Shrines are kind of a neat thing to me, a sub-class of enchantments with their own internal synergy. The biggest problem with them is they are the definition of a snowball deck, where once the deck starts rolling it’ll be drawing cards, generating mana, and slamming out damage or life loss; but there’s nothing really wrong with that, games should end. And this deck will end the game — not super quick, but things will start to really roll out.
Since this deck is targeted at bracket 2 or 3, it’s light on tutors or game changers; the only real tutor is Sterling Grove, which is really there more for protection than anything else. There’s also Sanctum of All, but a WUBRG costed enchantment with a triggered tutor seems “fair” to me.
Since land tutors are the one kind of tutors that “don’t count” I think it’s worth leaning heavily into them, running a grand total of 10, between the standard 2 costs and the 3 costs. These are “less good” but building the deck around serious tutoring helps to sort your mana base without running lots of duals. Or any non-basic’s whatsoever aside from fetch lands.
In turn this allows us to leverage two sets of stax effects. The first is non-basic land hate, in the form of Back to Basics, Magus of the Moon, Blood Moon, and Harbinger of the Seas. These will really punish decks that are trying too hard or are greedy in terms of land base, especially because the second stax effect is to lock down artifacts, thus depriving your opponents of mana fixing artifacts and mana rocks. Null Rod, Collector Ouphe, and Stony Silence are incredibly powerful stax effects. While the deck runs 5 shocklands, these are purely to fetch early to get you going. Only fetch enough to get a Forest out, so you can cast your other land tutors, then switch to ramping basics so you don’t punish yourself too much with your non-basic hate. It’s a 5 color deck, so having your non-basics turn into Islands or Mountains isn’t so bad. Back to Basics is the one that will really hurt you, but you can feel out the right time to cast it.
This combination of stax means your Shrines will have more time to come online and snowball, shutting off opponents’ midgames and ramp so they can’t execute on their plan while you build up a critical mass of enchantments.
For actually killing people you’ve got:
- Go-Shintai of Ancient Wars scales with Shrines
- Honden of Infinite Rage scales with Shrines
- Sanctum of Stone Fangs scales with Shrines (not an upkeep effect)
- Grim Guardian ETB effect
- Balemurk Leech ETB effect
- Forgeborn Oreads ETB effect
There’s also several copy effects, Copy Enchantment, Mirrormade, Estrid’s Invocation, and Yenna, Redtooth Regent. While Estrid’s can keep reentering as different things each turn (and thus triggering certain enchantresses like Setessan Champion) Yenna, Redtooth Regent lets you make permanent copies. Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin essentially reanimates enchantments, and also creates additional Shrine enchantment tokens along the way. While he’s listed in the sideboard, if you’re facing too much targeted removal you can run Ghen, Arcanum Weaver to keep recurring key enchantments.
You generally will want to be fairly aggressive with copying ideally one of your damaging Shrine effects, since you don’t have a lot of ramping Shrine damage. So copy your Ancient ways, Infinite Rage, or Stone Fangs, so you can actually close out the game.
In addition to the stax effects, this deck runs the attack tax effects in Propaganda and Ghostly Prison, meaning in order to attack you, your opponents will have to pay a fair amount of mana. Given the stax, and given your life gain off various effects, this should keep you in the game even if everyone decides you are the table enemy.
Finally there’s card draw, in the form of a bevy of enchantress type effect, and “other”. You’re meant to rapidly ramp out via land tutors, dump card draw cards, and redraw your hand so that you can overwhelm opponents with resources, and if needed, start reanimating key enchantments.
- Argothian Enchantress Cheap, Shroud
- Sythis, Harvest’s Hand Cheap, life gain
- Entity Tracker Flash
- Satyr Enchanter
- Verduran Enchantress
- Eidolon of Blossoms Triggers on self and is an enchantment
- Setessan Champion Gets big, ETB not cast trigger
Some limited interaction, both in the form of proper instants, and a couple of seals, Seal of Doom and Seal of Primordium have some added synergy for card draw and you can reanimate them with Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin, if you want more of this you could add Seal of Fire and a couple of others, see the sideboard.
I think this deck really personifies what will happen at bracket 3, sans further intervention, card draw will become king, with tutors effectively locked out at 3, you’ll just want huge amounts of draw, impulse draw, or mill to get to what you need in your deck. Overall this is good, meaning games will be less about tutoring out specific overpowered cards and more about general synergy. Also if you know everyone is going to need to draw all the time, it’s easier to punish that drawing or benefit from it with cards like Smuggler’s Share.
However because of the mass land denial this is solidly considered a bracket 4 deck.
Here’s a bracket 3 version, no mass-land denial, more Seals and a bit more protection.
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