BW Enchantment Midrange

Aka History of Benalia Tribal

A 61 player 1k top 8 report and deck primer

By Zack Brady

Hope everyone is having a wonderful time here in Pioneer. I wanted to share with you the little gem I’ve been pleasantly working on in my little corner of this ever changing metagame that is Pioneer. So let’s start as I often like to do talking about the general idea and premise around the deck. So with the release of Theros Beyond Death, we’ve gotten a slew of new enchantments to build around. Among these, one particular one rose immediately into the attention of many.

Treacherous Blessing allows to play out your hand and then refill to keep going. It should never be underestimated how much the words “draw three cards” does to enable your midrange deck to keep up with control in the card advantage game as well as to bury your aggro opponents after you 1 for 1 them out of their opening hand. Now the first several variants of BW Enchantment decks that came out built around Treacherous Blessing were much more of a control variant. They used things like board wipes to try and reset the boardstate and then go over the top with Starfield of Nyx. As many of you may know from my previous deck techs and articles, as much as I love value and drawing cards, I like killing my opponent and winning the game more. So I took the glue of Treacherous Blessing and Doom Foretold and dragged the entire core down a notch to be more aggressive. Let’s talk about each card and its role in the deck.

So we talked about Treacherous Blessing so let’s talk about the other powerhouse staple in the deck, Doom Foretold. Doom Foretold has an awful lot of text on it but let me explain what this card actually does in the context of the game. You are playing out spot removal, blockers, discard and other things in the first 3 turns. Your opponent slams their powerful turn 4 or 5 play. There are lots of those in this format, Nissa Who Shakes the World, Chandra Torch of Defiance, Vraska Golgari Queen, Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, Glorybringer, Heliod etc. just to name a few. You then untap and play out Doom Foretold. During your opponents upkeep, they must sacrifice a real card most of the time. Not some token or free incidental thing that usually are good against edict effects. Now they are faced with a tough decision, do they play something else onto the board that will be sacrificed next turn or do they let what I like to call “The Bad Stuff” happen to them. They are also put into a box because if they are low on cards in hand, part of the bad stuff is making them discard a card which can often eat that precious thing they were trying to save anyway. Well your opponent makes their decision and passes back. This deck runs a lot of cards that have already done their job but now stick around as fodder. For example, we have Trial of Ambition and Oath of Kaya as early removal pieces. We have Tymaret Calls the Dead of which we only care about the first 2 chapters, both of which might have resolved by the time you need to sacrifice something to Doom Foretold (if you played them out on curve for example). Essentially you are trading something irrelevant for a real card for every turn cycle that Doom Foretold sticks in play. So what happens if you have nothing to sacrifice to Doom Foretold? Well you sacrifice itself and move on, sometimes that’s good enough to get a pesky walker or indestructible creature in play. Something to note, if your Doom Foretold were to die in response to it’s trigger and you have nothing legal to sacrifice to it, you get the bad stuff but also the good stuff. It’s a sorta awkward situation but isn’t actually that bad for you considering you are getting the good stuff. TL;DR: Your life total stays the same, you discard then draw and you get a 2/2 knight. It’s important to have stuff in play to feed to Doom Foretold so it can continue to eat through your opponents cards. Bear this in mind that you can often want to extend your Oath of Kaya out proactively, even if it is just pointed at your opponents face so that when you follow up with Doom Foretold, you get to keep it around. It doesn’t matter if The Bad Stuff never happens or doesn’t happen for a while if it means you can churn through many of your opponents cards. Doom Foretold is a card that takes time to get used to it’s sequencing so take your time and try to spot the turn you want to deploy it in advance. Set yourself up to take full advantage.

Ok, now that 2 of the main cards are out of the way. Let’s talk about how we plan to kill our opponent. Afterall that’s the main overhaul that I wanted to get done right?

