(Yenna, Redtooth Regent | Justyna Dura)

Technically Playable - Yenna, Redtooth Regent

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is technically playable" (the best kind of playable). The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!

This week's random commander is Yenna, Redtooth Regent. When I press the random button on EDHREC, it's fairly common for it to be a popular commander or a new one. But it's rarely both, and Yenna is definitely both.

It may feel like Wilds of Eldraine came out a year ago, but it was just over a month since the set was released. Given how new it is, Yenna has almost as many decks (719) as both of the previous commanders that I've written about combined (Daryl has 535 and Balthor has 396). This is pretty impressive given that Daryl came out in 2020 and Balthor all the way back in 2002. I highly expect Yenna to simply climb higher and higher as time passes due to this card's unique take on Enchantress as a strategy.

The thing that makes Yenna so unique is her ability to choose any enchantment you control, that doesn't share a name with another permanent you control, and make a non-legendary token copy of it. In addition, if it's an Aura you can then untap Yenna. This is really key, and it's something that I'll be coming back to later.

Seeing Double

Anyone who has seen the nonsense I post on Twitter or read my Balthor article will know that one of my favorite things about Commander doing hilariously over-the-top turns. Yenna enables this to no end using cards like Doubling Season, Mondrak, Glory Dominus, and Anointed Procession to fill your playmat with token copies of your enchantments. I really hope one day I get Adrix and Nev, Twincasters as a random commander for one of these Technically Playable articles so I can talk about how absurd just one token-doubler can be, let alone multiple of them.

What's really glorious about Doubling Season and Anointed Procession in particular, is that these are also enchantments that Yenna can also copy. This is probably one of the best ways to get really out of hand and impossible to catch. While this does leave you open to a well-timed Farewell or Cleansing Nova there are a lot fewer enchantment board wipes compared to artifact or creature ones. This gives you some natural protection simply based on the card type you are playing and the other cards that exist in the format.

There's another way to go really wild with copying your enchantments, but it requires a little more work around. Populate is Selesnya's guild mechanic from Return to Ravnica and works really well with Yenna if you can jump through some hoops. The main issue with Populate is that it requires the tokens that you want to copy to be creatures. If you can run something like Opalescence or Starfield of Nyx to turn your enchantments into creatures, you can slam down Song of the Worldsoul and go really wild with copying your enchantments. This works really well with Yenna since she can only create only copy of an enchantment but can set you up to Populate your board.

Mana, Mana & More Mana

So we know how to make our board an absolute mess of permanents, but what should we be copying? The first thing we want to look at is how to get the resources for these massive turns. Yes Sol Ring and Mana Crypt are great but they're also... well, they're boring. Yenna likes enchantments so let's slam as many functional copies of Utopia Sprawl and Wild Growth into our deck as possible. A quick look at Yenna's EDHREC page shows us around eight enchantments that range from one to three mana with varying effects. These are going to be the bread and butter of our ramp package, and with the Enchantress effects you're running, they'll also replace themselves.

But we don't just want one or two extra mana from our enchantments, we want all of the mana. Nyxbloom Ancient and the new Virtue of Strength give us ways of going totally over the top with our mana since they stack on top of each other (they make triple mana, not an additional one). We can also use Commander staple Mirari's Wake, a card that has always been really powerful and consistent in the format but is a little less explosive than some other options. All of these options will give us half of the resources that we need to have the enormous, completely over-the-top turns that we're looking for with such an abusable commander.

What's really important (as I alluded to earlier) is that the land Auras will actually allow us to untap Yenna. This means you can make a copy of a land Aura, put it onto an untapped land, and continue to activate Yenna as long as you have the cards (specifically Auras) in hand to continue to play. And that's what I'm going to talk about now, getting more cards into our hand.

