A Brief History of Auras

Back in early 2015, I was new to Commander, but I knew I loved Naya. My first deck was Mayael, which I've kept together ever since, but, with the help of my friends, I actually built a second Naya deck before branching out into other color combinations. I wanted to do something slightly different than slamming down an army of big monsters. There were only nine options at the time, so I ended up picking...

I would never be the same, really. Quickly turning my commander into an alpha-striking threat with a million keywords was thrilling... for a time. I'd tweak the deck over the years and eventually retire it, but I still loved the playstyle of Auras in a more general sense. There's a true arcane feel to it: magically enhancing your creature in a bevy of ways, be it stats, keywords, or some great effect.

Auras have had an interesting road, without quite the same... roller coaster that Equipment found themselves on for the last twenty years. In spite of, or, perhaps, because of that, Auras have remained less popular than their artifact counterparts. I'd like to dive into the card type and its history and dig up why. Let's begin!

In the Beginning...

Auras have been a part of Magic: The Gathering for as long as the game itself. Alpha itself had 42 Auras, roughly 14% of the set! It being Alpha, of course, these cards were more focused on capturing resonant concepts and providing unique game pieces than on being... good. There are over 300 people still running Phantasmal Terrain, apparently, and I'd like to study them.

The key features of Auras were:

Could be attached to any permanent or player it specified (with the "Enchant X" rules text)
Couldn't be moved or removed from that permanent or player once placed
Went to the graveyard if the permanent it enchanted changed zones

They played in fun spaces with these early years, making things like blessings and curses and strange mind magicks... A lot of blue enchantments that dealt damage... Weird times.

1996: Auras as Combat Tricks

There's a weird cycle in Mirage of unique Auras which could be cast at instant-speed but at the tradeoff of only lasting a turn if so, so they could function as a slow-to-cast permanent upgrade or a surprise temporary boost. Later Auras played with a mix of this, sometimes providing both a permanent boost and a temporary one when the enchantment enters the battlefield, sometimes just a permanent effect that can have strategic value in when you play it.

Decent year for the card type. We've gotten 87 Aura cards with flash, and they're mostly designed for Limited, but that's a great part of the game to be useful to. Three years later, we got more... interesting developments.

1999: Recursive, Enchantments Matter, and Licids...

The Urza's block was mechanically supposed to be referencing enchantments, while the story was about a war over artifacts. (This is, in fact, the joke behind Urza's Saga being an enchantment land that cared about artifacts! It was still mean. Enchantment players are suffering.) There were some enchantment cards of note, but a fun new line of rules text acquired in this time was "When ~ is put into the graveyard from the battlefield, return ~ to its owner's hand." This line of text is especially famous on Rancor, a card that was changed last minute and turned out to be more powerful than expected.

There were two cycles of Auras with this line of text, as a matter of fact, but most of them are... not worth it. The fundamental problem with the recursive text line is what R&D calls a repetitive gameplay issue. It's why they don't like buyback or retrace: knowing the opponent is just going to slap down another slightly beefy creature and cast Rancor again in the next turn cycle makes your Murder feel a little... worthless.

On the other hand, Ancestral Mask didn't care about recurring itself. It was the most impactful Aura in the "enchantments matter" theme of the time, and it still holds a powerful legacy. Giving the creature +2/+2 for every enchantment gets big fast. Encouraging a deck to play more enchantments in this way was unique for the time and provided a great hook to build a deck around.

Finally, Licids. Creatures that become Auras and have an ability to end the effect. There's a direct throughline between Enraging Licid and Rabbit Battery, but hold that thought. In concept, they helped to mitigate the problem of "too many enchantments, not enough creatures and the game never ends," but in execution... well, they're for jank brewers. Licids haven't been seen since. The technology... has thankfully been repurposed.

(Seriously, though, there are 16 articles [including this one] on this website that mention Licids, and ten of those were penned by Michael Celani. Someone needs to give him a medal.)

2005: When Auras Attach!