So let’s start with Aphemia, the Cacophany. This is a card that does a ton of leg work for her simple 2 mana 2/1 flying frame. First, being an enchantment means that being legendary isn’t that big a deal. Multiple copies will feed themselves and this is a lightning rod of a card. If it’s not killed, it’ll really spin out of control by pumping a 2/2 out every turn. We have lots of ways for enchantments to hit the yard between Final Payment, Doom Foretold, Sagas sacrificing themselves after they finish their chapters, Oath of Kaya being legendary means multiple copies will hit the bin and Cast Out having cycling. One of your most aggressive draws allows you to cycle Cast Out on turn 1 followed by an Aphemia on turn 2 and immediately getting a zombie. It’s very real pressure that can really put your opponent on the back foot. Now it should be stated that Aphemia is not a card that you always want to just jam out onto the table. Protect her from open removal mana. Try your best to always get at least 1 Zombie out of the deal. Obviously if you have multiples, feel free to use her to bait a removal spell and feed the next copy. Also consider your sequencing. If you have a Tymaret Calls the Dead in hand, maybe you do want to run her out on 2 so you can sequence into her. If she dies, she guarantees you hit with Tymaret Calls the Dead and if she lives, your tymaret has a chance to hit 2 enchantments and turn your pressure into overdrive. If you have a hand that leans on History of Benalia, sometimes it’s right to hold back on playing her until after the Histories have pounded at your opponent and forced them to make some pretty feel bad trades with removal so that you can drop her and keep that pressure flowing. Aphemia is one of the strongest cards in the deck when sequenced around in the right way and really gives you closing power against decks you need to be the beatdown like Ramp, Control and Combo.

So now let’s talk about History of Benalia. This is a card that did extremely well during its time in standard and I think a lot of people sleep on a bit with regards to pioneer. This card is almost always a 2-3 for 1. The Knights make great blockers and attackers and when you get to chapter 3, your knights become lethal and make your opponent have to make some incredibly bad decisions. In addition to History making Knights, Doom Foretold and Gideon, Ally of Zendikar out of the board also make them. I’ve joked with people that this deck is “History of Benalia Tribal” because between it and Tymaret Calls the Dead, it often feels like you are running 7 copies of this effect. Even without the final chapter, swarming the board with what feels like endless supplies of 2/2’s means you rebound from sweepers easily and they close out games. Remember in matches where you are being aggressive to use your Oath of Kayas to the face or hold them with that in mind so you can reach a bit and lethal after a good chapter 3. History of Benalia is a lot like Seige Rhino, they come in groups and the second is often lethal for an opponent already knocked onto the backfoot by the first.

Final Payement is the last MB Card I want to talk about because it is a card that will probably invoke the immediate reaction of “why is this draft card in this deck”. This card is BONKERS in our deck. We have a ton of creatures and enchantments that can be sacrificed to it’s additional cost and doesn’t feel bad. Of note, it’s not always right to sacrifice enchantments if you have the choice. Beware of your own Doom Foretolds and ensuring you have enough stock to feed to them. Sometimes a 2/2 token is worth sacrificing instead or even paying 5 life if it means Doom Foretold gets to stick around for another trigger on the opponent. You know when I mentioned you sometimes trigger The Bad Stuff on yourself? This is generally how. Turn your onboard Doom Foretold into a rummage and a Knight while killing your opponents creature rather than just having it be sacrificed. There is also an interaction that should be mentioned with this card, the sacrifice is an additional cost so if you have a Trecherous Blessing in play that you want to sacrifice to cast the spell, it will no longer be in play when the spell is actually cast since it was sac’d to pay the cost. I’ve used this on my own things when you need to get a Blessing off the table against say Control (you kill your own creature). Additionally even if you target their creature and this spell gets countered, the Blessing was still sac’d and that’s often good enough. All in all this card has been Terminate in function almost all the time and in all of my matches I’ve played with this deck so far, I’ve paid 5 life once and it was because i didn’t want to take 4 damage from a mono-r deck. Followed it up with an Oath of Kaya and the life loss didn’t matter.

Sideboard:

So one of the things I like most about this archetype is how flexible the sideboard is based on what you want to focus on. Pick and choose and test as there are many many cards but I will say that unless things change, I was extremely happy with the sideboard I brought. My least favorite card in it is Lost Legacy but it’s pretty essential to help against UB Inverter and Niv to Light. It comes in during other matchups but those 2 are why it is there. Take Niv Mizzet and you can outgrind that deck, if you don’t take it, the match is pretty impossible after the 2nd Niv resolves. Prior to the rise of UB Inverter I just chose to concede that match and focus elsewhere but Inverter gives us a huge reason to play it and definitely paid off this last weekend. Decks might start to add Coax from the Blind Eternities so it’s not a hard lock out of the combo win for them but you don’t need it to be. In that matchup you just need to buy time as you hammer each other with discard and then let your endless supply of 2/2’s go to work and make their spot removal bad. Beware of Cry of the Carnarium and not overextending too far into it. Often they will be forced to use it on a single History of Benalia board which makes it really easy to rebuild as a follow up.

