Zur, Eternal Schemer Enchantment Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on July 22, 2025

Zur, Eternal Schemer | Illustration by Dan Mumford

Gen X-ers who grew up with cable likely knew the childhood terrors of Time Bandits, with just the kind of religious existentialism that was Terry Gilliam’s version of a kids’ movie.

But we also knew its pleasure, including Evil’s joy at the idea of transmogrifying things: “We will turn mountains into sea, and the skies into rivers, and fjords into deserts. And deserts into quagmires. And icebergs into fire! And the fire into a mighty rushing wind which will cover the face of the earth… and wipe clean the scourge of woolly thinking once and for all.” To which dimwitted henchman Benson replies: “We can make beans into peas!”

Speaking for my fellow MTG henchpeople, I have long loved making beans into peas, which, in Magic terms, is casting Animate Wall or Life and Limb or Zoetic Glyph. Anything that feels like breaking the rules is exciting, even if permission to break the rules is just right there in the rules of the card, so it’s no longer really breaking anything.

But still! It’s part of the fun of a game that lets us do magical things, which is why the most fun I’m having in Commander at the moment is with Zur, Eternal Schemer!

Let’s see how the deck works to make enchantment beans into creature peas!

The Deck

Enchanted Evening | Illustration by Rebecca Guay

The Commander: Zur, Eternal Schemer

Zur, Eternal Schemer is an Esper commander that animates your non-aura enchantments. If you’re like me, that sentence is enough to get your mind whirring! It also makes you think of a bunch of old enchantments in your storage boxes that haven’t yet found a home.

There are two general ways people build the deck. There's the one that uses Zur to trade dangerous cards like Demonic Pact because it’s easier to exchange control of creatures with cards like Wrong Turn than it is to try to dish off enchantments.

I like that version, but I find it a bit stressful to play, and Zur pleases my inner child. So the more common version is to play Zur as an enchantment commander with a ton of value and pillowfort enchantments as you look for your wincons while animating those enchantments into creatures for offensive and defensive opportunities, especially because they then have lifelink and deathtouch.

It’s durdly. It’s silly. It’s wonderful.

A special rules question hits people when they first start thinking about this card. Zur turns an enchantment into a creature in addition to its other card types. That means it’s an enchantment creature, which means that Zur’s first ability applies to the creatures it creates.

Commander Effect Reinforcements

You can’t always risk Zur early, as it’s hard to win when Zur is stuck forever behind a wall of accumulating commander tax. You have backup effects for your plan with cards like Enchanted Evening, as well as a few cards for enchantment recursion and animation like Starfield of Nyx or Dance of the Manse. And you also have some plain recursion in Court of Ardenvale, Replenish, and Resurgent Belief, and recursion plus a flash enabler in Heliod, the Radiant Dawn / Heliod, the Warped Eclipse.

Pillowfort Enchantments

Because this deck is slow and needs to power up Zur in order to even make blockers, given the small number of normal creatures in the deck, you need to run cards that make it harder for opponents to attack you. Ghostly Prison, Propaganda, and Sphere of Safety are classics in this space.

When you don’t need them or they don’t help enough at big mana or Voltron tables, just turn them into creatures and use them as you need to. And you do have a handful of stax pieces (sorry): Aura of Silence, Overburden, and Tainted Aether.

A special note on Brave the Sands: It’s not usually a pillowfort-style card, but it can ward off attacks well since Zur can turn your enchantments into deathtouchers that can block two creatures.

Value Enchantments

The real engine driving the deck is a suite of enchantments that net value, usually via extra cards but by producing mana as well:

• Black Market Connections
• Monologue Tax
• Mystic Remora
• Phyrexian Arena
• Rhystic Study
• Search for Azcanta / Azcanta, the Sunken Ruin
• Smothering Tithe
• Smuggler's Share
• Trouble in Pairs

There’s also a series of things that copy enchantments like Mirrormade, which you’ll most often use on these value cards. There’s one classic enchantress card in these colors, the colorshifted Planar Chaos card Mesa Enchantress.

Wincons

Aura-Based

You can play a very Voltron Zur deck, and there are just a few pieces of that here. You could lean into this space if you want, but Zur is kind of agnostic when it comes to auras, so I kept it lean with All That Glitters, Ethereal Armor, and Mystic Veil.

Drain

There are builds with a heavier emphasis on life loss, but I’ve only got Underworld Coinsmith. There are times that this can push you over the top, especially under heavy value-positive boards with cards like Ondu Spiritdancer, but it’s very minimal.

Tokens

You have a few cards that allow you to just go massive when you have a critical mass of enchantments out, like Archon of Sun's Grace, Hallowed Haunting, Shark Typhoon, and Sigil of the Empty Throne. There’s an Archetype of Imagination to support that strategy.

Ramp

Sol Ring is the only artifact in this deck. You can add in all your mana rocks if you like, but I prefer to take advantage of more synergistic ramp in this enchantments space, more specifically cost reduction cards like Starfield Mystic, Starnheim Courser, and Stenn, Paranoid Partisan.