The Three Best Words In Magic

Card. A. Draw.* These are the three best words in Magic, everyone knows it, everyone wants it, Yenna has it. Enchantment decks are often referred to as "Enchantress" decks based on the card Argothian Enchantress, the card that held together all of the competitive enchantment decks in the past. While this is from 75-card constructed, the name for the decks has persisted over to our 100 card format. Just like the land Auras, there is a critical mass, and Yenna's EDHREC page shows us, again, around eight options. Of these eight, I would say that specifically the two best with Yenna are Eidolon of Blossoms and Setessan Champion, the reason these two stick out is because instead of drawing on cast, these two cards have the Constellation keyword which triggers when enchantments enter the battlefield, this means that when you are copying your enchantments you will draw from those copies entering. This double double duty with the land Auras as they are also untapping Yenna. Turning your board into something of a fidget toy that you can keep fiddling with until you run out of gas.

*not specifically in this order

Okay But How Do I Win?

We're talking a lot about generating value and playing our long, albeit hilarious, Solitaire turns. But we do actually need to get our opponent's life totals down to zero. Luckily we have a few solutions to this. I'll start with the usual suspects. Since we're already making a ton of tokens and doubling, quadrupling or even octupling them, we can use that to our advantage! Sigil of the Empty Throne and Hallowed Haunting are both fantastic ways to build up a board of creatures every time you cast an enchantment. While this doesn't count the copies we make, a lot of our land Auras have a very low mana cost, and some other useful Auras or removal spells like Song of the Dryads, Ethereal Armor and Ossification also all have low costs, allowing us to play two to three spells a turn and generate a huge number of creatures.

But they're just small fry. I much prefer the idea of making tons of copies of Nylea's Colossus to keep doubling the power of something like Nyxborn Behemoth or a flier with Ancestral Mask attached. I just like to see the numbers get big as I turn my creature sideways into a hilariously-timed Swords to Plowshares (I mean, that's why I play Xenagos, God of Revels). You're also making a ton of mana, so a card like Heliod, God of the Sun or Bearscape is a fantastic way to dump all of that leftover mana from your three copies of Nyxbloom Ancient. One thing that makes Heliod particularly busted is the fact that the tokens it makes are also enchantments, triggering all of those Constellation draws and power doubles or contributing to your Ancestral Mask

Removing The Competition

I'm not going to talk about the must-includes, like Beast Within, Swords to Plowshares, or the new hotness that is Stroke of Midnight, because Yennna has a much more interesting suite of removal that fits in well with everything else that I've talked about. Yep, I'm talking specifically about Oblivion Ring.dec. While they don't have the benefits of a super low mana cost and most are sorcery speed, one thing that cards like Oblivion Ring and Banishing Light do have going for them is their card type. Being enchantments in this deck is incredibly beneficial, and allows you to make copies with them, draw cards with them, and generally get a whole host of additional value purely from the fact that they're permanents that stick around.

This can also be said for some of the cards that are, what I like to call, "soft removal" that's often attached to Auras (yet more benefits!). Cards like Pacifism are really cheap since they don't work well against all creatures. Anything that has a static ability is still going to work. But they do prevent anything really nasty from attacking, Blightsteel Colossus? Maybe next time! In short, while I'd be tempted to reach for my old-faithful Swords to Plowshares Yenna definitely screams out as a deck that a little extra synergy can definitely benefit it much more than just having a generally good card in a lot of spots. Personally, I'd still run Beast Within and Stroke of Midnight since they're so versatile, but could easily see Swords on the chopping block.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Yenna as a commander and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Yenna as the commander tick.

Let me know in the comments below if you play Yenna, if you want to build a Yenna deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!

Read more:

Power Sink - The Gitrog Monster and the Land of Enchantment

Do Your Worst - Rakdos Enchantress

Paul Palmer

Hey there, I'm Paul. I've been writing about magic for a really long time. I love to write about obscure commanders (one of my really early articles back in 2015 was about Skeleton Ship) and how you can make decks around them work, no matter how unplayable they are. I love Gruul, I love Mountains and I love casting Lightning Bolt.