Wheel of Sun and Moon is pretty new. I didn't know about it when I compiled the list. I think it might be the only "enchant player" on the whole list too, although I don't know that this matters. Why would you use this on your opponent? Well, it would keep Bridge from Below active and would shut down opposing reanimation tactics, but really, you want this effect for yourself. It's a good effect and the enchantment is inexpensive to play, so this could really go into any white or green deck. Enchantress decks might like it, since they actually stand to draw the cards that this thing digs up. Control decks and even aggro decks can use it to prevent decking and to keep reusing threats. It also shuts down opposing attempts to mill you, works really well with tutors, and is an all-around useful enchantment.
Mana Echoes isn't amazing and I probably excluded it because the whole "tribal" thing is something I usually find unimpressive. I didn't actually give this card much thought, and reevaluating it, I realize that it should have been somewhere on the list, if only for the combo with Sliver Queen. She'll always be special to me, and while infinite combos I've used with her are usually three cards, Mana Echoes provides a two-card infinite combo with Sliver Queen (both infinite tokens and infinite colorless mana). Even ignoring this awesome combo, Mana Echoes is pretty cool. Tribal decks can easily have enough creatures to make tons of mana, and I was about to write that all you need is a sink for it, but not anymore. So under the new rules (mana burn is no more), Mana Echoes is just a little bit better. Also, infinite slivers.
Mobilization is another tribal type of enchantment, but unlike Mana Echoes, which could be fun but won't win you any tournaments, Mobilization is serious business. I thought that perhaps I didn't include Mobilization on the list because I might have thought it was too similar to Sacred Mesa, but I also failed to include Sacred Mesa, so this space will have to do for both cards. How did this happen? Tokens are really good. I'm wasting time trying to look back at old posts and see if some other card would bump these off as too similar, but I'll just stop and say they're both really good. Mobilization is probably better, because soldiers are a strong tribe and it also gives them vigilance, while Sacred Mesa has its upkeep cost. But flying is pretty good too and gives Sacred Mesa and advantage. Whatever, these are good cards. They should be on the list
Karmic Justice is a bit of a strategy-hoser, but I think I just plain forgot about it while compiling the list. If an opponent wants to use removal spells to hit your cards, he'd better be careful. Karmic Justice won't help your creatures, but enchantments, artifacts, and lands will all trigger Karmic Justice if an opponent kills them. Pretty cool. It won't protect your most valuable permanents from destruction, but it will at least guarantee that you can strike back with equal force, which is almost as good and effectively the same against most opponents, since being able to choose any of his permanents to take out whenever he destroys one of yours is just too harsh a penalty for most decks to handle. If you could find a way to force opponents to kill some of your stuff, that could make for fun with Karmic Justice too, although I've never seen this done.
Sulfuric Vortex seems like such an obvious card to have on a list of top enchantments, especially when it comes to how limited red is. I didn't forget about Sulfuric Vortex, though. I think I actually had it on the initial list, but confused it with Pyrostatic Pillar (both are red enchantments from Scourge that do damage to players) and ended up leaving it off because of that mixup. Sulfuric Vortex does something valuable for aggressive red decks: it completely shuts off life gain. The upkeep damage also creates an inexorable clock that will eventually kill everyone. Useful in red decks against any opponent, and invaluable against ones that rely heavily on life gain. Red decks in Legacy are probably more likely to use it as a sideboard card, but burn and sligh decks often maindeck it, because it's never a dead card and having that inexorable clock is useful against anything.
Grave Pact turns every creature you have into an Abyssal Gatekeeper. And I really like Abyssal Gatekeeper. This is another enchantment I didn't forget (I know because it's on my long list that I prepared in order to make this list), so I don't know how it didn't get included. While it won't affect creatureless opponents and it's heavy on requiring black mana, this is a very powerful enchantment. With support that is easy to generate, Grave Pact will kill all of of your opponents' creatures and leave you with your own army to swing for the kill. Actually, it's scary to think about just how easy this could be. And even if it only partially succeeds, it can still do a lot. Without a mechanism for killing your own cheap (preferably token) creatures, Grave Pact is still an imposing threat that makes your blockers more dangerous and punishes opponents for killing your attackers.
