Unlocking the Power of Parallax Wave in Historic Enchantress Decks

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week it's once again time to hand out some life lessons to Arena zoomers, this time about Parallax Wave! The old Nemesis enchantment just came to Arena for the first time in the Powered Cube prize packs of all places, and while it might not look like much at first glance, with some sneaky deckbuilding it's possible to turn Parallax Wave into an almost unbeatable engine! How will Arena zoomers handle the infinite protection and removal of Parallax Wave? Let's get to the video and find out!

The core of our deck is an enchantress shell, for reasons that will become super clear in a minute once we talk about what we are doing with Parallax Wave. I'm not going to actually break down every card choice because we've played Enchantress before, but we've got cards like Utopia Sprawl, card-ref:Exploration, and Sanctum Weaver to ramp us into our Parallax Wave combo, while also drawing us cards if we have Sythis, Harvest's Hand or some Enchantress's Presence on the battlefield. We also get some random early game removal like Seam Rip and Sheltered by Ghosts and some one-of tutor targets in Rest in Peace and Authority of the Consuls. All pretty typical Enchantress stuff.

Now for the fun part: Parallax Wave. Parallax Wave is a super old enchantment from Nemesis with the fading mechanic. It enters with five fade counters, we have to remove one on our upkeep and once we can't, we have to sacrifice it. We can also remove fade counters to exile creatures, but once Parallax Wave leaves the battlefield, they'll all return into play. Played fairly, Parallax Wave is basically temporary removal. We can play it, remove a fade counter or two to exile our opponent's best threats and keep them off the battlefield for a few turns until we run out of fade counters and are forced to sacrifice Parallax Wave and give all of the creatures back. We can also use it to protect our creatures from removal. If our opponent tries to kill one, we can exile it, knowing that we can get it back later once Parallax Wave is gone.

But we're not trying to play Parallax Wave fairly. Instead, the actual goal of our deck is to turn Parallax Wave itself into a creature, which is when things start to get crazy...

What we're actually trying to do with the deck is to get Parallax Wave on the battlefield alongside Starfield of Nyx and at least five enchantments (which is why we are playing the Enchantress shell) so that Starfield of Nyx will turn all of our enchantments into creatures.

Why do we need Parallax Wave to be a creature so badly? Well, if we can turn Parallax Wave into a creature, then we can target it with its own ability, which turns Parallax Wave from a janky temporary removal spell into a game-ending lock piece. Let's assume we get Parallax Wave in play with Starfield of Nyx with enough enchantments to turn on Starfield, what does this allow us to do?

Well first, we get to exile all of our opponent's creatures forever. The trick here is that we can activate Parallax Wave targeting one of our opponent's creatures and with the exile trigger still on the stack, use Parallax Wave to exile itself with its own ability. This will trigger Parallax Wave's leaves the battlefield ability, returning itself to play. Then the trigger exiling our opponent's creature will resolve, and since Parallax Wave already left the battlefield, it will just straight up exile our opponent's creature forever. We can do this to exile not just all of the creatures our opponent has on the battlefield but any future creatures they might play, because when we blink out the Parallax Wave, it will reset the five fade counters, allowing us to keep it around forever.

But that's not all. It also becomes essentially impossible to kill our enchantments (which also are creatures thanks to Starfield of Nyx) because if our opponent tries to Doom Blade or card-ref:Disenchant something, we can always just use Parallax Wave to exile it, and then blink our Parallax Wave to return it to play. The same goes for Parallax Wave itself; if our opponent tries to kill it, we simply blink it and keep doing our thing. So basically, with Parallax Wave as a creature, our opponent can never have creatures, and our opponent can never kill our creatures.

But it gets even better! The combo of Parallax Wave and Starfield of Nyx is also our win condition, since all of our random enchantments will turn into creatures and we can use them to beat our opponent down. Normally the problem with this plan is removal. If we turn all of our enchantments into creatures, our opponent could just wrath them away, but, as you might have guessed, Parallax Wave mostly solves that problem because if our opponent tries to wrath, we can usually blink out enough enchantments to turn off Starfield of Nyx temporarily to fizzle the wrath and then play more enchantments to turn Parallax Wave back into a creature and keep going!

So rather than being temporary removal, with the help of Starfield of Nyx and some random enchantments, Parallax Wave exiles all of our opponent's creatures forever, keeps our opponent from ever killing any of our stuff, and also literally wins us the game by beating down as a 4/4 creature! Pretty good, right?

The last card I need to mention is Sterling Grove. We're playing the two-drop enchantment as a way to tutor up our combo pieces. Normally the biggest draw of Sterling Grove in an enchantment deck is giving all of your enchantments shroud, and while this is helpful in the early game while we are getting things set up since it can protect Sanctum Weaver and Sythis, Harvest's Hand from removal, we cannot let it stay on the battlefield if we want to combo, because shroud means we won't be able to target our Parallax Wave with its own ability. As such, make sure that you sacrifice Sterling Grove before you try to lock your opponent out of the game, otherwise you'll be in for a sad shroud surprise.

Record-wise, I finished 13-5 with the deck for an over 70% match win percentage, which is great. I actually think Parallax Wave Enchantress might be a very real deck in Historic. Its biggest weakness is spell-based combo and control decks which don't really care about our infinite removal plan, but most Historic decks are creature decks, and this deck wrecks creature decks. It also led to some hilarious moments where our Arena Zoomer opponent has clearly never seen the combo before and would pause, read our cards, fire off removal on Parallax Wave only for us to use its ability to blink it and watch our opponent scoop in dismay! If you are a fan of enchantress decks, but also like to lock your opponent out of the game, give Parallax Wave a shot. The deck might actually be pretty good!