No matter how you slice it, Magic: The Gathering is a truly vast game. There’s over 30 years of history here, and over 30,000 unique cards to consider. Inevitably, a lot of really interesting stuff is going to fall through the cracks and end up forgotten. That’s exactly what happened with Enchanted Evening, an MTG enchantment from Shadowmoor with a truly unique effect. Now, however, with our return to Lorwyn mere months away, it’s starting to garner some attention.
This newfound spotlight comes courtesy of an Instagram reel by Goblin_grounds, which showcases a truly disgusting combo enabled by the card. Digging deeper, it has plenty more to offer, too. Whether it’s combo shenanigans or wholesome enchantment-based value, this is a card with ample depths to explore.
Enchanted Evening Comes Out Of MTG Retirement
If you haven’t seen Enchanted Evening before, you’re certainly not alone among MTG players. Outside of The List and Secret Lair, the card has only had one proper printing. Said printing came way back in 2008’s Shadowmoor, too, which was long before Magic became the commercial juggernaut it is today.
As card types in Magic go, enchantment is one of the least common. Most cards that interact with them are designed with this in mind, so Enchanted Evening, a card that suddenly makes everything an enchantment, opens several large cans full of worms.
There are a bunch of wild interactions possible with Enchanted Evening, but one in particular has the community talking at the moment: the combo with Aura Thief. In Goblin_grounds’s Instagram reel, they break this particular combo down, but it’s spicy enough that it bears repeating here.
Aura Thief is another fairly obscure card from Urza’s Destiny. In a regular game, this can get you some decent value, but with Enchanted Evening, it’s basically a win condition. Not only will it give you control of every creature, artifact, enchantment, token, etc. in play, but it’ll also grab every land your opponents control as well.
This combo will put your opponents so far behind that you’ll essentially win on the spot. It’s pretty easy to trigger Aura Thief’s effect, too, by using some of Magic’s colorless sacrifice outlets, like Ashnod’s Altar and Phyrexian Altar.
More Tricks Up Its Sleeve
This is a pretty absurd combo, and one that’s flashy enough not to get too many groans from most Commander pods. It’s far from the only powerful MTG combo that Enchanted Evening enables, mind you.
There are quite a few ways to go infinite with this and just one other card. Take Leonin Relic-Warder, for example. This is intended to be a Banishing Light on a creature for artifacts and enchantments, but with Evening out, it can target itself with its own ability. This means it’ll exile itself, then its leaves ability will trigger, returning it to play. You can repeat this as many times as you like to generate infinite enters triggers, allowing for infinite life with cards like Soul Warden, or an instant win with Impact Tremors.
In a similar vein, any card that makes a token when an enchantment enters will make you infinite tokens with Evening in play. There are a few different cards that enable this, including Archon of Sun’s Grace and Ajani’s Chosen, so you can have some redundancy if you want to run this. As a quick word of warning, these aren’t ‘may’ abilities. This means they’ll keep going forever if uninterrupted, so you will need a sacrifice outlet of some kind to eventually turn off the creature tap. Otherwise, the game will end in a draw.
Enchanted Evening also makes it much, much easier to wipe everything in play, including lands, off the table. If you have Threshold active, Cleansing Meditation will destroy everything then bring your permanents back from the graveyard. You can achieve something similar with Calming Verse if you’re in green. As with the Aura Thief combo above, these are pretty much instant wins, though they may not make you particularly popular.
Playing Fair
While the above combos are powerful and exciting, it’s important to remember that Enchanted Evening has plenty of utility in ‘fair’ MTG decks too. When everything’s an enchantment, a lot of cards get a big boost in power level.
Take Sanctum Weaver, for example. This is a pretty solid mana dork in enchantment-heavy decks. With Evening in play, even your lands count towards Weaver’s mana boost. This can easily net you double-digit mana each tap, which is a terrifying advantage by anyone’s standards.
Sterling Grove is another great pairing. Giving all of your other permanents Shroud is a huge deal, forcing your opponents to deal with it before anything else. While most of the traditional Enchantress creatures, like Mesa Enchantress, don’t work with Evening since they trigger on cast, Duskmourn’s Entity Tracker, and Eidolon of Blossoms, give you easy card draw engines.
Enchanted Evening also makes all your enchantment removal much, much better. Suddenly, Aura Shards is capable of taking down lands, and Druid of Purification has a much wider range of targets. Enchantment removal tends to be cheaper than its creature counterpart, and Enchanted Evening lets you leverage that fact to full effect.
No matter how you choose to play it, Enchanted Evening is a card with a lot of facets, all of which glimmer in the right light. It’s a true hidden gem from the original Lorwyn block, and one very unlikely to get a reprint in Lorwyn Eclipsed, even on a Bonus Sheet, due to just how out-there its effect is.
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