Tombstone Stairwell is a casual player's favorite. This makes it all the worse that I forgot about it when compiling this list. After all, this list was originally designed with casual play in mind (we've only just transitioned into a Legacy blog). Tombstone Stairwell is a bit tricky to play with, but has the honor of being the only card that can do what it does, which is turn your graveyard full of creatures into a massive army of zombies. The bad news is that Tombstone Stairwell costs four mana, has a cumulative upkeep, and each of your opponents also get the zombie armies. I've yet to see this in a tournament deck because of those drawbacks, but they really can be worked around and Tombstone Stairwell makes for a unique deck that fills the battlefield with zombies. And what more could you ask for?
The final local enchantment on list, but Pattern of Rebirth isn't really meant to enhance creatures and the only things it has in common with Rancor are that it's green and that it technically enchants a creature. The real use for Pattern of Rebirth is to ditch a small creature for a something that you'll use to win the game. I've written about this in the past in two different posts that should soon be archived at the CPA. Pattern Rector is a fun deck, of course, and a potentially devastating one. It's good enough for Legacy tournament play and allows for fun tricks like putting Progenitus into play quickly and such. And then there's going infinite with Reveillark. Like I said with Dream Halls, playing stuff without paying the mana it normally costs is really good. Getting it out of your library and into play though, that's just insane. And that's why Pattern of Rebirth ranks so highly.
This is the enchantment that nearly made it into the top 10. I tried to squeeze it in, but Saproling Burst will have to settle for runner up. There are a lot of tricks with this card. The infamous PandeBurst combo uses this with Pandemonium to deal 21 damage to the opponent. Saproling Burst can also temporarily shut down attackers with its variable ability to conjure blockers for you. Attacking with the tokens is another option, and you can choose between quantity of tokens and how long they'll last depending on your strategy or the combat situation you're face with. The new combat rules have been unkind to some cards, but I think Saproling Burst is pretty much unhindered. Lots of cards make tokens. Even among green enchantments, making saproling tokens specifically isn't hard to come by. But Saproling Burst stands out from the crowd. It's really something special—for cracking your opponent's skull open.
There are lots of enchantments for making a creature stronger. Rancor is simply the best. Enchantments of this type have a card disadvantage problem: if the creature is destroyed, you lost a creature and the investment you put into it with your enchantment. Rancor gets around this. It also gives a considerable power boost to the creature and adds on trample for even more of a threat. Finally, for the icing on the broken cake, it costs only a single green mana. Local enchantment's don't have much presence on this list. The ones that are in this top 200 tend to do amazing things like pump out tokens as Squirrel Nest does or bring stuff back from the graveyard as Animate Dead does. Rancor is the exception. It does normal things, but it's so good and so cheap, that it's truly one of the best enchantments there is. Mix with Auratog for added hilarity. Endless Wurm isn't bad either. I've also had fun using it with Smokestack. The point is, it's really good.
There's no clear line on this list from which we leave behind the merely great cards and move into the true heavy hitters. But if we made a list that only included the scariest, most broken enchantments in the game, Earthcraft would certainly be on it. The only bit of sanity to be found here is in the phrase "basic land." It's nice that your opponent can't use this monstrosity to repeatedly untap his Gaea's Cradle or whatever, but this does little to balance things. Lots of decks can make tapping creatures a negligible cost. And even basic lands give you mana, which is good. By itself, Earthcraft is two mana for massive acceleration, turning every creature you play into a virtual land. Throw in something that has synergy with it, and infinite loops are laughably easy. Squirrel Nest is the most compact. But three-card infinite combos with Earthcraft are easy too. Earthcraft is even banned in Legacy because of its capacity for infinite combos.
The last blue card on the list, I'm sorry to say. But at least blue goes out with a bang. Dream Halls is banned in Legacy and was, for a long time, restricted in Vintage, where it has since been unrestricted because there is more broken stuff there (Dream Halls decks have recently started showing up in Vintage tournaments and it's unclear how good they might be). It turns out that playing spells without having to pay mana for them is broken. Who'd have thought? Your opponent can do the same, but as anyone who's been on the receiving end of a Dream Halls combo deck can tell you, that's often no consolation. Anyway, I wrote a post about Dream Halls in the early days of this blog, which I'll link to when it becomes archived at the Casual Players Alliance, rather than go on and on about the card here.