The original Ravnica: City of Guilds set actually had a minor Aura theming going on, which brought out a new fun line of text that helps with Auras specifically: "Whenever an Aura becomes attached to...". This is highly specific to Auras but does mean that it doesn't have to be reliant on a cast trigger. This line of text has gotten more and more interesting to me with time given the new tools that Auras have. The most recent set, Outlaws of the Thunder Junction, even brought back the line with a little twist: caring about putting the Aura on an opponent's creature!

Also of note: up to this point, most Auras entering the battlefield didn't have an "enters the battlefield" effect unless it was directly tied to what the card was doing (Sleeping Potion taps the creature when it enters in order to keep it tapped) or just a normal cantrip, which many spells in the game were doing. Ravnica had a cycle of common Auras which did exactly that. The normal problem with enter-the-battlefield triggers on an Aura is that, if the creature gets flickered, the Aura falls off. However, there was a clever Aura in the set which could work around that, letting you stack several spell effects onto a single creature and re-use them.

2007: Future Sight

Time Spiral block produced a lot of innovations, not all of which were... worth it. I could discuss every major piece of tech, but it would balloon this article unnecessarily. I'm more interested in the Aura design history that could be relevant going forward. So, to that end, I picked three!

Daybreak Coronet represents a category of Auras which require a hoop before you can cast them but which deliver more power in exchange! I think other interesting restrictions would be fun to play with in a more Aura-focused set. Retether represents a level of powerful spell that Auras need a little more of.

Finally, Emblem of the Warmind. Auras and Enchantress decks have a lot of overlap because there are not a lot of Aura-specific payoffs and there aren't a ton of "utility" effects on Auras. Getting to shave a mana off of Fervor in exchange for a little risk on losing it when the creature dies is an interesting design, and I hope to see just a little more of this.

2009: Color Specificity

Auras never really had the colorless problem that artifacts generally did, but it's still important to cordon some cards off by color identities. Earlier sets had played with this a little, but Shadowmoor really hammered it home. Shout-out to its three most famous Auras!

The first two are part of a ten-card cycle that are maximized by a creature being at least two colors. In some ways, they reward more colors but do reward focus and restraint (at least, if your commander keeps getting removed, you'll be more likely to have a useful target for one of these babies). As for Armored Ascension, it's not the first of its kind to reward mono-color decks, but I wanted to highlight it here as part of this focus on color-based restrictions. I would love to see more designs in the space.

I can't leave behind the Lorwyn block without a brief shout-out to (technically 2008's) Slippery Bogle. Very cheap hexproof creatures would eventually form a staple for Auras decks due to being incredibly hard to remove once they get suited up.

2010: Umbra Armor

I discussed previously that Auras have a card disadvantage problem, and umbra armor was an excellent crack at trying to resolve that issue. Whenever a creature enchanted by an Aura with umbra armor would be destroyed, you instead remove all damage and destroy the Aura, so targeted destroy-based removal spells are no longer a 2-for-1. Nice!

2011: Political Favors

I'd be remiss if I didn't at least briefly touch on the Vow cycle from the original Commander decks! I'm all about some precons, and I've briefly talked about the Vows over here. These cards were a decent first attempt at this, which would be worked on over the years. The fact that these at least give you a reason to enchant your opponents' creatures would eventually open up a new possible deck archetype, which is great for the card type!

2012: Curses

Now for a really political set of Auras that you'll almost never play on yourself: Curses! Originally in Innistrad, Curses have since shown up on Amonkhet and in various Commander products. They represent a cruel magic being placed upon a player, to weaken them or make them some form of target. That last one would prove to be a problem, actually, as the Commander 2013 cycle of Curses would encourage the table to attack that player to gain an advantage, which Gavin Verhey has since realized was a mistake.

Nonetheless, the card type is flavorful and interesting while giving a different avenue for the card type! Very much appreciated.

Shout out to Lynde, Cheerful Tormentor for providing a solid Commander for this particular iteration of the card type!

