It's time to pray to the Kami as we go on a spiritual journey to enchant our opponents to death with Shrines.
Our Commander & the Shrines
Go-Shintai of Life's Origin is a pretty well balanced commander in my opinion. For it allows us to return any enchantment from out graveyard to the battlefield, and whenever a non-token shrine card enters the battlefield it makes a 1/1 enchantment creature which is also a shrine. It's important to note that shrine is an enchantment type and not a creature type so the shrine tokens we make do not technically have a creature type. I'm adding that here as it was a subject of much debate when the card was released and caused a fair bit of confusion!
Go-Shintai of Life's Origin's first ability is great for fishing destroyed enchantments out of the graveyard. It means that if a player wants to remove a piece of our board while we have mana available they need to remove our commander first so we don't immediately put the enchantment back into play. If we put a shrine back into play we also get to create a new 1/1 shrine token as well. This ability is at instant speed too so before we untap for our turn we can utilise unused mana to get something back. We don't waste mana we left up for other things like our protective instants.
Go-Shintai of Life's Origin's second ability is pure value. Every token we create gives us a chump blocker but more importantly increases our shrine count. Every shrine we play relies on having as many other shrines in play as possible, so every token helps. It's an extra draw, an extra point of damage, or an extra mana; every little helps us get ahead.
Then we have the rest of the shrine tribe which generally do as follows:
General Strategy & Win Conditions
To start we want to be fixing our mana base, setting up a draw engine and getting our commander out as fast as possible to maximise the value we get from playing our shrines. The mid-game to late game is protecting ourselves, outvaluing our opponents and building a finisher. This can be pure damage, tokens swinging or simply spilling our entire deck with Omniscience.
Win Conditions
Omniscience - We play Omniscience out by hard casting it, or retrieving it from the graveyard with Go-Shintai of Life's Origin ability. It can be discarded usually when we draw too many cards and discard down to hand size. While Omniscience is in play and we have a good enough draw engine, we can usually keep playing and drawing enchantments until we hit our other win conditions listed below or wipe out our opponents boards to the point where recovery is just impossible vs. our current board state.
Tokens - There's a few cards that make creature tokens for us to steamroll over our opponents with combat damage. Every time a enchantment enters the battlefield or is cast we get creatures from our commander, Hallowed Haunting, Honden of Life's Web, Sigil of the Empty Throne, Ajani's Chosen, Archon of Sun's Grace & Go-Shintai of Shared Purpose. For evasion, Hallowed Haunting gives flying to our creatures once we hit 7 enchantments, while Sigil of the Empty Throne & Archon of Sun's Grace are making flying creatures. Sanctum of Tranquil Light allows us to tap down anything annoying that is in our way.
Shrine Damage - Looking to the red and black shrines we have pure direct damage. Honden of Infinite Rage & Go-Shintai of Ancient Wars hits almost any target to remove key creatures and planeswalkers or you can just smack a player right in the face. Sanctum of Stone Fangs makes all players lose life at the start of your main phase and dodges player hexproof and protection. Both of these can be triggered twice per turn via Sanctum of All if we have 6 or more shrines, and Weaver of Harmony can copy a trigger as well making the loss of life soon add up!
Attrition - Depending on the decks we are up against and how they recover we can often win by just getting too far ahead especially with an Omniscience. Using the constellation ability where an effect happens every time an enchantment enters the battlefield, Doomwake Giant can quickly wipe the board of opponent's creatures. Agent of Erebos removes graveyards incredibly often to prevent recursion and Grim Guardian pings every opponent for 1 life loss.
Cleansing Meditation & Enchanted Evening - This is an instant win assuming you already have 7 or more cards in your graveyard. With Threshold enabled and Enchanted Evening this destroys every card in play including everyone's lands. Threshold then returns every single card on your board that was destroyed as they were all enchantments when they were destroyed. This leaves your opponents with no ability to play the game while you are exactly as you were before Cleansing Meditation was played.
How We Get There
Mana Generation & Fixing - I included mostly basic lands for this deck as I was trying to avoid buying an expensive land base and there's some great cards for getting basics consistently. Obviously there are a couple of proxies in this deck in the form of Gaea's Cradle & Serra's Sanctum which you can swap out for more affordable alternatives.
You have traditional green ramp in Cultivate, Tempt with Discovery & Collective Voyage. Dryad of the Ilysian Grove fixes our mana along with Cascading Cataracts & The World Tree in our land base. Prismatic Omen is here as our alternative enchantment version of Chromatic Lantern.
