Marina Vendrell Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on September 30, 2025

Marina Vendrell | Illustration by Jack Hughes

With Duskmourn: House of Horror in the books, what better to do than start building some decks around this Magic set?

There are a lot of things from Duskmourn that I liked, and a few I didn’t. I do think Duskmourn‘s aesthetic is a bit all over the place. I don’t know how much I really like all the ‘80s-style clothes and items, but I think WotC ultimately nailed it with the overall feeling of dread and horror lurking in every room of the house.

I’m definitely one to enjoy gothic horror themes a good amount (you can imagine my excitement back when original Innistrad was announced) so I’ll say this: I really like the room cards, and I really like Marina Vendrell’s design and art. The theme for this set is “spooky horror house” and what better way to set the mood than to give us access to said house’s rooms as well as a host to guide us through them?

It’s time to throw caution out the window (or in through the window, this time) and take a step into The House with an EDH deck built around Marina Vendrell.

The Deck

Marina Vendrell | Illustration by Magali Villeneuve

My original idea for this Commander deck was to straight up include every single room card out there. Turns out we got a baffling 28 room cards in Duskmourn. For the sake of playability, I had to cut a couple of them out, but just know that there’s a version of this deck that’s considerably less playable, but a lot more thematic!

The Commander: Marina Vendrell

Let me preface this with a little bit of Duskmourn‘s story. Marina is a classic horror trope character. Think of Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice, or Coraline from Coraline. She was a socially awkward goth whose parents forced her to move to a new town. Her life outside of her home became increasingly difficult until she ended up making a deal with the devil, or better said elder demon, that lurked inside her house. In this case, that evil is Valgavoth, a hungry and resentful demon bound to the basement of the house.

Marina accidentally allowed Valgavoth to devour some of the girls from her school, causing the demon to recover some of his power. As his power grew, the demon gained control over the house itself, using it to feed on the things around it. Marina, in an attempt to undo the horror she’d unleashed on her plane, made a deal with Valgavoth, asking him to leave the world as it was.

Valgavoth used his magic to trick Marina, making the rooms become normal as she walked through them, imposing a sense of normality that’d leave Marina calm, as the demon resumed his feeding spree on the world.

With all this in mind, it’s easy to understand where Marina Vendrell’s abilities come from. With Marina being the only character that’s allowed to roam freely around the house, it makes perfect sense that her card’s activated ability lets you lock and unlock doors in room enchantments. With Marina on your side, you can traverse the house unimpeded.

With this mind, this deck obviously runs a ton of room enchantments. All but seven of them, to be precise. You may have even noticed that all the non-creature enchantments in this deck are actually room cards, with the rest of the enchantments simply being enchantment creatures.

Marina Vendrell’s first ability makes it a solid 5-color commander for an enchantress strategy, so enchantress with a focus on rooms is the strategy that I’m aiming for here.

The Rooms

Rooms, much like sagas, are enchantments that are meant to be played as ways to support other strategies. By default, this makes a room-typal-ish deck a bit less functional than other enchantress decks, seeing as these cards aren’t necessarily meant to synergize with each other but rather other strategies.

That said, most rooms work well enough on their own. Something like Charred Foyer // Warped Space may not be at its best in this deck (as much as I want to, I won’t talk about how well this’d fit in a Prosper, Tome-Bound EDH deck), but if you manage to unlock both doors, you essentially have a nice engine that works by itself. Of course, that’s where your commander plays a key role as it’ll help you speed up the process of opening doors.

Both Dazzling Theater // Prop Room and Polluted Cistern // Dim Oubliette fit into this category. They’d definitely work better as support for other decks, but once you have them completely unlocked, they start turning in the profits without too much hassle.

Most of the other rooms are decent, albeit sometimes circumstantial. You probably won’t be taking full advantage of cards like Cramped Vents // Access Maze or Spiked Corridor // Torture Pit but they can still offer a helping hand in more than one instance, and they help build up the number of rooms you’re playing.

Enchantment Support

No enchantress-style deck is complete without a ton of support. I’ll admit I actually struggled when deciding which cards to include as enchantment support, mostly because there are just too many. Sometimes a lack of support can be a helping hand: The good options are few and obvious, and then you just have to get creative. In this case, the good options were overwhelming and varied, so I tried to pick some that I thought would be the most helpful.

Some of the cards here reduce the cost of your enchantments, with cards like Herald of the Pantheon or Inquisitive Glimmer.

The others give you some bonus for casting enchantments. The most obvious one in the latter category is the well-known Sythis, Harvest's Hand which essentially combines the two most common enchantress abilities – namely lifegain and card draw – into one card.

