What does Enchant mean in Magic: The Gathering?

Enchant is a keyword ability found on Aura cards — a subtype of Enchantment. It defines what the Aura can legally target when cast and what it can remain attached to on the battlefield. For example, "Enchant creature" means the Aura can only target and attach to creatures.

What happens to an Aura when the enchanted creature dies?

When the enchanted permanent leaves the battlefield, the Aura is placed in the graveyard. Auras can't exist on the battlefield without something to enchant, so they fall off and are immediately put into the graveyard. The Aura does not follow the creature to the hand, library, or exile.

Can an Aura enchant a creature with hexproof?

Not if you control the Aura and your opponent controls the creature. Hexproof prevents a permanent from being targeted by spells or abilities your opponents control, so you can't cast an Aura targeting an opponent's hexproof creature. However, you can enchant your own hexproof creatures freely — and that's the core strategy of "Bogles"-style decks.

Can an Aura enchant a creature with protection?

No. A creature with protection from a colour can't be targeted by Auras of that colour, and if an Aura of that colour somehow ends up attached to a protected creature, it falls off immediately. Protection stops the Aura from both targeting and staying attached.

What is the difference between an Enchantment and an Aura?

An Enchantment is a card type representing persistent magical effects. An Aura is a specific subtype of Enchantment — one that must be attached to another object or player on the battlefield (or occasionally in another zone). All Auras are Enchantments, but not all Enchantments are Auras. Non-Aura enchantments like Enchantress's Presence sit on the battlefield on their own without needing to attach to anything.

Can an Aura enchant another Aura or enchantment?

Yes, if the Aura's enchant line says "Enchant enchantment." Cards like Steal Enchantment ({U}{U}) use exactly this targeting, allowing you to attach an Aura to another enchantment — including other Auras already attached to permanents. Power Leak from Alpha is another classic example, taxing the controller of any enchantment it targets.

Enchant: The MTG Mechanic Explained

There's something satisfying about slapping an Aura onto a creature and watching it transform. A humble 2/2 becomes a 7/7 with haste. A land you don't own suddenly answers to you. An artifact starts quietly draining its controller every upkeep. That's the promise of Enchant - one of Magic's oldest and most flavourful keyword abilities.

What is Enchant?

Enchant is a keyword ability found on Aura cards - a subtype of Enchantment. It does one specific job: it tells you what the Aura can legally target when you cast it, and what it can legally remain attached to once it's on the battlefield.

Every Aura has exactly one enchant line (or occasionally more - more on that in a moment). That line defines the Aura's legal targets entirely. A card that reads "Enchant creature" can only be cast targeting a creature, and can only stay attached to a creature. A card reading "Enchant land" works the same way, just for lands.

The object or player an Aura is attached to is called the enchanted permanent (or enchanted player). The Aura is said to enchant that object.

Rules note: Enchant is classified as a static ability under CR 702.5 - not a triggered or activated one. It doesn't go on the stack. It simply defines the Aura's legal attachment at all times.

What can Enchant target?

The diversity here is wider than many players realise. Across Magic's history, Auras have carried enchant lines targeting:

Creatures (Enchant creature - the most common)
Lands (Enchant land)
Artifacts (Enchant artifact)
Enchantments (Enchant enchantment)
Players (Enchant player)
Specific land subtypes, like Enchant Mountain
Cards in graveyards (Enchant creature card in a graveyard)

That last one is unusual enough to deserve a callout.

Rules note: Auras that enchant players (e.g., older Curse cards) can target and remain attached to players, but cannot target or attach to permanents. The two categories are mutually exclusive under CR 702.5d.

Rules

The basics

When you cast an Aura spell, it requires a target - specifically, whatever legal object or player its enchant line defines. If no legal target exists, you can't cast the spell at all. The target is chosen as you put the spell on the stack (CR 601, "Casting Spells"), and your opponents have a window to respond before the Aura resolves.