Tutors

You’ve got a small tutor suite including Invasion of Theros, Idyllic Tutor, Moon-Blessed Cleric, Enlightened Tutor, and the other Zur, Zur the Enchanter.

Interaction

There’s not a ton of stuff here, but you do have a few pieces of enchantment-based removal in Banish to Another Universe and Grasp of Fate. You also have a few asymmetric board wipes in Cacophony Unleashed and Extinguish All Hope.

Finally, you don’t have a ton of counterspells, but I find Declaration of Naught hilarious to play, and of course, Fierce Guardianship.

Protection

Zur does a good job at keeping your team alive, but you have to keep Zur alive! Instead of Lightning Greaves, which you can easily fold in if you like, you have enchantments that synergize better with the other cards in the deck, especially with your tutors:

• Alexi's Cloak
• Mystic Veil
• Robe of Mirrors
• Vanishing

There’s also a few spells that protect the whole board: Clever Concealment, Flawless Maneuver, and Teferi's Protection.

The Mana Base

You’ve got a pretty standard set of Esper () lands in addition to your limited ramp options. There are fetch lands here like Flooded Strand to get Raffine's Tower and shock lands. Those can be excised on a budget. And there’s also Hall of Heliod's Generosity for nice recursion, and the awesome but bank-busting Serra's Sanctum, which is of course very much optional.

The Strategy

You generally want to avoid dropping Zur until you have an opportunity to take advantage of making your enchantments into creatures. That’s usually later in the game, since you get a pretty below-rate creature when you drop an enchantment then animate it with Zur’s activated ability.

You typically want to lead with your ramp creatures into value enchantments like Rhystic Study and pillowfort enchantments like Propaganda to discourage attacks and start gaining card advantage. Be wary of the control player who rolls out a Farewell every turn 4. You know that player at your LGS. Always make sure you can survive that. Other board wipes don’t bother you too much.

Once you start to gain card advantage you’ll often want to stockpile value if you have some wincons in hand or begin to find your tutors and figure out your angle of victory. When I play this deck my goal is to leave Zur, Eternal Schemer chilling in the command zone as long as I can afford to so that it’s a wincon backup to the token strategy if that comes online quickly enough.

Try to have a mass protection spell in hand before you go all in with the enchantment horde, either with Zur or something like Dance of the Manse.

Combos and Interactions

Most of the things here are obvious. There’s rarely an exceptional advantage to making an enchantment a creature, unless it’s animating a Black Market Connections as a doomed blocker to stop the life loss.

The combinations usually involve copying and/or reanimating enchantments for the right combination of effects on the board at the same time, which you should be able to manage based on the matchup. There are a few neat little tricks in the deck, although none of them really qualifies as a combo.

One thing to note is that Zur, Eternal Schemer’s activated ability doesn’t require tapping, which means you can use it whenever you want and however many times you can pay the mana. The most common use cases for this are to save an enchantment that's targeted by something like a Feed the Swarm to turn it into an enchantment creature, thus making it suddenly hexproof. You’ll be tempted to name an enemy commander with Declaration of Naught, but I’ve always found bargaining with the table for permission on that is better than just plopping it down. I’d personally usually rather name Farewell at almost any point, as it ruins you.

And you should be free of any Rule 0 issues, as there are no infinite combos in this deck.

Budget Options

Aside from lands, this is a pretty budget deck. Some of the value cards, like Black Market Connections and Rhystic Study, can be swapped out for cheaper cards. I’d recommend finding cuts in the budget elsewhere before cutting wincons like Hallowed Haunting, as it’s hard to manage without them. Serra's Sanctum is by no means a necessary addition to this deck.

Other Builds

The other two builds of this deck can still work on the basic shell here with some shifts in certain areas. Or you can go all in.

I’m unconvinced by Zur as a Voltron commander, as auras are the one thing in the enchantment space that Zur doesn’t synergize with. Still, swapping out a bit of the value package for cheaper auras that can help Zur is a reasonable effort, especially because Aqueous Form and the like are definitely more budget-friendly. Making other enchantments into creatures and then enchanting them is a bit of a trap, as when Zur is popped, they revert back and the auras fall off.

A donate theme seems more plausible, and it also feels a bit like extra cheating on top of Zur’s cheating. If I animate a Demonic Pact or have the option to, attacks suddenly come to a halt. It can be pretty fun to run a suite of trade cards like Visions of Duplicity plus the black enchantments you might put in a Blim, Comedic Genius deck, like Greed's Gambit, Colfenor's Plans, or even Midnight Oil.

The answer to this deck is just to keep removing Zur, so unless your playgroup is removal-light in their deck designs, I’d be wary.

Commanding Conclusion

Starfield of Nyx | Illustration by Tyler Jacobson

Evil’s response to Benson’s “beans into peas” line has always stuck with me, and it haunts me when I build too janky a deck: “Oh, Benson. Dear Benson, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence.” But I have high hopes that this deck is a product of many such ravages!

You’ll have to let me know in the comments or in the Draftsim Discord whether I deserve Evil’s punishment of being turned “into a dog for a while” or whether this Zur list is the real deal.

Happy scheming!