing this deck doesn't lack, it's ways to win the game. Its ability to turn the game into a snowball that grows only in its favor from the beginning is astounding and provides us with a diversity of options to secure victory, based on how we develop throughout the match.

Nyxborn Behemoth, besides being an enchantment itself, is a challenging piece for opponents to remove, ensuring its survival and potentially becoming indestructible while playing more enchantments into the graveyard for our commander to retrieve, all while carrying a 10/10 body with trample.

Archon of Sun’s Grace and Sigil of the Empty Throne can transform our stream of enchantments into powerful tokens and ensure elimination with an absurd number of tokens, while Starfield of Nyx can turn our numerous enchantments into creatures and close the game with an unexpected blow.

Alright, now that we've seen how the main deck functions, with its structure and strategies, it's time to seek improvement through upgrades that make its main structures work more smoothly, aiming for a faster and even more synergistic gameplay.

Replacing Lands

It's common for preconstructed decks to come with an excess of lands, and this is the first point we need to address. However, we can't forget that our deck still needs a good mana-generating capacity - so instead of relying on the quantity of lands, we'll add ways to accelerate mana, increasing the number of lands on the field.

By removing Selesnya Sanctuary, Golgari Rot Farm, and Orzhov Basilica, we can make room for Explore, Cultivate, and Nature's Lore, achieving the progress we're looking for.

Out:

In:

Focusing on the Graveyard

To enhance the deck's effectiveness in fulfilling this somewhat lacking part of our strategy, the added cards in place of Culling Ritual, Greater Tanuki, and Font of Fertility aim to improve this aspect of our deck.

With the goal of placing the desired card into the graveyard at the optimal time, Entomb, Unmarked Grave, and Oriq Loremage can turn the somewhat fragile aspect of our base deck into something much stronger and more consistent, offering the necessary support.

Out:

In:

Enhancing Creatures

The objective here is simple: increase effectiveness and/or improve synergy with the rest of the deck. Argothian Enchantress is another card draw piece but much more resilient and difficult to remove, while Nylea's Colossus turns every enchantment we play into a potential booster for our creatures, generating immediate power on the battlefield.

To make room for these new, more potent pieces, we remove some cards that, despite being powerful, don't have as strong or immediate an effect or have little synergy in the list, such as Arasta of the Endless Web and Heliod, God of the Sun.

Out:

In:

Empowering Enchantments

Being the main focus of our deck, the changes to enchantments are aimed at enhancing existing aspects of our construction, focusing on providing protection for our pieces through Sterling Grove or protecting ourselves with Sphere of Safety, among other cards like Teleportation Circle that seek to activate our commander more than once per turn.

To make space for these pieces, similar to what we did with creatures, we remove enchantments that have less synergy with the deck or appear somewhat disjointed in the list, such as Cast Out and Dreadhorde Invasion, which, while good cards, don't contribute as much to the strategy.

Out:

In:

With the changes focused on enhancing performance, our final list should look like this:

As a naturally resilient and synergistic deck, Anikthea, Hand of Erebos leads a powerful and structured set of cards, with various foundations and possibilities, offering an opportunity to customize the deck with your favorite theme: Combo? Aggression? Control? Graveyard? There's room for all options.

And you, what would you add?

Leave your thoughts in the comments, and see you next time!