If the target becomes illegal before the Aura resolves - say, the creature you targeted gains shroud in response - the Aura spell fizzles and goes to the graveyard without entering the battlefield.

When the enchanted object leaves the battlefield

This is where newer players sometimes get tripped up. If the enchanted permanent leaves the battlefield, the Aura is placed in the graveyard. It doesn't follow the creature to the hand, library, or exile - it simply falls off and dies.

This happens because the Aura becomes "unattached" and the rules immediately put it into the graveyard, as Auras can't exist on the battlefield without something to enchant.

Multiple enchant abilities

A handful of unusual cards carry more than one enchant line. When that happens, both apply simultaneously - the Aura's target must satisfy all enchant restrictions, and it can only remain attached to something that matches all of them (CR 702.5c). Think of it as narrowing the target category with every additional line.

Enchanting graveyards

Animate Dead is one of Magic's most famous examples of a genuinely strange Aura. Its enchant line reads "Enchant creature card in a graveyard" - so it targets a card in a graveyard when cast, brings that card to the battlefield, and then changes its own enchant ability mid-resolution to read "enchant creature put onto the battlefield with Animate Dead." The card's own triggered ability performs this swap, and the Aura ends up attached to the living creature instead. Wild stuff, and a reminder that "Enchant" can define targets in zones other than the battlefield.

Common misunderstandings

Auras entering without a target: In some situations - mainly being put onto the battlefield directly rather than cast - an Aura can enter attached to something it couldn't normally target. The enchant ability only restricts casting and staying attached, with some nuance around enters-the-battlefield scenarios.
The enchanted creature's controller: Several Aura effects reference "enchanted creature's controller" not "you." This matters a lot with theft effects and Auras that punish their host - like Warp Artifact, which pings the controller of the enchanted artifact, not the Aura's owner.
Protection and Auras:** A creature with protection from a colour can't be targeted by an Aura of that colour, and any Aura of that colour already attached to it falls off immediately.

Strategy

Playing with Auras

The classic danger of Auras is what players call "two-for-one" vulnerability. You spend a card to enchant your creature, your opponent kills the creature in response or shortly after, and suddenly you've lost two cards while they've lost one. This card-disadvantage problem has defined how Auras are evaluated for decades.

The cards that break this pattern tend to do one of three things:

Replace themselves when cast (drawing a card on entry)
Generate such an immediate and overwhelming effect that the opponent must deal with it right now
Attach to a creature that's already hard to remove (hexproof, indestructible, or protection)

Building an Aura deck - often called "Bogles" in Modern, after Slippery Bogle, or "Enchantress" in Commander and Legacy - usually means picking creatures your opponent simply can't target, then stacking Auras onto them freely.

The Enchantress engine

One of Magic's oldest synergy loops involves cards that draw you cards when you cast enchantments. Enchantress's Presence and Mesa Enchantress are the archetypal examples. In a deck full of cheap Auras, these turn every enchantment spell into a cantrip, keeping your hand full even as you develop a threatening board. The loop can generate serious card advantage, especially in formats with access to multiple enchantress effects at once.

Playing against Auras

Aura-heavy strategies are uniquely vulnerable to bounce spells. Returning the enchanted creature to its owner's hand sends the Aura to the graveyard - you've effectively answered two cards with one. This is much cleaner than destroying the creature, which just leaves the Aura in the graveyard.

For permanent answers, Disenchant at '{1}{W}' is the gold standard: one mana to destroy any artifact or enchantment. It's been a staple answer since Alpha.

Enchanter's Bane offers a different angle from Red - rather than destroying Auras, it pressures the controller of enchanted permanents at each end step, forcing them to sacrifice their enchantments or take recurring damage.