This is one weird enchantment. Lich can be difficult to work with, so good luck if you use it or something similar (Nefarious Lich, for example). Lich is misunderstood. It has so many drawbacks that it's easy to assume that it's just plain useless. But then there's TurboLich. Actually, there are at least a few ways to make combo decks using Lich. Overgrown Estate is often key. Zuran Orb works too, although the former is preferable. Instead of gaining life, which would be boring, Lich decks draw cards. And looking at the potential life that would be gained by something like Overgrown Estate, that's a lot of cards. Nourishing Shoal and Autochthon Wurm are a newer engine for Lich to play with. Kill conditions for Lich decks vary, but my favorite is probably Mirror Universe, because there's something special about switching life totals with your opponent as the win condition for a deck.
An old standby of mine and something I really need to bring back. Illusions of Grandeur won me lots of games once upon a time (seven years ago or thereabouts). It was probably intended as a stalling device that could keep your alive while you already have your opponent on a clock with some other cards that can kill him. After all, the cumulative upkeep ensures that you won't get to keep all the life you gained with it. But that's not how I used Illusions of Grandeur and that's not what it's really known for. It's quite simple: if an opponent gains control of Illusions of Grandeur, he's sitting on a time bomb that will hit him for 20 once he can't pay the rapidly increasing upkeep, all while you get to keep the 20 life you gained forever and ever. Fortunately, Donate does just this for only three mana. Apparently some players really hate it if you do this to them, but I think it's awesome. Don't do it all the time though.
These days, there are better enablers for infinite combos, but Enduring Renewal is the classic, the icon, and one of the first. I couldn't possibly list every single combo with Enduring Renewal, but I can give a few examples. Use it with Ornithopter and Fallen Angel for a flying attacker that's as big as your heart desires. Use it with Mogg Fanatic and Aluren for endless targeted damage. Wild Cantor and any storm spell give you a ridiculously high storm count to power the spell. My personal favorite is Goblin Bombardment, which was already featured on this list. They won't do any damage by themselves, but damage from using these two cards alongside small creatures can rack up very quickly, and a free creature (Ornithopter, Wild Cantor, Cloud of Faeries, whatever) will still give you access to that trick.
Six mana to win the game. Yes, it's one of the costliest enchantments on the list. It's still a force to be reckoned with. It turns out that some effects are so powerful, paying six mana is still worth it. Being able to tap or untap whatever you want for the cost of discarding one card is such an effect. With the right engine to fill your hand, Mind over Matter offers a strange degree of control over the game, letting your lock your opponents down by tapping everything they have, while you repeatedly use activated abilities on your own permanents and then untap them. That second part can easily be enough to win the game, especially if you happen to have a Quicksilver Dagger. Other fun combos include Tolarian Academy (I used this a lot), Library of Alexandria, and Arcanis the Omnipotent.
This is possibly the most powerful blue enchantment ever, and certainly the strongest blue enchantment in the Legacy format right now. Yes, it's better than Counterbalance. Standstill can be used with lots of things, but perhaps the most straightforward is a control deck featuring man-lands, especially Mishra's Factory. Your opponent is left with two options. He can avoid playing spells so that you can't take advantage of Standstill, in which case he dies from your lands beating him down, or he can play spells and let you draw the cards from Standstill. The latter option is what almost always happens, and that means Standstill is really letting you draw three cards for two mana. Drawing three cards for two mana is a really, really good deal. Fear Standstill.
I used to use Mangara's Tome all the time and I loved it. When I first saw this card, I was amazed. Here was my Mangara's Tome in enchantment form, but better. And blue. Parallel Thoughts is also blue. And I like blue. If waiting for the cards you want to show up as you draw one at a time from a library of 40+ cards isn't your thing, and I know it isn't mine, you'll like Parallel Thoughts. You do still have to shuffle the cards you pull, but there are only seven of them. It could also conceivably be used to thin your deck our by getting rid of seven cards that you want to avoid drawing, but why you would do that when you could just get whatever you need with Parallel Thoughts is beyond me (unless you're really worried that someone could destroy Parallel Thoughts). The bottom line is that this is a tutor for seven cards. Tutors are really good. Even if it costs five mana, grabbing whatever seven cards you want is well worth it.
