Budget Magic: $40 Eerie Azorius Auras (Duskmourn Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! Duskmourn is finally here, and today, we're checking out the new eerie mechanic with Azorius Eerie Auras! The deck plays like a hybrid of Enchantress and Bogles, which makes it surprisingly powerful. The card advantage from the enchantress plan lets us play a longer game, while powerful auras like Ethereal Armor and Sheltered by Ghosts let us pick up fast aggro kills! The best part is that the deck is super cheap to put together, at just $50 in paper and 16 rares (with half being the rare lands Adarkar Wastes and Seachrome Coast) on Magic Arena! How good are the new enchantment synergies from Duskmourn on a budget? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Eerie Azorius Auras
The Deck
Azorius Eerie Auras is an aura-heavy enchantment deck that can play like Enchantress or Bogles, depending on the hand.
Creatures
All in all, we have five different creatures in the deck, which break down into two groups. First up, we have some enchantment support cards in Optimistic Scavenger, Gremlin Tamer, and Inquisitive Glimmer. Optimistic Scavenger gives us a one-drop that rewards us for playing enchantments by growing our creatures, while Gremlin Tamer makes 1/1 Gremlin tokens as we play our enchantment. Meanwhile, Inquisitive Glimmer offers some ramp by reducing the cost of our enchantments while also having the upside of being an enchantment creature, so it triggers eerie on Optimistic Scavenger and Gremlin Tamer.
Card-Advantage Engines
The two non-land rares in our deck are our final two creatures, our card-advantage engines Entity Tracker and Enduring Innocence. Entity Tracker is pretty straightforward: it's an enchantress—drawing us a card whenever an enchantment enters the battlefield under our control—but mono-blue, which is something we've never seen before. Having flash makes it especially powerful since we can cast it during our opponent's end step, untap, and cast some enchantments to start generating card advantage. Plus, flash makes it easier to protect with our hexproof auras, which we'll talk about in a minute. On the other hand, Enduring Innocence doesn't care about enchantments specifically (although it is an enchantment, so it triggers all of our eerie cards, potentially twice since it will return to the battlefield as a non-creature enchantment if it dies), but it works really well with the creatures in our deck. All of our creatures have power two or less, which means they'll all trigger Enduring Innocence to draw a card; plus, we can potentially draw on our opponent's turn too by casting Entity Tracker or a flash enchantment to trigger Gremlin Tamer to make a 1/1. Together, these cards make sure we always have plenty of action and that we'll keep drawing into our hexproof auras to protect our best threats.
Auras
Arguably our two most important auras are Shardmage's Rescue and Fae Flight, both of which can be flashed in to give a creature flash and fizzle a targeted removal spell. These cards make it super difficult for our opponent to kill our threats with targeted removal, which lets cards like Entity Tracker and Enduring Innocence stick on the battlefield to generate oodles of card advantage. Fae Flight also has the upside of giving the creature it enchants flying, which makes it one of our best finishers, in conjunction with Ethereal Armor...
Ethereal Armor is still an absurd card, often giving a creature +5/+5 or more for just a single mana, which makes it our best finisher. The most common way we win the game is by slinging a bunch of enchantments to build a big board and then giving a creature flying with Fae Flight before loading it up with Ethereal Armors to let us kill our opponent in just one or two evasive attacks.
Finally, we have Ossification and Sheltered by Ghosts for removal, with the latter being especially impressive. When Sheltered by Ghosts was first previewed, I wasn't sure how good it would be. Was it absurd because it offers ward, lifelink, a power buff, and removal for just two mana? Was it horrible because you could be blown out by a removal spell in response to casting it? Well, Sheltered by Ghosts is absurd, at least in this deck. Thanks to our eight hexproof enchantments, it turns out that it's pretty easy for our deck to protect the creature wearing Sheltered by Ghosts, which is brutal for the opponent. We had a lot of games where our opponent would try to kill the creature and pay two for the ward, only for us to flash in a Fae Flight or Shardmage's Rescue to fizzle the removal for a huge tempo swing. The lifelink is also super relevant against aggro, giving us a way to race by building a massive, lifelinking, hard-to-kill threat in conjunction with Ethereal Armor. Oh yeah, and it also removes our opponent's best non-land permanent. While I'm not sure it will be good in a random deck that isn't as good as ours at protecting its creatures, at least in Eerie Auras, Sheltered by Ghosts is a legit bomb and one of the strongest cards in our entire deck.
Wrap-Up
While I don't usually put too much weight in records during early-access day, we only lost a single time with the deck. More importantly, it felt strong. The synergies the deck offers are powerful. We generate tons of card advantage, have a fast clock, and can play a longer game thanks to Enduring Innocence, Entity Tracker, and Gremlin Tamer. At a minimum, I think that Eerie Auras is a great budget option for Duskmourn Standard, and it might be even better than that. I could imagine something like this being a real tier option, especially considering that there are a ton of upgrade options in a non-budget build thanks to all the enchantments in Duskmourn. If you're looking for something super cheap to play in Standard, give Eerie Azorius Auras a shot! The deck is super fun and, at least in our small sample size, surprisingly strong!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