Stealing enchantments

A quirky corner of Aura design is Auras that take control of something. Control Magic enchants an opponent's creature and hands it to you. Steal Enchantment does the same for another enchantment - including, in some delightful loops, another Aura. Enthralling Hold is a more recent version of Control Magic, with the restriction that you can only target tapped creatures. These theft Auras are strong because the opponent loses a permanent and you gain one - the two-for-one math runs the other way for once.

Specific-type enchant lines

Some Auras narrow their target to a specific permanent subtype. Awaken the Ancient** enchants a Mountain specifically, turning it into a 7/7 red Giant with haste. This sounds narrow, but in a mono-red or Mountain-heavy deck it's a surprising threat - your opponent has to kill what is, functionally, a land. Until they do, it attacks every turn.

Notable cards

Holy Strength - One of Magic's original Aura spells from Alpha (1993). Simple Enchant creature, '+1/+2'. It established the template for what Auras are: a permanent bonus attached to a creature. Not powerful by modern standards, but historically significant as one of the first examples of the mechanic.

Animate Dead - A genuinely weird Aura that enchants a creature card in a graveyard, reanimates it, and then changes its own enchant ability mid-resolution. It's one of the most mechanically unusual Auras ever printed and has been a reanimator staple in Legacy and Vintage for decades.

Control Magic - '{2}{U}{U}', Enchant creature, you control enchanted creature. Clean, brutal, and one of the most impactful Auras in the game's history. Stealing an opponent's best creature with one card is the kind of tempo swing that wins games.

Enchantress's Presence - The backbone of Enchantress-style decks. Drawing a card every time you cast an enchantment sounds modest, but in a deck designed around it, the card advantage is relentless.

Enchanted Evening - A strange and powerful enchantment that makes all permanents enchantments. This opens up explosive combo lines (everything is now affected by enchantment-matters cards) and has some genuinely game-warping interactions with mass-enchantment destruction.

Steal Enchantment - '{U}{U}', Enchant enchantment, you control it. Niche, but elegant. In an enchantment-heavy meta, being able to turn an opponent's best Aura into your own is strong value, and the double-blue cost is the only real cost.

Awaken the Ancient** - A three-mana Aura for '{1}{R}{R}{R}' (so effectively a '{4}{R}{R}{R}' investment counting the Mountain it needs) that turns a basic land into a 7/7 with haste. Threatening because your opponent has to keep answering what is technically a land.

Disenchant - Not an Aura, but the most important hate card for the mechanic. '{1}{W}', destroy target artifact or enchantment. It's been answering Auras since Alpha, and variants of it appear in virtually every format.

History

Enchant is one of Magic's original mechanics, present in the game from Alpha (1993). The original Aura cards - Holy Strength, Unholy Strength, Firebreathing - used the "Enchant creature" line to establish what they could attach to, and the template has stayed largely consistent ever since.

For most of Magic's early history, Auras were treated as Enchantments with a subtype implied by their "Enchant" line rather than a formal card supertype. In the comprehensive rules overhaul that accompanied the Ninth Edition (2005) rules update, Aura became an official enchantment subtype, clarifying a lot of rules interactions that had been ambiguous.

The enchant keyword itself was formalised under the keyword ability rules - CR 702.5 - to make the targeting and attachment rules explicit. Before this, the rules around what happened when the enchanted object became illegal mid-stack, or how protection interacted with Auras, were handled inconsistently.

Over the decades, the targets of the enchant line have evolved considerably. Early Magic largely stuck to creatures and lands. Later designs pushed into enchanting other enchantments, artifacts, players (especially with the Curse subtype introduced in Innistrad (2011)), and exotic zones like graveyards. Each expansion of what "Enchant" could point at opened new design space and new strategic possibilities.

The Enchantress archetype - drawing cards by casting enchantments - has been a consistent part of Magic's design DNA since Legends (1994), when the original Verduran Enchantress was printed. The term "Enchantress" is now used informally by R&D to describe the whole category of cards that reward you for casting enchantments, even as the Enchantress creature subtype itself was officially retired.