By Jeremy Rose
Welcome back to Foxy Gaming’s Best of EDH series! We will be going through the top card, by card type, in each color and colorless when appropriate. We’ll be sticking with mono colored cards for this first series. This is our second entry in the series and it’ll be discussing sorceries. To see our first entry, which discussed non-legendary creatures, click here!
DISCLAIMER: This list is based on Foxy Gaming’s playgroup and the cards we see, run in our decks, and get donked by week in and week out. Our playgroup tends to play in the six to eight range on the power level scale, so keep that in mind as we go through our list. If you and your playgroup see different cards or value some differently than we do, we’d love to hear about it so please leave a comment letting us know what you think!
For our sorceries list, we excluded the card Demonic Tutor. We decided it was too obvious of a pick because of how incredibly good it is and we wanted to keep the conversation a little more fun and interesting.
WHITE: Sevinne’s Reclamation
Many of the best sorceries in white tend to be thought of as sweepers, like Wrath of God, and while that is a strength of white in Commander, we wanted to highlight a card that is severely underplayed for what it does. Sevinne’s Reclamation is a Sun Titan’s ETB effect without the 6/6 body, but it’s also half the cost. With white’s mana producing issues being well known in our format, players should be shifting their focus to include more of the lower cost cards that can replicate effects of more expensive staples. Sevinne’s Reclamation gets back so many good white permanents like Mother of Runes, Land Tax, Grand Abolisher, and our top white creature from our last entry, Aven Mindcensor. In addition, any colorless ramp cards like your Sol Rings and Arcane Signets are easily recurred after they’ve been hit. Assuming you’ve paired white with another color, Sevinne’s Reclamation just gets even better due to the range of targets becoming much wider. And after you’ve done it once, this card has Flashback so you get to run it back and do it again! The versatility of this card put it over the top for us, despite white’s strong selection of sweepers.
BLUE: Treasure Cruise
Cheating mana costs and drawing cards are some of the most powerful things you can do in Magic and Treasure Cruise does both. Ancestral Recall is a blue both one of the Power Nine and banned in Commander, but Treasure Cruise does a pretty darn good impression of it. Resolving this card will also draw you three cards and you will most likely not be paying eight mana for it due to it having Delve. Blue decks are often fairly adept at putting cards in their graveyard, especially instants and sorceries, and Commander is a format that lends itself to longer games meaning more time for the graveyard to be filled. Treasure Cruise is often just a one mana, draw three. Delving away seven cards might seem like a steep cost, but it’s often better to delve away cards you don’t need or can’t recur and just draw three new ones rather than keep them around in your yard without getting any value from them. Even casting this card for two or three mana because you want to keep some cards in the graveyard is still highly valuable. A worse Ancestral Recall is still some amount of Ancestral Recall and so Treasure Cruise gets the nod for blue on this list.
BLACK: Reanimate
There are a lot of really good reanimate effects in black, and it’s one of the reasons the color is so strong. None of those cards are as efficient as the effect’s namesake, Reanimate. A one mana reanimation spell is incredibly strong and doesn’t get much more mana efficient than that, so much so that most other reanimation spells cost significantly more than one mana. Paying life in black is pretty standard, so that shouldn’t be too much of a drawback to recur your heavy hitters, especially if your target creature is Gray Merchant of Asphodel and you get to gain all that life right back and then some. Something that should be highlighted here as well is that Reanimate brings a creature back from ANY graveyard, not just your own. A black deck is likely better equipped to take advantage of their graveyard, but being able to snipe a big beefy green creature or a sweet value creature from your opponents is not something to overlook. Commander games generally take a while and everyone’s graveyard tends to fill up over the course of the game so Reanimate should net plenty of value being able to swipe from four different graveyards. Additionally, the fact that it is one mana means that you get to take advantage of this powerful card really early on and run away with the game. Set up cards like Entomb and Buried Alive, or even some selected discard, really make this card shine. Reanimate is one of the most valuable spells in Magic and works in many different decks, all while only being one mana to cast.
RED: Faithless Looting
Yet another card that his found its way onto a ban list or two, Faithless Looting is one of the most powerful set up cards in the game. Not only is it a draw spell in red, but it also provides a discard outlet for decks interested in filling the graveyard up with value. Faithless Looting is also about as efficient as it gets at only one red mana and enables these setup turns very early on in the game. It gets even better due to this spell having Flashback for the ability to cast this again from your graveyard later on in the game when you’re digging for answers or attempting to close out a game. It’s also super effective at just sculpting hands for cheap and ensuring that your red deck has consistent plays and doesn’t run out of gas, which tends to be a problem for red decks emptying their hands quickly.
GREEN: Green Sun’s Zenith
My personal favorite card on this list, Green Sun’s Zenith is just so good. It can literally be any green creature in your deck for one extra mana. It finds the creature, and puts it onto the battlefield for just one extra mana. I cannot overstate how crazy good that is. This card just does it all. Missed your third land and don’t have a mana dork? Green Sun’s for Llanowar Elves. Trying to set up your long game value engine? Green Sun’s for Seedborn Muse. Have a decent board state but no way to push damage through to win the game? Green Sun’s for Craterhoof Behemoth. This card is good at every stage of the game and its functionality is way beyond that of a normal tutor because it puts the creature directly onto the battlefield for you. Green tends to have the best creatures as it is, which just makes Green Sun’s Zenith a tutor for the best creatures in Magic. If you’re playing a deck with more than just green in it, this card also grabs your multicolored cards that have green in them too. There is not much this card doesn’t do and it gets better every time I play it.
HONORABLE MENTION: Gamble
Gamble is a really interesting card to me and was almost tied for Faithless Looting for the red spot on this list. In my experience, most players that I have seen play Gamble and been upset about it have used it in such a way that sets them up to be upset by it. The best way to play Gamble is to play it as a red version of Entomb, or a tutor that searches for a card and puts it in your graveyard. Gamble has the possibility of being a Demonic Tutor as well, which is also extremely good, but if you are playing Gamble and just hoping that you keep the card you tutored, you are setting yourself up for potential disappointment. Gamble is at its best when it is used to tutor for a card with Flashback or a creature that you can reliably recur later in the game. It does a lot of good work in combo decks as well as reanimator decks, while having the upside of sometimes getting lucky, though not reliably, and tutoring for the answer you needed at the time.
This concludes Foxy Proxys’ list of best sorceries in Commander! What sorceries do you and your playgroup think fit on this list? What sorceries do you think we highly overrated? Let us know in the comment section below and be sure to stay tuned for our next entry in the series!
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Jeremy Rose is a relatively new Magic player, having only started in Battle for Zendikar. When he's not being a filthy, filthy blue player, he enjoys jamming fun games with his friends. He's also a lifelong martial artist and a professionally employed teacher. He sometimes paints minis adequately.
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