The decklist also has quite a few cards with the eerie ability word, which essentially refers to an ability that triggers when you cast an enchantment or fully unlock a room. These obviously fit right in with this deck and tend to have some more than decent effects. Ghostly Dancers and Gremlin Tamer are a great way to stock up on disposable creatures to use in combat, while Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal can reward you for dumping all your mana into playing and unlocking many rooms per turn.

For the final two, Weaver of Harmony supports both your enchantment creatures as well as your enchantment abilities, while Wildsear, Scouring Maw can give you a ton of profit with its cascade ability.

Interaction

This is probably the most standard part of the deck. We have some targeted removal like Anguished Unmaking, Assassin's Trophy, and Swords to Plowshares, as well as a bit of countermagic like Counterspell and Negate.

Board Wipes

No Commander deck would be complete without a proper suite of board wipes. We have our usual options like Farewell and Blasphemous Act, but this deck also runs a fun little extra: Extinguish All Hope. After all, over half of your creatures are also enchantments, so this is as close as we'll get to a one-sided wrath.

Mana Fixing

Five colors mean you need ramp. Greenhouse // Rickety Gazebo, Moldering Gym // Weight Room, and Walk-In Closet // Forgotten Cellar all give some mana fixing while also adding to the deck’s room count.

Similarly, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Overlord of the Hauntwoods, and Sanctum Weaver are all enchantment creatures that help with the fixing.

Other than that, Farseek and Nature's Lore can help you get any colors you may be lacking.

The Mana Base

If I’m being completely honest, this is probably the part of the deck that could use a bit more care. I find 5-color mana bases a bit tiring to think through sometimes, so the one for this deck is basically most fetch lands and shock lands, all the triomes, some basic lands, and some additional utility lands. It’s perfectly functional, but definitely not the most optimized it could possibly be.

Minamo, School at Water's Edge is here to allow you to use your commander twice a turn if you need to, while Hall of Heliod's Generosity is a must-have in pretty much any enchantress deck.

The Strategy

This deck has a pretty straightforward strategy: Play your enchantments, get benefits for doing so, repeat. In this case, with the additional step of unlocking rooms, too. That’s genuinely about it. While rooms are the main focus for this commander, at the end of the day they’re still enchantments; this means the deck pretty much works around simply casting enchantments, be they rooms or not. This way, having your commander out can be more than useful for opening rooms, but if Marina returns to the command zone, the deck still works perfectly.

Combos and Interactions

This deck has a lot of synergy, but not that many combos. It wins on a more traditional basis of overwhelming your opponents as you reap the rewards of playing enchantments turn after turn.

Rule 0 Violations

The only possible offender here might be Central Elevator // Promising Stairs. A lot of people dislike “you win the game” cards, since these alternative wincons can stop a fun game without much warning. With this deck’s commander in play, it’d be relatively easy to have eight different rooms unlocked, so this card may be worth discussing during your Rule 0 conversation.

Other than that, some playgroups could have some issues with cards like Farewell or Teferi's Protection, but that can vary a lot depending on your playgroup. The best thing to do is check with your pod if they’re fine with them before the game, and that’s about it.

Budget Options

Arguably the most expensive cards in this deck are the lands, since I just threw a bunch of shocks and fetches in there. Luckily, most of those can easily be replaced by any half-decent lands you want, especially in a 5-color deck.

When it comes to spells, Teferi's Protection is definitely the most expensive card in the deck. There aren’t really any cards that do what this white instant does, but there’s tons of defensive spells out there that can be found for a much cheaper price and can still be really good.

Thassa, Deep-Dwelling can be replaced by Teleportation Circle, which isn’t exactly cheap but it’s definitely more reasonable.

Other Builds

Marina Vendrell is a very specific commander. It wants you playing room enchantments specifically. This may make it fun, but it doesn’t open up too many alternative builds. You can ultimately choose different support cards for the enchantress theme within this deck, but not much more.

I have seen some alternative builds around curses, but I feel it's ultimately a waste of both your commander, and your curses, considering Lynde, Cheerful Tormentor exists.

Commanding Conclusion

Blasphemous Act | Illustration by Daarken

That’s all for now. I really like commanders that play heavily into a specific theme like this one, and I especially like the goth-y horror feel that Marina Vendrell brings along with it. It may not give a lot of possible variations to its strategies, but it makes a fun strategy viable and that’s all I need to enjoy a commander.

But enough about what I think. Would you build Marina Vendrell differently? Should I have just included every single room card? Should I have taken some of them out? Leave a comment below letting us know! And don’t forget to visit the official Draftsim Discord where you can find and join an amazing community of MTG fans.

That’s all from me for now. Have a good one, and I’ll see you next time!