Matchup Analysis

Core Gameplan: Historically our best matchup. We assemble the Opalescence plus Parallax Wave lock faster, and with more backup copies, than a normal Enchantress deck can keep up with.

Navigating the Lock: After sideboard, the main thing you have to get through is their protection—usually a couple of Sterling Grove—plus the tax from Aura of Silence. Be patient: hold at least one Seal of Cleansing or Disenchant to deal with an incoming Decree of Silence before you go for a game-ending Replenish.

Sideboard Strategy: Cut the creature removal you don't need (Swords to Plowshares) and your anti-land cards (Tsabo's Web). Bring in extra Seal of Cleansing, Abeyance, and Arcane Denial. Since Enchantress tends to load up on graveyard and enchantment hate after Game 1, an Exalted Angel gives you a great second angle—it just swings through all their hate while their hand fills up with dead reactive cards.

Core Gameplan: Elves is a very favorable matchup. Once the Opalescence plus Parallax Wave lock is down, their whole board gets exiled for good. Use your early Swords to Plowshares only on their mana dorks (Priest of Titania or Rofellos). Elves can come out of the gates fast, but if you make it to Turn 4 and stabilize, the lock is impossible for them to beat.

Sideboard Strategy: Cut Tsabo's Web unless they're running non-basic mana disruption like Rishadan Port or Wasteland. You can also trim a Meddling Mage to make room for more reactive cards. Bring in extra spot removal (Swords to Plowshares), a sweeper (Wrath of God), and Seal of Cleansing to answer free spells they bring in like Reverent Silence.

Core Gameplan: Black-green midrange decks lean on one-for-one trades (Cabal Therapy, Duress, Pernicious Deed), and that just can't keep up with the card advantage and graveyard refueling Replenish gives you. They don't have a fast clock, so you get plenty of time to set up the lock with backup.

Sideboard Strategy: After board, expect graveyard hate like Withered Wretch and color taxing from Gloom. Cut card-disadvantage filtering like Frantic Search for proactive threats (Exalted Angel) and permanent removal (Seal of Cleansing and Disenchant). Save your Swords to Plowshares for their early Wretches—kill those before you start filling your graveyard with combo pieces.

Core Gameplan: Sligh can't really interact with the combo—no counters, no way to kill an enchantment—so their only path to victory is burning you out before you stabilize. When you land an early Meddling Mage, name Lightning Bolt. That keeps Mage's 2/2 body around as a blocker against Jackal Pup and their other one-drops. Later in the game, once the board has settled, switch to naming their reach—Fireblast or Ball Lightning—since that's what actually kills you from a stable board.

Sideboard Strategy: Cut every Ancient Tomb—paying two life per activation is suicide against burn. Bring in Exalted Angel, Hydroblast, and your fourth Meddling Mage. After board, don't race them. Treat every removal spell and blocker as a trade that eats one of their burn cards and buys you time—the goal is to reach your combo alive, not to win a damage race.
Which hate cards actually pull their weight: Chill is the MVP. Once you've stabilized at a low life total, it shuts off their last outs: topdecked Mountains into cheap burn. Sphere of Law gives you huge protection, but it dies to a splashed naturalize effect and is too slow on the draw. Leave Circle of Protection: Red at home; taxing your own mana every turn just gets in the way of setting up and comboing off.

Core Gameplan: Landstill grinds out slow, incremental advantage and usually doesn't have many blue sources untapped at once. Your plan is to sit back, build up resources, and then overload their blue mana in a single turn. They can counter a test spell or two, but if you go off when they only have 3 or 4 open blue sources, your lethal Replenish resolves as the last spell on the stack.

Tactical Tools (Chant & Abeyance vs. Mana Short): After board, lean on your cheap interaction like Orim's Chant and Abeyance over pricier options like Mana Short. At one and two mana, Chant and Abeyance are cheap "must-counter" threats that don't eat into your own mana. Best of all, resolving one shuts off free interaction like Foil or Thwart—which Mana Short can't stop—and Abeyance even draws you a card and locks out Mishra's Factory and cycling activations.

Deploying Meddling Mage: When deploying an early Meddling Mage on turn 2, think about your turn 3 and 4 plays before you cast it. If you're setting up a combo turn and just want to strip a counter or tie up their mana, name Counterspell. If you'd rather keep the body around and start attacking, name Swords to Plowshares or their main card draw engine.

