Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Zur, Eternal Schemer!

Zur is a three mana 1/4 with flying, gives enchantment creatures you control deathtouch, lifelink, and hexproof and for one and a white target non-Aura enchantment you control becomes a creature in addition to its other types and has base power and base toughness each equal to its mana value.

Game Plan

Zur being a way to make your enchantment creatures more effective is actually really good, especially if you happen to play a lot of support enchantment creatures that like to linger on the battlefield because they improve your board state.

The fact that Zur can also make your noncreature enchantments into creatures is even better because it allows us to play into a sort of pillow fort type of deck where we play a lot of enchantments that protect us that we can then leverage as creatures in the late game.

Support

Let’s start by first taking a look at creatures that are already enchantments and there are plenty of them we can use very effectively.

Grim Guardian is an enchantment creature with a Constellation trigger of when they or another enchantment enters under our control then each opponent loses 1 life, Aegis of the Gods gives us hexproof, and Underworld Coinsmith has a Constellation trigger of when it or another enchantment creature we control enters we gain 1 life and we can pay two mana and pay 1 life to have each opponent lose 1 life.

The Enduring cycle of creatures from Duskmourn have a very interesting interaction when it comes to Zur. See normally when the Enduring creature dies, it returns to the battlefield as an enchantment and not as a creature any more. Zur can then turn them back into a creature, which then allows them to come back if they were to die again.

This means that if we happen to have Enduring Tenacity in play, which has it so that whenever we gain life target opponent loses that much life who now has lifelink, deathtouch, and hexproof, it means that we have a continuous way to trigger their ability and not have to worry about a lot of removal from our opponents, barring board wipes.

Black Market Connections is a solid card that allows us to lose 1 life to create a Treasure token, lose 2 life to draw a card, and lose 3 life to create a 3/2 Shapeshifter token with changeling and while we would normally do one or two of these effects, with as much life we are gaining we can offset the life loss and full send for 6 life for all three effects.

Boon of the Spirit Realm can definitely help in this endeavor as well because when it or another enchantment enters under our control we put a blessing counter on it and creatures we control get +1/+1 for each blessing counter on it, which just increase the amount of life gain we get from our enchantment creatures.

We can even gain additional copies of our enchantments with something like Imposter Syndrome, which whenever a nontoken creature we control deals combat damage to a player we create a token that’s a copy of it except it isn’t Legendary.

The nonenchantment creatures in our deck primarily serve us to make our enchantments cheaper like a Starfield Mystic or to gain us some advantage whenever we do play our enchantments like Mesa Enchantress, though there is also a enchantment cost reducer in Inquisitive Glimmer, which is very helpful.

Setbacks

We have a ton of ways to protect our board from targeted removal because of Zur, which means we can focus our protection spells onto Zur because that is the greatest weakness of the deck.

There are plenty of ways we can take advantage of enchantments and enchantment recursion in our colors, but Zur is the lynch pin of the deck and without him in play, there is a chance our deck struggles towards the late game.

The concern of losing our enchantments that we turn into creatures is also important to note because they become much more susceptible to board wipes and other forms of removal should Zur not be in play, because the enchantments stay as creatures even when Zur is not in play.

While Zur does protect them while they are in play and we can focus or protections spells on Zur, we do have to be aware that Zur can’t protect from creature board wipes and can’t always be in play to protect our creatures from targeted removal.

Enchantment removal often does come stapled to some creatures in addition to artifact removal, so not having a way to keep your enchantments protected is definitely a factor to keep aware of. It also doesn’t help that the ideal enchantments we want in play have a higher mana value.

Zur being three mana is actually a solid rate, it’s our other spells being more expensive to cast being the issue. It may take us a bit longer to get to the enchantments we want, more so because we need to decide if we want to cast Zur before our enchantments or after.

Bracket Rating: Mid 3, Low 4

I do think that Zur has the potential of being a really good Commander for a decently powered deck, but in terms of how strong that deck is really held back by the overall rate the ideal enchantments we want in play are.

There are some tricky ways we can play with to recur our enchantments, but again those tend to be pretty mana intensive and can really hold us back from getting too strong. We still can be brutally efficient in controlling the board state as well as making sure that we stay in the game, but overall have a tougher time closing the game as threats become more and more dangerous.

I do think that Zur works perfectly with other enchantment based decks, Shrines is where I’ve seen him shine perfectly, and as a Commander he is solid, but hard to get over the bend in winning against faster decks.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual