The Best Enchantress Commanders in EDH, Ranked

An enchantress deck is built around drawing extra cards every time you cast an enchantment, turning a steady stream of auras and enchantments into a steady stream of gas rather than relying on combat damage. The best enchantress commander for most decks is Sythis, Harvest's Hand: two mana, no attacking required, and a card every single time you cast an enchantment. Tuvasa the Sunlit is the pick if you want blue, and Eriette of the Charmed Apple is the pick if you want to win without ever turning a creature sideways.

Four things separate a great enchantress commander from a merely fun one:

• Cards per enchantment. Every trigger, or only the first one each turn?
• Mana cost. You will recast this commander. A two-mana engine survives three trips to the command zone; a five-mana one does not.
• Does it need combat? Draw triggers that fire off casting work through a stalled board. Attack triggers don't.
• What happens after a wipe. Enchantress decks commit hard to the battlefield. The commanders that rebuild are worth more than the ones that just draw faster.

That last one is the criterion most lists skip, and it's the one that decides games in a four-player pod.

Sythis costs , and every enchantment spell you cast draws a card and gains a life. No "first each turn" clause, no combat requirement, no conditions. It is the cleanest version of the effect ever printed on a commander.

Two mana is the real selling point. Even after three deaths you're recasting a 1/2 for at worst, and in practice you're paying two or four. Compare that to a five-mana commander that stops coming back on the second wipe.

Sythis is also an enchantment creature, which cuts both ways: your enchantment recursion can rebuy it, but so does Back to Nature find it. Selesnya gives you no counterspells, so a resolved board wipe is a resolved board wipe.

Tuvasa is for a 1/1 that gets +1/+1 for each enchantment you control and draws on your first enchantment spell each turn. One card per turn instead of one per spell is a genuine downgrade from Sythis, and you're paying a mana more for it.

You're buying blue. Counterspells, Cyclonic Rift, and card selection are exactly what a durdle-heavy deck wants, and Tuvasa turns into commander-damage lethal faster than anyone at the table expects, six enchantments makes her a 7/7. She's still a 1/1 base, though, so budget a protection slot or two before your fourth turn.

Eriette costs for a 2/4, and at the beginning of your end step each opponent loses life equal to the number of Auras you control while you gain that much. She draws nothing. She's on this list because she solves the problem the draw engines create.

She also has the best defensive text in the archetype: creatures enchanted by your Auras can't attack you. Put an Aura on the biggest thing across the table and it becomes both a drain counter and a creature that can't come at your face. In a pod that's two effects for one card, and it makes you a genuinely awkward target early.

Anikthea is for a 4/4 with menace, and when she enters or attacks she exiles a non-Aura enchantment from your graveyard and makes a token copy of it that's also a 3/3 Zombie. Every wipe you eat becomes fuel for the next one.

The catch is that she's a five-mana attack trigger, so she's slower than everything above her and she asks you to be in combat. But Abzan enchantress with a recursion engine in the command zone is the most resilient version of this deck, and resilience is what the archetype is short on.

Zur costs for a 1/4 flier, and whenever he attacks you search for an enchantment with mana value 3 or less and put it straight onto the battlefield. That's a free, repeatable, unconditional tutor that skips paying for the card, and it finds whatever the board needs. A lock piece, a protection aura, a combo half.

Zur is a real jump in power level, and pods notice. If you build him, run your list through the bracket calculator before you sit down, because a deck steered by a repeatable free tutor lands higher on the scale than the pile of enchantments it looks like.

Uril turns up in every search for this archetype, so: he's for a 5/5 that can't be targeted by spells or abilities your opponents control and gets +2/+2 per Aura attached. He is excellent. He is not an enchantress commander, he plays Auras and draws nothing.

If that's the deck you actually want, our Voltron building guide is the better starting point. Just remember that untargetable is not indestructible, and a board wipe eats him and the four Auras with him.

Drawing cards is not a win condition, and this is the failure mode nobody warns you about. Our own Zacama enchantress build is a good honest example. It draws well, it builds an absurd board, and it still wins about 37% of its recorded games. The engine works. The closing doesn't, unless you build for it.

Two things fix that. First, pick a kill before you pick your thirtieth enchantment: an aura-based drain, a big trampler, Approach of the Second Sun, anything that converts the board into a dead opponent. Second, plan for the table's reaction. A player drawing four cards a turn becomes the archenemy of the pod around turn six, and the removal is coming whether or not you're ahead on board.

Enchantments dodge most Commander interaction. Very few decks run maindeck enchantment removal, but Farewell and Austere Command don't care, and they exile. Hold a protective piece, or accept that you're rebuilding from the graveyard, which is the whole argument for Anikthea.