This is one of the enchantments that I have personally used the most out of all of the enchantments on this list. Pandemonium is great fun and does a lot of damage very quickly. I see three ways to have fun with this card. Firstly, you could use it in a multiplayer deck and let damage fly everywhere as creatures are played. People might just choose to hit you with it and kill you with your own enchantment, but more likely they'll target each other and the result will be, well, pandemonium. Secondly, you could play lots of creatures and use Pandemonium to clear away potential blockers or get in some extra damage. This works very well on its own and even better if the appropriate creatures are chosen. Thirdly, you could use a combo of some sort to kill opponents with massive Pandemonium damage. There are lots of ways to do this. Tombstone Stairwell could be good. Phyrexian Dreadnought is better. Saproling Burst is best. By the way, this is it for red cards. Sorry, Pandemonium is the coolest one. That's right, no red enchantments in the top 20. But at least red made it this far. Enchanting stuff was never its specialty.
The odd enchantment that behaves like a sorcery. Being an enchantment gives Attunement two considerable benefits: the effect can be stored for later, and it can be used repeatedly. Although it's actually a pretty good card, Attunement is mostly ignored by casual and tournament players alike because there are so many other options out there when it comes to digging for cards. Rarely will Attunement be what fits your deck moreso than any other such card. But Attunement is worth looking into precisely because it's an unusual take on a common effect. Maybe it is what you're looking for. I see it working well in aggressive decks that play bombs with little regard for card advantage, as well as decks that play stuff from the graveyard and don't care about discarding. Attunement is perhaps most impressive when combined with Replenish, as the synergies there produce an enchantment generating engine that wins for sure once it goes off.
With how many enchantments on this list have I found myself noting that they can be used in Enchantress decks? Enchantress decks use more enchantments than other decks do. And this is a list about enchantments. It's to be expected. A lot of cheap enchantments work really well in Enchantress decks. Al0ysiusHWWW covered this to some extent when he wrote about the Enchantress Bloom combo deck. Enchantress decks are powerful, diverse, and use lots of enchantments. Perhaps best of all, they go crazy, using enchantments that accelerate mana production to make lots of mana, to play enchantments, to draw cards, and repeat the cycle until they're ready to kill. It's great. And it's the "draw cards" component that makes all this possible. Argothian Enchantress does this well, but the best card in this category and one of the best card-drawers ever is Enchantress's Presence.
With our change in focus to Legacy tournament play, perhaps I should note how good this thing is there. Not that it's bad elsewhere. Counterbalance is a powerful card, giving you some chance to just counter spells out of nowhere, at virtually no cost. Manipulating the top of your library completely changes things and actually makes Counterbalance scary. Sensei's Divining Top is the ultimate in this area. In fact, the combination of Counterbalance and Sensei's Divining Top is so prevalent in Legacy that it's practically a defining feature of the format. I must pay Counterbalance the respect it is due. There aren't many stronger enchantments in Legacy. Also, it's blue. And yes, I'm going to continue to point out the colors of cards even when an image of the card is right next to my text. Anyway, Counterbalance is scary.
One of the best local enchantments ever. There are only three local enchantments that rank higher on our list than this one. And only one of those is used for improving creatures, so for this sort of job, Curiosity is certainly one of the best. And arguably, it's the most powerful local enchantment. They all do such different things that it's somewhat arbitrary. What Curiosity does is make your opponent cry. Any creature can become a card-drawing machine. Put Curiosity on something your opponent can't block, and reap the card advantage rewards. It can also be used in combos. With Mind over Matter (coming soon to a list near you), in play, you can deal massive damage all at once. But Curiosity probably shines most with aggressive blue decks, where the card advantage lets you play aggro-control smoothly and dominantly.
Land's Edge isn't too bad either, but Seismic Assault is the ultimate at what it does. The concept is simple: get lots of lands into your hand, discard them to Seismic Assault, win. But the exact way this is done can varies so much, I won't try to cover every method. Drawing lots of cards is an easy one. Or you could just set up Sunder and let it bounce all of your lands. Land Tax works too. Swans of Bryn Argoll offers an instant win alongside Seismic Assault, although the mana requirements for this are somewhat prohibitive. But the best use of Seismic Assault is its combo with Life from the Loam. This kill has taken the Legacy format by storm. Life from the Loam makes it easy to get lots of lands, to find Seismic Assault, to have the three red mana available for it, and finally to have lots of lands to pitch for the kill. It's a match made in heaven.
This is the last local enchantment on the list that isn't green, which should give you good hints of the identities of the two remaining local enchantments. Animate Dead is really here as a representative of a whole class of cards. Having Animate Dead, Dance of the Dead, Necromancy, and Diabolic Servitude all on the list would just be redundant. Animate Dead was chosen because it's cheap, the drawback isn't particularly problematic, it doesn't remove the creature from the game at any point, it can get either your creatures or your opponent's creatures, and finally because it's the original. Whether you're making your opponent's strongest creature come back and using it against him or using it to sneak a hugely expensive creature into play without paying for it, Animate Dead is highly effective. It also has a combo with Worldgorger Dragon that I won't get into right now. It may be old, but don't underestimate this card.
I used to have multiple copies of this card, but I think they were all traded away years ago, which is a pity. I tried to make Food Chain work, but ended up only ever using it in goofy multiplayer decks. Food Chain went pretty much ignored until the rise of the one deck to break it: Food Chain Goblins. Here's how it works: play goblins just like any goblin deck, play Food Chain, play Goblin Recruiter, stack the top of your deck with Goblin Recruiter, pitch some goblins for red mana, play Goblin Ringleader to draw some of the goblins from the top of the deck you stacked, play those goblins, repeat, attack your opponent with goblins (that have haste due to Goblin Warchief), win. Sound good? Because it's better than that. Food Chain Goblins is exceedingly fast. Even though Goblin Recruiter is banned in Legacy, Food Chain still manages to show up in goblin decks to provide a burst of speed. It may seem a little straightforward for a card we're ranking so highly on the list, but there's something to be said for making creature swarms deadly.
The one line of text says it all. "You may play an additional land each turn." Simple as can be. Also highly effective. Exploration is cheap and can do a whole lot. Alongside Horn of Greed, it created the combo known as "turboland." Each Exploration means you can play still another land per turn, and each Horn of Greed means you draw yet another card for each land you play. Exploration is also a must in Enchantress decks, where it provides acceleration while doubling as a cheap enchantment that can be used with the card-drawing engine. And it's great with Life from the Loam. It even allows for bizarre decks that use over 40 lands and rely on man-lands like Mishra's Factory for the kill. Exploration is somewhat overshadowed by Fastbond, but that card is banned or restricted in tournament formats and does damage you, whereas Exploration lets you play extra lands without killing yourself.
This is the coolest alternate win condition enchantment ever printed and the last one on our list. Something about seeing "100" in the text of a Magic card is just awesome. It would make this list for being cool even if it were as impractical as Divine Intervention. But that's the best part. Helix Pinnacle is actually pretty good. Possibly the best of the "win the game" enchantments. It can come into play early and shroud to keep it there is nice. It serves as an excellent mana sink. And the way you pay for the tower counters can vary depending on your deck and situation. You can get a combo for a ton of mana and pay for 100 counters all at once, or you can do it slowly, paying a little each turn but holding the game locked down to stall for the win. You can do anything in between those extremes too. Large blocks over a few turns. Small blocks over several turns. Helix Pinnacle is quite flexible.
Future Sight may have a somewhat demanding mana cost at five mana with a triple-blue requirement, but it's well worth that. By manipulating the top of your library in any way at all, you can use Future Sight to generate significant card and tempo advantage. Control decks can dominate the board and combo decks can chain spells together and just win outright. Future Sight accelerates everything, as long as you get it out early enough to take advantage of it. And since Future Sight is so powerful, getting it out early is the main concern. Academy Rector works well and Future Sight is often a secondary enchantment in combo decks using Academy Rector. Although it can be good anywhere, I don't recall seeing a deck that was built fully around Future Sight. It's used as support or as a surprise in decks that don't rely on it, but can suddenly win with it. So buidling a deck based around this enchantment could be fun and people wouldn't expect it.
It was all I could do to rank this card where I did. It's not used much, but both Al0ysius and I really, really, really like this card and think it's underused. Squandered Resources really isn't seen in tournament decks anymore (I'd love to see it). I don't remember the last time I saw it in a deck that wasn't built by either Al0ysius or myself. But it's worth noting that people did use it once upon a time. It's even banned in Mirage Block Constructed because of ProsBloom. They could have banned other components, but Squandered Resources was seen as the problem because it was what made the deck so fast. And that's what it does. The Squandered Resources/Natural Balance combo lets you go totally crazy. And if you use Fastbond Squandered Resources is incredible. But even if you don't, the mana boost is pretty good. Use this card. Or at least play around with it. Come on. Please?