Elfhame Sanctuary can swap your draw for a guaranteed basic land in whichever colour you need. Seeing this in your opening hand is amazing as your first few turns you can fix your mana base and 'draw' the right colour every turn to hit your land drops. It also gives you the choice to draw regularly if you have enough land and tutor for a land later if you don't draw them on curve. Land Tax is also here for the same reason as it allows you to fetch lands if you are somehow struggling.
Generating additional mana we have creatures and enchantments. Bloom Tender & Sanctum Weaver tap for mana. Sanctum of Fruitful Harvest generates mana relative to the amount of shrines we control. Carpet of Flowers lets us benefit from blue players and Cryptolith Rite lets us tap our creatures for mana. Finally Kruphix, God of Horizons allows us to carry mana into other players turns which otherwise might get wasted.
Tutors - There are multiple things that we can do to get enchantments to win or solve a problem. Sanctum of All is our key piece for shrines, allowing us to fetch one every turn from our library or graveyard. Grim Tutor & Idyllic Tutor do what they say on the tin and fetch us whatever we need at the time. Zur the Enchanter lets us fetch any enchantment mana or less which could be another shrine or a defence piece. Sisay, Weatherlight Captain can do the same except she can fetch nearly anything in the right circumstance as long as it's legendary. Finally, Academy Rector is another proxy card for me, but a very powerful enchantment search engine if your group is OK with it.
Draw Power - Draw Engines are plentiful with enchantments. Cast or enchantment ETB effects draw us a card with Enchantress's Presence, Eidolon of Blossoms, Mesa Enchantress, Satyr Enchanter, Setessan Champion, Sythis, Harvest's Hand & Verduran Enchantress. Our shrines Sanctum of Calm Waters & Honden of Seeing Winds let us get extra cards based on our shrine count, sometimes drawing huge numbers of cards with a large shrine board state. Sylvan Library lets us filter our draws and Teferi's Ageless Insight doubles every draw we make outside of our normal draw.
Damage Defence - We have cards to make it harder to attack us to preserve our shrine tokens and keep our life total from getting too low. Ghostly Prison & Propaganda are the classic attack tax cards to make it harder to attack us. Sphere of Safety is the same but makes the usual mana skyrocket to however many enchantments we have out, effectively stopping any kind of go wide strategy. Solitary Confinement with any kind of draw engine effectively makes us untouchable from anything except loss of life, as we can still keep a hand of cards to play and pay it's cost. You can also sacrifice it and replace it with Go-Shintai of Life's Origin's first ability when you are hit by a nasty surprise. Lastly, Honden of Cleansing Fire helps us to pad our life total and Revenge of Ravens chips away at our opponents total.
Other Things to Note
Removal - Aura Shards helps us to remove annoying artifacts and enchantments that are oppressive and help to keep opponents combo pieces off the board. With any of our token generators we get triggers of Aura Shards without even having to cast creature spells so getting this card out is hugely beneficial to us. Farewell can help us with a one sided board wipe, often removing everything including artifacts, creatures and sometimes graveyards while leaving our enchantment engines intact.
Removal Protection - We are relying on being able to build a value board state with a lot of permanents so protecting the board is very important. Sterling Grove & Privileged Position protects all our enchantments from targeted removal and will protect everything we have if Enchanted Evening is also on the board. Boros Charm & Heroic Intervention make our board indestructible while Teferi's Protection removes us from the game for a turn. Avacyn's Memorial protects all of our legendary permanents which crucially is all of our shrine cards.
Artifact Hate - I have a bit of a bias against colourless artifacts especially tokens. The amount of extra treasure, clue, blood and now phyrexian tokens that get generated in commander games is really high and mana rocks are nearly always a part of peoples strategies. We can turn those value engines against them with Energy Flux & Titania's Song. Energy Flux means that pesky Sol Ring is just tapping itself to stay alive and causing players to use their mana in their upkeep as a artifact tax. Titania's Song turns powerful artifacts into vanilla creatures and continually removes any zero mana cost artifacts from play by sacrificing them to state based actions, farewell tokens! If you want more you can also add Hum of the Radix to this list to make artifact decks cry in pain as they are costed out of the game.
Recovery - Brilliant Restoration gets us everything back out of our graveyard & Hall of Heliod's Generosity lets us get something back that we want to cast on our turn.
