Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Marina Vendrell!

Marina is a five mana 3/5 and when she enters you reveal the top seven cards of your library and put all enchantment cards from among them into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order, and you can tap her to lock or unlock a door of a Room you control as a sorcery.

A recent habit Wizards of the Coast has been making Commanders that are all in on a new card type or subtype that they introduce, with Marina being very clearly designed to be a Room Commander.

However, what interests me is the fact that she grabs any enchantment, not just Rooms, which means that she is actually well suited in being an Enchantress style Commander.

Moreover, it’s possible that we can combine two different sorts of enchantment strategies by adding another popular archetype for enchantments.

First we need to build up our Enchantress package, meaning anything that allows us to get more value from casting enchantments.

Enchantress’s Presence is one of the better versions of this effect because of the fact that it is an enchantment itself to gain a draw trigger if we have access to another Enchantress.

Sythis, Harvest Hand, Mesa Enchantress, Setessan Champion are among some of the higher picks in this category, but we also have access to Entity Tracker which is a blue Enchantress that also triggers off of Rooms being unlocked.

We also need ways to make casting enchantments cheaper and protecting them. On the discounting mana cost side we have Jukai Naturalist, Starfield Mystic, and Inquisitive Glimmer and for the protection side of things we have Sterling Grove, Fountain Watch, and Greater Auramancy.

Shrines are one of my personal favorite decks, mostly because I enjoy the theming around them. The issue can be making sure that you have the resources to get them into your hand if they are your primary strategy.

Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin is the Shrine Commander and whenever it or a nontoken Shrine enters you make a 1/1 Shrine enchantment creature token, which helps snowball Shrine value.

The most important aspect is that all Shrines are enchantments, which means that we potentially have a fairly consistent way to get Shrines into our hand. There are plenty of blink and flicker effects that we can use to get Marina to trigger again and again, with my personal favorite being Teleportation Circle.

We can then cycle through our deck to get as many Shrines as possible and play them to help our enchantment value engine. There are Shrines that give us a ton of mana, gain us life, drains our opponents, and draws us more cards for more value.

While we aren’t going to be playing every single Room, there are still Rooms that we want to play to help us out.

Mirror Room//Fractured Realm gets a token onto the battlefield, but much more importantly is a Panharmonicon effect for triggered abilities of our permanents.

Cramped Vents//Access Maze can help get rid of a problematic creature while gaining us life and then allow us to pay life to cast spells, which ideally we should have a lot of if we played correctly, and Charred Foyer//Warped Space also helps us gain card advantage and playing a spell for free from exile once per turn.

Greenhouse//Rickety Gazebo helps fix our colors and returns some permanents to our hand, while Roaring Furnace//Steaming Sauna can deal damage equal to the number of cards in our hand to a creature and give us no max hand size limit and draw more cards.

And then of course we have Central Elevator//Promising Stairs to act as an alternate win condition. The way we would ideally win is to outvalue our opponents into a dominant position that our opponents can’t reasonably deal with.

Marina is a value Commander, being able to get the pieces that we need to build a dominant board that is hard to deal with. Five colors can make things a bit difficult to manage depending on your budget for your land base, and there is also the possibility that you get bored with playing an all value Commander.

It doesn’t always present the most interesting gameplay and it can get repetitive, but with Marina being five colors you have a wide swath of enchantment based strategies to pursue to help vary your play patterns.

Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow for the next Daily Commander!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual