Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
Commander is one of Magic: The Gathering’s most popular formats. The format utilizes 99 card decks led by one commander whose colour identity determines what cards you can play in the 99. Every card from the first set to the latest release is legal in Commander, assuming they aren’t banned in the format or not allowed to be used in any format. Enchantments are one of the backbones of the format.
Best Commander Enchantments in Magic: The Gathering
They provide static effects that can slow your opponents down or push your advantage forward, making them played across many decks of the formats. There are plenty of good enchantments, but these are the 11 best enchantments in Commander, many of which you’re also going to find in the best precon Commander decks too.
11. Black Market
Black Market isn’t going to be useful in every deck, but in decks that want to play it, Black Market is one of the best decks they can be casting. It’s a way to ramp for a ton of mana in black, and once it starts gaining a lot of counters, you get more black mana than you know what to do with.
Notable, Black Market gets a counter whenever any creature dies, not just your own. So, a board wipe can give it dozens of counters if the battlefield is full of creatures. In sacrifice decks, Black Market can grow on its own while you perform the gameplan your deck wants to do in the first place. Decks that can’t play green can struggle with ramp, especially black, but Black Market can fix that downside.
10. Imprisoned In The Moon
The best Aura-based removal, Imprisoned In The Moon turns any creature, land, or planeswalker into a land that can only tap for colourless mana. There are multiple effects similar to this, but what makes Imprisoned In The Moon so good is that a land is hard to get rid of naturally, making it hard to recover whatever was enchanted unless the Aura itself is removed (something that’s also hard to do naturally).
Imprisoned In The Moon has the potential to permanently get rid of a commander. By enchanting one, there’s nothing your opponent can do if it resolves. Some decks don’t even have the ability to get rid of enchantments, as red and black have very few ways to deal with them. It won’t net you any friends casting Imprisoned In The Moon on a commander, but it will help take someone out of the game if they need their commander for their deck to function.
9. Dictate Of Erebos
Dictate Of Erebos turns any of your creature deaths into deaths on your opponents’ battlefields. You can cast it with flash to catch your opponent off guard and force everyone else to sacrifice. It does cost five mana to cast, but if it sticks on the battlefield, your opponents won’t be having creatures sticking on theirs.
Dictate Of Erebos is amazing because of sacrifice decks. These are sacrificing their creatures for value, causing them to die leading to your opponent needing to sacrifice a creature. It’s very easy for sacrifice decks to have dozens of free sacrifice fodder they don’t care about dying, letting Dictate Of Erebos act as a kind of board wipe.
8. Wilderness Reclamation
If you are casting a bunch of instant spells, Wilderness Reclamation is the enchantment for you. It lets you untap all lands you control during your end step. This lets you go deep using your mana as they will all untap anyway, letting you get more greedy with what spells you are casting. It doesn’t untap all your permanents, so you don’t get to re-use your mana rocks, but having essentially double the mana coming from your lands is what makes Wilderness Reclamation so powerful.
Wilderness Reclamation can act as both a combo piece and a control piece, giving you mana for counterspells or to use combo cards to go infinite so you can win the game off of it. If you have ways to create copies of Wilderness Reclamation or trigger its effects multiple times, you can generate a ton of mana at your end step to cast powerful instant spells.
7. Blood Moon
Blood Moon is one of the best Stax pieces. It turns all nonbasic lands into Mountains, meaning they lose all other effects and can only be tapped to produce red mana. Commander decks outside of mono-coloured decks rarely have many nonbasic lands, even in budget lists thanks to cheap dual lands.
Unless a deck is using red, Blood Moon has the potential to cut off your opponents’ ability to cast spells at all. Most spells need a specific coloured mana, so they can only rely on their mana rocks (assuming they have them on the battlefield) to cast their spells to really slow their gameplans down.
Playing Blood Moon:
Blood Moon is a powerful enchantment, but you need to build your deck with it in mind. If you’re planning on playing Blood Moon, you will want to make sure you are playing multiple basics so you can still have access to all of your colours. Blood Moon works best when you’re going all in on a stall strategy, less so just being tossed into any red deck.
6. Rhythm Of The Wild
Creature decks want to be including Rhythm Of The Wild if they can. The effect to give creatures riot is nice, especially if you’re planning on casting multiple creatures to swing out for lethal damage. If you’re using Rhythm Of The Wild in a combo-based creature deck that generates an infinite amount of creatures, the riot can give them haste to let them attack right away. It doesn’t work for tokens, so the combo has to use proper permanents from your library. However, the main attraction is the static effect that prevents creatures from being countered.