One card that I’m like 95% confident should be in every board is 4x Leyline of the Void. There are enough decks that use their gy heavily like Breach Lotus, Dredge, Soul Flayer (although that matchup is pretty laughably easy with all the edicts we run) and we are pretty much an ideal Leyline deck since multiples can be used as fodder to Doom Foretold or Final Payment later. You take any of the decks that heavily lean on their yard and put them under a leyline, sometimes all you need is the couple turns it buys you til they remove it.

Thanks for reading the primer, now we will move to a shortish tournament report from my 1k top 8.

Round 1 UB Inverter (0-2) [0-1]:
If you ever play against me in a tournament, you better hope it’s round 1. For some reason I just love eating a round 1 loss. No idea why. Anyway, I got paired against my roommate for this match. He’s a very good player with multiple PTs under his belt from the past year and he gave me the drubbing in this match. Game 1 he set up the combo with Dig Through Time to clear out his yard and then combo from hand. Game 2 was sorta a series of bad luck for me or good luck for him however you want to look at it. It happens though so it’s not that big a deal. I take his Thoughtseize with mine on turn 1. Turn 3 I go for Lost Legacy and nab his Inverters. I see he drew a 2nd Thoughtseize by this point and between his draw off Lost Legacy (he had 1 inverter in hand) and his draw for the turn, he found the 3rd. Double Thoughtseize yanked both my remaining spells from hand. I drew lands for a couple turns while he drew into Dig Through Time which found him a Pack Rat. He knew he needed to slam the door shut so he went all in on Pack Rat and there was no way I could get them off the table as I drew more lands. Oh well, shake it off and move on.

Round 2 Mono-R (2-0) [1-1]:
These are the kinds of matchups where this deck shines. I pretty cleanly removed their creatures in both games, gaining incidental life off Oath of Kaya and Doom Foretold along the way and cards like History of Benalia and Aphemia just out valued them. Not too many interesting lines to note from this match, remove their things til they are in top deck mode and then turn the corner. Shambling Vent is pretty great at helping with that as well.

Round 3 UB Inverter (2-1) [2-1]:
So in order to win in magic, you gotta be both lucky and good. My opponent got aggressive with their combo in game 1. To their defense, they used a Thought Erasure and saw that I had nothing in hand of relevance to stop them so when they jammed their Inverter on 4 and flipped their deck, I fully expected them to have 2 Thassa’s Oracles in hand so even if I drew a thoughtseize it’d not matter. I ripped the Thoughtseize like a pro and they only had 1 in hand. Now knowing the rest of their deck was dead cards, they had a couple turns to try and do the 6/6 beatdown plan but my deck of removal spells meant that was not a winning line before they decked. Game 2 had a good back and forth but in the end I was not fast enough to put pressure on them before they set up a dig into combo. Of note they brought in Ashiok and it looked awful against me. I get wanting additional wincons but that one in particular isn’t going to get the job done against my deck and should probably stay in the board. Game 3 I got to Lost Legacy their combo away and unlike my previous UB opponent, they were unable to find an alternate wincon and I was able to beat them down in pretty short order due to History of Benalia.

Round 4 UW Control (2-1) [3-1]:
This was a very long match. My opponent was a very… deliberate player. Wasn’t enough to call a judge for slowplay on but I knew we were probably going to time because of it and we did. He got me pretty far behind in game 1 since I had a bunch of dead removal spells so I made sure to concede with 40+ min left in round. Game 2 I curved out a nice aggressive draw and killed him pretty quickly with over 20 left in round. Game 3 became a grind where I was boardwiped on 4 different occassions and managed to rebuilt. The poor guy kept trying to stick Dream Trawler or Teferi, Hero of Dominaria to stabilize and turn the corner but with good sequencing on my part, I immediately was able to edict them off the table (or cast out for the Teferi) and unable to find a way to gain card advantage, I ground through. When we ended at time, I had a full board again and he was very likely dead in the next few turns as he was in top deck mode and at a pretty low lifetotal. I asked if he would concede the match as he was very likely going to lose if we kept playing and it was very unlikely either of us would make top 8 with a draw at this point in the tournament. He agreed. Nice guy to do that. I hate going to time and play extraordinary quickly so it was nice to get this W instead of a draw because of the speed of play from my opponent (which again, wasn’t unreasonably slow but was definitely the reason we went to time).

