Conditions Allow - Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal EDH
(Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal | Art by Jeremy Wilson)
The Moth Man
Hello, and welcome back to Conditions Allow, where I take a legendary creature with a drawback and turn it into a strength. Today I am once again exploring the twisted halls of Duskmourn: House of Horror to build around one of the planes most important denizens, Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal.
Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal doesn't have a downside in the traditional sense, but he does present an interesting deckbuilding challenge. He can bring powerful creatures back from your graveyard, incentivizing you to play a lot of creatures to ensure you'll have access to creatures in the graveyard quickly. However, that effect only triggers once you've had three enchantments enter play in a single turn, meaning you also need to play enough enchantments to make that happen reliably.
This tension between big creatures and enchantments pulls this deck in different directions, but it's still a graveyard-centric deck. You'll need self mill effects, as many enchantments as possible, and just enough big threats to not get in the way.
Keeping a Full Graveyard
As with any good reanimator deck, you need to start by getting cards into your graveyard. Stitcher's Supplier and Mire Triton are some of my go-to cards for the job, and I'm adding Undead Butler and Renegade Reaper to round out the numbers.
Firja, Judge of Valor also feels like a natural fit, since Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal wants you to play multiple spells a turn. Firja is also a higher value creature to reanimate in the mid-game, helping find both more enchantments to cast and bigger creatures to reanimate later on.
Speaking of enchantments, Ripples of Undeath is the perfect turn-two play for this deck. It puts cards into your graveyard and lets you hold on to any key engine pieces you need. Scion of Halaster is a slightly slower version of this effect which is best played after you've cast Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal. Paired with the surveils from Victor's first Eerie trigger, Scion of Halaster lets you control what you draw and what ends up in the bin.
Finally, Cemetery Tampering is another steady source of mill on an enchantment with the potential to surprise your opponents with a haymaker spell once you have more than twenty cards in graveyard, and with all this mill, that won't take long.
Never-Ending Enchantment
Once you establish a steady stream of cards into your graveyard, you'll want to start hitting three Eerie triggers a turn as quickly as possible. The easiest way to do that without access to the full suite of enchantress effects is Chthonian Nightmare.
Not only does this two-mana enchantment let you recycle your self mill creatures over and over, it returns to your hand each time, letting you quickly stack Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal effects. It also combos extremely well with Spirited Companion and other small enchantment creatures, generating two Eerie triggers each time you use its effect.
Chthonian Nightmare may offer the best value as an engine, it isn't the most mana-efficient way to put enchantments into play. That honor goes to Soaring Lightbringer, which only requires you to attack your opponents to make 1/1 enchantment creature tokens.
If you attack each opponent you'll get three tokens, immediately getting all three of Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal's abilities. Spellbook Vendor also generates a Sorcerer Roll token every turn for just one mana, while Psemilla, Meletian Poet adds a 2/2 enchantment creature token to the first enchantment you cast each turn.
To ensure you never run out of enchantments to cast, I'm including both Flickering Ward and Conviction. Bouncing and recasting these Auras is mana-intensive, but consistently doing so puts enchantments into play which is what this deck needs. They also play extremely well with Psemilla, Meletian Poet and Firja, Judge of Valor. Lastly, I'm including Heliod, God of the Sun as a last ditch option to make enchantment tokens.
Of course, all those effects wouldn't be enough on their own. Wherever possible I'm including enchantments to perform the necessary functions all Commander decks need, like Banishing Light, Seal Away, and Grasp of Fate for removal, and Black Market Connections for draw. Waste Not and Liliana's Caress synergize with Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal's discard effect, while Necromancy and Animate Dead supplement your reanimation capabilities.
Just in case you don't find any big creatures to win the game, All That Glitters and Ethereal Armor make your tokens much more dangerous.
The Big Stuff
... which isn't to say this deck doesn't pack plenty of powerful creatures. Alongside big enchantment creatures, like Overlord of the Mistmoors and Overlord of the Balemurk, I'm including Massacre Wurm and Archon of Cruelty as powerful cards that immediately swing a game in your favor. Syr Konrad, the Grim is another self mill engine that also threatens to end the game, and to help use the graveyard as much as possible, I'm including both Sun Titan and Emeria Shepherd.
Finally, the real big hitters for this deck are Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and Gray Merchant of Asphodel. Between Soaring Lightbringer and the self-mill utility creatures, this deck ends up with a lot of small bodies hanging around. Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite immediately turns them into lethal attackers and pairs very well with Massacre Wurm. Gray Merchant of Asphodel is another classic finisher for enchantment decks, especially when you can sacrifice and revive it multiple times.
This turned out to be one of my favorite kinds of decks, where you can endlessly tune the ratio of effects to make it run smoother and smoother. It also scratches that Enchantress itch without being a typical stormy deck, which I also love, but what do you think of Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal? Are there any cards or synergies I overlooked? Let me know in the comments, and thanks for reading!