Counterspells can severely hurt creature decks as they cause you to lose out on board presence and, in the case of creature-based combos, can make them fall flat on their face. Rhythm Of The Wild can hit the board early so you can start taking advantage of it right away. It even guarantees you can cast your commander without worrying about it getting countered.
5. Black Market Connections
Versatile effects are always going to be strong, and Black Market Connections is the best that’s attached to an enchantment. At the cost of life, you can use three useful effects that can either ramp you with Treasures, draw you cards, or give you a creature on the board. All of these effects are great, although creating a 3/2 Shapeshifter is going to be the least used. The other two you will likely be triggering every turn as the Treasure and card draw puts you ahead of your opponents in advantage.
One important thing to note is that Black Market Connections is a mandatory effect. If it’s on the battlefield, you have to activate it. Luckily, with 40 starting life, the odds of Black Market Connections leading to you burning yourself to zero life is low, letting you keep taking advantage of it without worry.
4. Cathars’ Crusade
In decks where you are putting multiple creatures on the battlefield, Cathars’ Crusade is going to be your best friend. It gives +1/+1 counters to all creatures on the battlefield whenever one enters, including the one that caused Cathars’ Crusade to trigger. This allows you to turn simple 1/1 tokens into massive threats once they start racking up counters on them.
The only real downside to Cathars’ Crusade is that it can be a nightmare to track, as every group of creatures will have a different number of +1/+1 counters on them. However, if you can get past the headache of tracking them, Cathars’ Crusade is one of the best enchantments you can be playing in creature decks in the Commander format.
Tracking Counters:
Cathars’ Crusade can be a bit tiring to track, but with how good it is it’s hard to say no to putting it in decks. One good way to keep track is to use dice to show how many +1/+1 counters are on creatures and put the creatures in a collection underneath those dice rather than putting them on the creatures themselves.
3. Sylvan Library
Being able to draw extra cards at the cost of life is amazing in a format like Commander where you have to work to get the cards you want into your hand. Sylvan Library lets you draw two extra cards and keep them if you pay four life for each one kept, or put them back on top of your library. Sylvan Library is great because it tells you what cards to expect in your upcoming turns, or get them into your hand if they will impact the board right away.
Sylvan Library is also great combined with fetchlands. If the cards you draw with Sylvan Library are not going to be useful to you, if you use a fetchland that searches your deck for a land, your deck gets shuffled afterward so those cards you don’t want are shuffled from the top of your library so you don’t have to worry about seeing them again.
2. Smothering Tithe
Making your opponent pay two mana never stops feeling good with Smothering Tithe on the battlefield. It turns your opponent drawing cards into Treasures on your side of the field if they don’t pay. This includes every single draw, including the card they draw for turn. If you get Smothering Tithe on the battlefield early, you can ramp a bunch as most players won’t want to sacrifice two mana and put themselves on the back foot.
Smothering Tithe is fairly easy to cast in Commander thanks to mana rocks making the process easier. White decks that can’t play green appreciate Smothering Tithe, as it’s one of the only ways to ramp well in that colour. If your opponents are drawing a ton of cards, Smothering Tithe will reward you with a ton of Treasures you can use for whatever spells you want.
1. Rhystic Study
“Will you pay the one?” A question that has been the bane of Commander players ever since its release. For just three mana, you get to draw a card whenever an opponent casts a spell unless they pay one. This essentially puts a tax on all the spells your opponents are casting as they won’t want you to be drawing cards.
While the tax effect is optional, Rhystic Study is something you should always pay for. Card advantage is most important in Commander, as card draw makes it more likely to draw the cards you need. If you are playing a deck that can play blue cards, Rhystic Study is always worth slotting in as the value it provides is not one that can be matched by any other card, making it the best enchantment in Magic: The Gather’s Commander format.
We’ve reached the end of the best enchantments in Commander. Enchantments are played in almost every deck, and there were many enchantments that didn’t make this list that are great under the right circumstances. With how many archetypes and strategies there are in Commander, there are no shortages of powerful enchantments that can be used in them that aren’t great in other decks. There are plenty of strong generic enchantments that any deck can benefit from, like many of the cards featured here. Some of Commander’s most well-known and strongest spells are enchantments, so much so that some have even called for their bans (namely on Rhystic Study).
Enchantments are so powerful in Commander because of how little interaction there can be with them. Red and Black both have less than five cards that can handle enchantments, making them stronger than any other card type when it comes to staying on the battlefield. Enchantments can be so strong entire decks can be built around them and perform amazingly against other decks, making them worth investing in when you are building your decks.