Round 5 UB Inverter (2-0) [4-1]:
This one was another friend of mine and I knew what he was on. Really helped as I kept a 1 land double thoughtseize hand that paid massive dividends. I tore his dig through times and then a combo piece and managed to beat him down. Game 2 I got a bit lucky as over the course of the game he cast 2 dig through times without finding a fatal push for Kambal who really came in clutch and put my opponent on the back foot after some early beats had gotten him to single digits and he survived through a cry of the carnarium. Between Kambal and Shambling Vent, I cut off his way to find a clean answer. To the onslaught of threats that kept eating at him little by little til the match was over.

Round 6 Jeskai Fires [Walkers] (2-0) [5-1]:
Game 1 I had a pretty good aggressive draw that forced him to pull the trigger on a couple sweepers but got him fairly low. My opponent did almost make a comeback when they ripped a Fae of Wishes to find Chandra, Living Inferno and clear my board then give me 2 emblems before I had found enough pressure to kill it. That said my opponent also fell into a trap with Heart of Kiran and Gideon of the Trials. I was racing his Chandra Emblem and got to eat back to back Heart of Kirans with Final Payments that allowed me to pressure gideon and his life total. I ended the game at 1 life with him exactly dead. I think slightly tighter play from my opponent and they probably win that game by the skin of their teeth. Game 2 really showcased my issues with the walker variants of fires. I mostly just ignored the ones he played and beat him relentlessly while taking cards from his hand with thoughtseize and using doom foretold to clear the walkers for me. They just fell too far behind and even through board wipes they just couldn’t clear through my multiple History of Benalias.

Top 8:
QTR UB Inverter (2-1):
This was my roommate again and we got to duke out a rematch from round 1. Because i had to play out through the end and he got to draw, I was the number 2 seed so I got to be on the play. He managed to set up a clean combo win in game 1. Game 2 I feel I got sorta lucky. My hand could apply pressure but didn’t really disrupt as well as I normally like. Against the heavy discard deck I decided to keep though and he spent enough time durdling that I was able to set up lethal attacks through a Kalitas because of Kambal Consul of Allocation. Game 3 was pretty close, I was able to take out his combo and I forced my opponent into a mistake that while I don’t think actually cost him the match (between cards I still had in hand and the boardstate, I think he was pretty dead anyway) but definitely cost him the chance at finding an out. This was the turn I cast Lost Legacy to take out the combo so I didn’t get got as I was pretty ahead on board and with an Oath of Kaya in hand, pretty confident I could lock up the game if I didn’t get cheesed out via the combo. I see that my opponent has just enough mana to cast Dig through Time between cards in yard and mana available but that they also have a Censor. I after the Lost Legacy resolved, I gave him a History of Benalia which I knew he’d want to counter with the Censor. He took the bait and countered it which left him unable to Dig at the end of turn and really cut away his ability to look for outs to the boardstate.

SEMI Breach (1-2):
Game 1 was strange. We both kinda floundered about. I found no discard spells but I managed to put on a clock and he fizzled on a turn he felt like he had to go off on, my own bad luck made it so I didn’t have lethal on that turn but having burned through some resources, he couldn’t find the tools needed to go again on his next turn. Game 2 he assembled a pretty quick combo kill through Kambal which he used an underworld breach to cast anger of the gods from yard to get rid of my board again. Game 3 I kept a 3 spell 4 land hand, had Leyline and got to Lost Legacy. Despite that, I drew 9 more lands to 3 more spells and while I had all day because of my hate pieces, he eventually assembled what I’ll call “oodles of mana” and set up a Granted for Primal Amulet, cast 4 spells to flip Primal Amulet and then win the game by casting as many pour over the pages as he needed making absurds amount of mana, then using granted to find Jace, Wielder of Mystery.

My opponent was a very good pilot and I do think people who think the Breach deck just folds to hate, just haven’t seen the players who are really good at piloting these decks work their way through it.

All in all I had a great day, my deck was sweet and it definitely attacked every matchup from a powerful angle. Thanks everyone for reading my report and primer. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me @BradyMTG on Twitter and Discord.