2014: Bestow

I'd say everyone reading this article undoubtedly remembers the bestow mechanic from Theros, seeing as it only released a couple of years ago. I ripped open so many booster packs from this set! Wait. T...ten... Ten years, you say? Oh... Oh dear.

Ahem.

Theros had an enchantment theme (which could have been more prominent and powerful, but that's a different article) and it also had the Heroic keyword, which triggered when you cast a spell targeting a creature. The natural endpoint was Auras, but there are only so many of those you can put in a set. For the sake of draft, you can't put 42 Auras in a single set. What is this, Alpha? A solution was needed: what if the Aura was itself a creature?

Bestow allowed you to cast a creature as an Aura instead, attaching it to one of the creatures you already control on the battlefield. If the enchanted creature is removed from the battlefield, the Auras fall off and become creatures again, so you don't lose out on cards that way. In the original Theros set, for the record, there were 16 creatures with bestow. There were 15 Auras, meaning a total of 31; 11 fewer than Alpha, weirdly enough.

Bestow would be revisited a little in Commander 2018 but did not come back on our return to Theros back in 2020. It's a good tool, and one I hope to see pulled out again. The idea of an Aura that can go onto the battlefield without you already having a creature in play is a good one worth revisiting, perhaps with a different execution.

2015: Batching with Equipment

It seems crazy to think, but Auras and Equipment weren't actually put together as a nifty little draft archetype until 2018's Dominaria. However, the seeds for this were planted back in Eldritch Moon, with these cards:

Initially mono-white, this batching would branch out to Boros in Dominaria and largely stay there aside from a brief dip into other colors for various Commander decks, like Galea, Kindler of Hope and Dogmeat, Ever Loyal. Much later, modified would take this further by batching Auras with Equipment and +1/+1 counters. Batching allows for cards to be useful in multiple kinds of decks. Any card that cares about modified creatures or a creature becoming modified can go into an Auras-only deck, and I hope to see more batching things like that.

With that, most of the Auras we would see would be normal or just a tiny tweak on an existing spin, until...

2023: Aura Tokens

Wilds of Eldraine pushed the set to change in multiple ways. Instead of focusing on the knightly courts and wilds in equal measure, the courts were broken in favor of the fairytale nature of the set. In addition, Wizards realized it had been very nearly a decade since an enchantment set had cropped up in full force, and a fairytale set would be perfect for that end. To blend those ideas together, they created Role tokens. Roles are Aura tokens that become attached to a creature and, for the most part, give +1/+1 and a minor bonus. (Cursed, Young, and Virtuous are slightly different, with Cursed being the most different as being a negative.) Creatures can only have one Role from a given player at a time; when another is placed, all others from that player get sacrificed.

This really changed how Auras played! They allowed for enchantment sacrifice strategies and played well with lots of different things. The Auras were no longer promoting card disadvantage because it wasn't a whole card you lost. Major overhaul, huge facelift, can't wait to see more in this space.

Three cards, five roles mentioned! Can you name the two not shown without looking it up? Let me know in the comments below!

Enchant Target Conclusion

Whew! That about wraps up the history of Auras. Since their creation, Wizards have put together quite a few new tools in the mystical belt. The folks in Seattle have invented a few ways to mitigate the A/B problem of Aura:creature ratios in your deck, but we could use quite a few more. (Equipment have had three different mechanics which solved this issue.) Certain Auras throughout history (and the new Role tokens) have a sacrifice element to them that's worth investigating for re-use.

Hot take: you know how we're getting colored mana rocks with bonus effects? We should be getting enchant lands in every color that produce an extra mana and do something similar. Give enchantments/Aura decks some neato ramp options that work with the rest of the deck!

The Role tokens especially breathed new life into the card type: the way those in particular play was refreshing and new, something hard to achieve for a card type that's been with the game since the beginning! I hope Wizards can keep up the surprises in the future, but we'll have to wait and see.

Hopefully we get a regular enchantment land before artifacts get their twentieth.

What do you all think? Do you enjoy how Auras play as-is? Would you like a different avenue? Let me know!