Sideboard Execution: Get your permanent answers down early—bring in your 4th Seal of Cleansing and copies of Tsabo's Web. A Seal on the battlefield stops them from resolving a Standstill, and Tsabo's Web hits both their mana and their Mishra's Factory clock. Note: Don't bring in Deep Analysis against Landstill or UW Dreadnought lists running Fling—paying 3 life on your own is way too risky when they can just burn you out with it.

Core Gameplan: A lot like Landstill: Psychatog tries to control the early game while building toward an Upheaval plus Psychatog finish. The problem for them is that Replenish has so many threats (Opalescence, Parallax Wave, Replenish) that you run their counters and removal dry before they hit the mana to go off.

Sideboard Strategy: Turn into a control deck. Bring in taxing effects like Defense Grid and Meddling Mage along with instant-speed disruption (Abeyance, Arcane Denial). Psychatog loads up on anti-enchantment cards and card-draw hate after board, so switching to Exalted Angel gives you a fast clock that dodges all of it.

Core Gameplan: Orzhov control leans on hand disruption (Gerrard's Verdict, Duress) backed by flexible permanent removal (Vindicate, Swords to Plowshares). The thing is, their discard actually helps us: every enchantment they make us pitch just gets our graveyard closer to a game-winning Replenish.

Sideboard Strategy: Expect graveyard hate (Withered Wretch, Tormod's Crypt) and enchantment taxes (Aura of Silence). Bring in Exalted Angel as a morph threat they'll struggle to answer, plus instant-speed removal like Disenchant and Seal of Cleansing. Don't sit in a long standoff—push the game while their removal is pointed at the wrong things.

Core Gameplan: This one swings hard on the play/draw. Your job is to protect your basic mana and keep hitting land drops while they blow up your lands (Stone Rain, Pillage). Mulligan shaky two-land hands that don't have basics or early filtering—you can't afford to stumble into their land destruction.

Sideboard Strategy: Cut fragile early creatures like Meddling Mage for a real finisher (Exalted Angel). Tsabo's Web is a must—it shuts down their Rishadan Port and Wasteland. Even in builds running your own factories, the tax Web puts on them is worth more than the small hit to your own synergy.

Tactical Considerations: Keep at least 2–3 copies of Swords to Plowshares; cut spot removal entirely and you leave yourself dead to a fast beater like Terravore or Ravenous Baluchitherium. Think about your speed, too: some players keep Frantic Search to dig through their taxing effects, but trimming the pricier filtering usually makes your curve more consistent.
Spicy tech: Divert works as a pseudo-counter against their targeted land destruction, and Sacred Ground shuts their whole destruction plan off completely.

A Swingy Matchup: Moneyball is all over the place. It hits you from three angles: heavy early hand disruption (Duress), repeatable graveyard hate from Withered Wretch, and a brutal color tax from Gloom, all backed by efficient threats like Wretched Anurid and Grinning Demon.

Core Gameplan (The Attunement MVP): Attunement is far and away your MVP here. For one, it turns dead extra lands—the ones you keep just to survive their discard—into real gas. Even better, Attunement lets you stash your key pieces on top of your library, safe from their endless hand discard and Dystopia. Even with a Withered Wretch in play, a live Attunement lets you dump a fresh graveyard the moment their graveyard hate goes away.

Sideboard Strategy (Seal Priority & Morph Evasion): After board, get an early Seal of Cleansing down so you can blow up Gloom before its three-mana tax shuts off your white spells and enchantment activations. Even better, leaning on Exalted Angel wins games on its own: play Angel face-down as a morph on turn 2 and flip it on turn 3. You dodge Gloom's three-mana tax, sidestep their graveyard hate completely, and leave them racing a 4/5 flying lifelinker they can't beat.

Tactical Interaction: If an opponent controls an active Wretched Anurid and you successfully assemble an Opalescence plus Parallax Wave engine going, your infinite blink loop keeps flickering creatures in and out—which triggers their own Anurid over and over and kills them on the spot.

Sideboard Transformations: Keep your full set of Intuition—cutting your card selection just grinds you to a halt against a deck built to punish slow control. Trim the card-negative stuff like Frantic Search instead. Hold onto your efficient spot removal (Swords to Plowshares) to answer Withered Wretch and their fastest beaters.
Standard Transitions: +3 Exalted Angel, +1 Seal of Cleansing, +1 Wrath of God, and targeted silver bullets like Alter Reality or Nevinyrral's Disk when available.

