The Dual Brews – Enchantment Alteration
Welcome back to The Dual Brews, a series where we shine a light on Old School Magic: The Gathering cards that never quite made it out of the binder. Along the way, we might uncover a hidden gem—or more likely, just confirm why these cards were forgotten in the first place. Either way, Bjorn and Johan are up for the challenge. In each episode, they independently brew a “budget” deck (by Old School standards) built around a single, underappreciated card.
Last time we explored the card Personal Incarnation (link here, thank you for all the feedback), now we are taking a closer look at Enchantment Alteration.
Johan’s take on Enchantment Alteration
Like the previous time, this card has been much more clearly phrased since the Oracle introduction.
The official text is nowadays: “Attach target Aura attached to a creature or land to another permanent of that type.”. Well, that is what I would call efficiency, although it lost a bit of its Old School charm.
In this case we have to investigate which ‘enchant creature’ or ‘enchant land’ (the initial wording) would benefit most from playing Enchantment Alteration.`Before doing that though, I would first like to mention an auto-include in this deck; call it a homage to my Dual Brews counterpart Bjorn. It is one of his favourite cards and almost became a missionary to preach the power of the Enchantress.
Definitely not a green mage at heart, but I can’t deny the appeal of playing Verduran Enchantress. It is one of the draw engines in Old School Magic and an underrated one for sure. Drawing lots of cards is one of the best things in Magic the Gathering!
Due to budget restrictions I am inclined to stick to these colours: Blue and Green. Let’s look at the ‘enchant creature’ and ‘enchant land’ it offers; at least the seemingly playable ones:
Definitely not sold on all of them, but Control Magic is indisputably the stand-out card. After your opponent has figured out you are playing with multiple Control Magics, they tend to play their weakest creature first, given the choice. This is where Enchantment Alteration shines.
Not only can you take over the strongest creature on the battlefield, but even at instant speed. Imagine if you used Control Magic on your opponent’s Savannah Lions. A few turns later and there is both a Serendib Efreet and a Serra Angel staring at you from the other side of the board. Then… a top deck Enchant Alternation, just what the doctor ordered. You await the attack phase where he decides to attack with both creatures, clearly not expecting our focal card of this episode. By switching the Control Magic to Serra Angel - again, at instant speed! - we can block the Serendib Efreet of its former controller. If we want to aim for card advantage with underrated cards, we have to work hard for it!
Backfire could easily be one of the other contestants of this series, since I believe it is a hidden gem as well. Perhaps due to low life totals your opponent decides not to attack with his Backfired creature. A well-timed Enchantment Alteration could surprise them.
A prominent weakness of this deck is to be reliant on the deck of your opponent. In case not many creatures are played, we still need to figure out a way to win. Enter Psychic Venom! Elon, a player from the Dutch community, has a true calling to win a tournament with Psychic Venom. As soon as this aura is included, we can’t forget about his compadre, the mighty old Icy Manipulator. Does Enchant Alternation and Psychic Venom have a proper synergy? Not really, but it can put your opponent’s Mishra’s Factories at bay.
For rounding out the deck, I think the following cards are a no-brainer to me:
Braingeyser
Sylvan Library
Mana Drain
Copy Artifact
Skull of Orm (we keep it spicy here!)
That concludes the following decklist:
Bjorn’s take on enchantment alteration
Johan beat me to it again writing, and told me he was making a brew with Enchantress. This was obviously where I would have gone too, since I love brewing and playing Enchantress decks. But since Johan had dibs (not Serendibs, mind you) on an Enchantress version, I had to think of something different. When we first spoke about Enchantment Alteration, it was also because when I had just started playing Magic, it somehow felt like a good or at least a usable card. This was mainly because my Sengir Vampires were always stolen by my magic playing friends with control magic. One fine solution was the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach, so I traded for some control magics myself. So I was up against an UW deck and UG deck with my (now) UB deck. It felt like not enough, like I needed something more. And then I ran into Enchantment Alteration. In my very limited magic experience at the time (I was playing for 2-3 months or so, with no internet, so looking for strategy advice was mainly looking at cards in binders and figuring out if they would be any good in your normal match-ups. Enchantment alteration looked great. That way I could move the control magic of my opponent to my Demonic Hordes, which would be a nasty surprise. Or just put their Control Magics on their own creatures, instead of mine.
As soon as I started playing some more competitive games, I noticed the card was not really that good in most matchups. But the thought of playing with it never really left my mind, so next to being in full spike mode for some of my decks, I also tried playing with sub optimal cards like Enchantment Alteration. This ‘Dual Brew’ was a good way to think about what you can do with it, and I went a way I had thought of many times, but never really worked into a deck that I actually played with.
One of the interesting things you can do with enchantment alteration that was not possible in an understandable way in 1994, is use it in combination with a stacked effect. The stack did not exist by then, and we had plenty of discussions whether it was possible for me to change the target of my own enchantment alteration on my opponent's creature after blocking with it. It somehow felt that should be possible, but it led to all kinds of discussions questioning if it would still be blocking or not. Anyway, using it with the stack enables you to change the target of the enchantment after an effect has gone onto the stack, which leads to interesting possibilities. Since the idea of this blog is to make use of cards that are not played that often, I went for Blight, combined with some other cards that would complement this idea and ended up with this:
I wanted to keep the deck sort of budget friendly, with no power, but playing this without duals would be very risky, so I put those in. Other than that, the idea is pretty straightforward. You sinkhole some lands, but Blight on others and when the destroy effect goes onto the stack, you change Blight to another one of your opponents’ lands. If he decides not to tap it, you tap it with your Icy Manipulators. Creatures are taken care of with Paralyze, but since the goal of the deck is getting a lot of mileage out of Enchantment Alteration, I went for Spirit Shackle. It should take no more than two taps of the Icy to take care of most creatures. And if there is no other creature to put it on, you can always get it back with the Skull of Orm. Since you do need a way to actually win, I added some vises and 2 Mishra’s Factories to do enough damage before you run out of cards. And since this whole thing started with Control Magic, I added some too. Also, if you are up against a bolt deck, the one Nether Void might take care of that for you, so you are not completely helpless.
One could think about some other ways to run this deck, exchanging one of the vises and one of the Control Magics for Ivory Towers, since this deck will obviously take a long time to win, and towers might give you just enough time to win against bolt/weenie decks. Either way, every time you use Enchantment Alteration in this configuration, it should give you a feeling of fun satisfaction. If you decided to try this out after this blog, drop me a message to let us know how it went!