Core Gameplan: Goblins comes at you from two directions: fast early beats plus card advantage from the back end (Goblin Ringleader, Siege-Gang Commander). Leaning on early Meddling Mage is risky here—Mage can't profitably block a Turn 1 Goblin Lackey on the draw, and it can't block pro-blue beaters like Goblin Piledriver at all. If you survive the first three turns, you win.

Sideboard Strategy: Cut all your Meddling Mage and slow enchantment removal like Seal of Cleansing. Bring in your fourth Swords to Plowshares, Hydroblast, Exalted Angel, and extra Tsabo's Web to shut down their Rishadan Port. Killing a Turn 1 Goblin Lackey before it can connect is the most important thing you can do.

Core Gameplan: Watch for their ramp—Weathered Wayfarer, Sylvan Library, and an incoming Armageddon. Your plan for Armageddon doesn't have to be countering it: once you're at three mana, just holding extra basics in hand is a great defense. Or land an early Exalted Angel and take over the board—at that point casting Armageddon is suicide for them.

Sideboard Strategy: Trim your clunky combo pieces (Parallax Wave, Opalescence, Attunement) and cut every Meddling Mage. Bring in Exalted Angel, Seal of Cleansing, Arcane Denial, and Tsabo's Web.

Core Gameplan: Beating Stiflenought comes down to reading what they're actually running. Do they have Mishra's Factory and manalands? Are they keeping Phyrexian Dreadnought after board, or turning into a dedicated Brain Freeze mill deck? Either way you're shifting toward pure control, but the exact sideboard plan depends on watching what they do across the match.

Sideboard Strategy: Bring in Defense Grid, Exalted Angel, and Abeyance. Trim your card selection like Frantic Search and Intuition, plus extra copies of Parallax Wave and some spot removal. If they've got defensive creatures like Meddling Mage and shroud beaters like Nimble Mongoose, Wrath of God is a blowout.

Core Gameplan: Game 1 is a race to see who lands the Opalescence plus Parallax Wave lock first. Get a Seal of Cleansing down early—you need it to answer their combo the moment they try to go off.

Sideboard Strategy: The matchup changes a lot after board. A lot of players reflexively bring in Exalted Angel or Meddling Mage, but Angels are terrible in the mirror—they're slow, and they just get exiled by an opposing Parallax Wave or picked off by Swords to Plowshares.

The real post-board MVPs are Abeyance and Seal of Cleansing. Abeyance protects your own Replenish or blows up their setup turn, and Seal gives you instant-speed answers to their enchantments. Leave every Exalted Angel and Meddling Mage in the board.

Core Gameplan: Stasis wants to lock you out of your untap step entirely, then chip you down with Black Vise while keeping Stasis online through Forsaken City or Quirion Ranger. Your way out is instant-speed enchantment removal—Seal of Cleansing and Disenchant. Break the lock on their end step, then untap and go off.

Sideboard Strategy: Rebuild the deck for this one. Cut the removal that does nothing here (Swords to Plowshares, Tsabo's Web), your expensive card draw (Intuition, Frantic Search), and trim Parallax Wave. Bring in the full control package: Defense Grid, Exalted Angel, Abeyance, Arcane Denial, and Seal of Cleansing.

Core Gameplan: This is historically our toughest matchup. Full English Breakfast / Devourer is a redundant, blazingly fast graveyard combo: it uses Survival of the Fittest to assemble Sutured Ghoul powered by Phyrexian Devourer and Dragon Breath. Their goldfish clock is faster than our interaction and shrugs off most standard disruption.

Sideboard Strategy: Cut every Tsabo's Web and trim spot removal like Swords to Plowshares—it doesn't touch their engine. Load up on cheap answers instead: Meddling Mage (name Survival or whatever their main reanimation piece is), Seal of Cleansing, Arcane Denial, and Hydroblast if they lean on red discard or looting.

Core Gameplan: White hatebear decks come at you from two angles: a fast clock of protected threats (Mother of Runes, Silver Knight) plus attacking your mana with Armageddon. Fetch basics early so a land wipe hurts less, and save your Swords to Plowshares for the threats that actually matter—their real clock or a key protective creature.

Sideboard Strategy: Trim your fragile mana and slow card selection. Bring in Exalted Angel—an untargetable morph that takes over the board before they can Armageddon—along with Arcane Denial and defensive spot removal. If you land a creature before Armageddon resolves, their whole plan falls apart.