Despite often being overlooked by their instant-speed counterparts, sorceries play a crucial role in MTG. While playing them during your turn is quite restrictive compared to instants, sorceries also have some of the most powerful effects in MTG. With the hope of giving them even more recognition, we’ve set out to highlight our picks for the best MTG sorceries ever printed.
Honorable Mention | Contract from Below
From a pure power level standpoint, Contract from Below has an argument as the best card ever printed. A one-sided Wheel of Fortune for a single mana is simply ridiculous, especially for decks that are built to empty their hands.
The problem is that this card, along with all other ante-referencing designs, have been officially banned from sanctioned play. Given the horrendous play experience of literally losing ownership of your cards following lost games, ridding the mechanic from all official formats was an easy decision. Despite this, thanks to its sheer power, creating a best sorceries list without Contract from Below just felt wrong.
7 | Timetwister / Wheel of Fortune
Among MTG’s various extremely abusable wheel effects, Timetwister and Wheel of Fortune are the absolute best. The key to maximizing these tools is to break the symmetry, and there are many methods that work.
In Vintage, the simplest way to pull ahead is to empty your hand before your opponent by playing all of your Moxen. Then, once all of your fast mana is in play, you can refuel back to seven, while your opponent gets nothing out of it. Many Dimir Lurrus decks also utilize the combo of Timetwister and Orcish Bowmasters, dealing waves of damage and creating a massive board presence.
This idea of pairing Timetwister and Wheel with “punisher” cards like Nekusar, the Mindrazer deck also extends to Commander. To be particularly nasty Narset, Parter of Veils can essentially force an opponent to discard their entire hand with a wheel effect. If that weren’t enough, traditional Storm Commander decks with lots of Rituals make great use of the mass card draw, often winning the game outright.
While these cards do remain legal in Commander, their Storm-bolstering potential did earn them a Legacy ban and a Vintage restriction. With this in mind, Timetwister and Wheel of Fortune are easily some of the best sorceries in MTG.
6 | Demonic Tutor
While there have been many tutors printed over the years, the sheer efficiency and flexibility of Demonic Tutor is unmatched. In Vintage, having extra virtual copies of powerhouses like Ancestral Recall is incredible. At the same time, this sorcery adds tons of consistency to combo decks like Doomsday and Tinker that are centered around a few specific cards. Considering this, its no wonder Demonic Tutor is restricted in Vintage and banned in Legacy.
Besides its Constructed impact, Demonic Tutor card also shows up in over 900,000 Commander decks according to EDHREC! While its best in combo decks, Commander’s Singleton nature means that Demonic Tutor increases the consistency of every black deck. Like all of MTG’s best tutors, this means that Demonic Tutor is unsurprisingly on the Game Changer list, and for good reason.
5 | Yawgmoth’s Will
When it comes to combo finishers, few are more reliable than Yawgmoth’s Will. Essentially allowing your graveyard to function as a second hand, cards like Dark Ritual can be used to build up to critical mass. From there, Yawgmoth’s Will makes it trivial to build up Storm off, enabling an easy win with Brain Freeze or Tendrils of Agony.
Given that Yawgmoth’s Will can even recast tutors to find your win condition, this sorcery is literally the perfect card for Storm. It rightfully earned a Legacy ban and a Vintage restriction, but it continues to make an impact in the cEDH sphere in Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh and Silas Renn, Seeker Adept Partner shells. With this in mind, Yawgmoth’s Will is easily one of the best sorceries of all time.
4 | Balance
Don’t let this card’s name fool you; it is anything but balanced! Even though this sorcery creates symmetry when it comes to lands, creatures, and cards in hand, it does not affect artifacts or Planeswalkers in any capacity. This makes Balance a devastating build-around for decks like Vintage Tinker that can get on board quickly and use Balance to strip the opponent of tons of resources.
After you build out a board of artifacts or Planeswalkers, you can even pair Balance with land-sacrificing effects like Zuran Orb to build your own game-winning Armageddon. The broken interactions are limitless, hence why Balance needed to be banned in Commander and Legacy.
3 | Tinker
Unlike most tutor effects, Tinker enables you to put your tutor target directly into play, potentially saving a huge amount of mana. The cost is that you need an artifact to sacrifice, but this just isn’t a big ask at all. Thanks to this, Tinker remains a typical build-around, in Vintage, despite being restricted. The upside of converting a Mox into Bolas’s Citadel or finding the Time Vault and Manifold Key combo is through the roof.
Even in formats with less free sources of mana, however, there’s still plenty of cheap fodder like Baubles and Chromatic Star to go around. Given Tinker’s minimal setup cost and efficiency as a tutor, it’s well-deserving of a Legacy and Commander ban. Tinker even played a pivotal role tutoring Memory Jar in Grim Jar, arguably the most broken Standard deck of all time! There’s never been a time where this card wasn’t broken, making it an easy top three inclusion.
2 | Channel
As we’ve seen with mechanics like Phyrexian mana, being able to convert life points into mana is absurdly broken. Channel takes this idea to the extreme, letting you pay any amount of life to net that much mana to spend as you choose. Simply pairing this sorcery with a massive colorless bomb like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn typically wins the game on the spot.
Given how cheap Channel is to cast, it truly creates some of the most miserable gameplay possible, forcing games to end one way or another super early. Fortunately, Channel remains banned in EDH and Legacy, and its restriction in Vintage has essentially made it a non-factor. Good riddance!
1 | Time Walk
To the shock of no one, Time Walk is still our pick for the best sorcery of all time. Printed back in Alpha before Wizards had a good sense of power balance, Time Walk is way too efficient for the effect it provides.
Thanks to cards that let you recast it, like Underworld Breach and the newly printed Bilbo, Thief in the Night, it isn’t hard to chain extra turns together. That said, even using Time Walk just to get enable a single extra combat step is usually good enough to win the game.
With this in mind, Time Walk is essentially an auto-include in all blue decks in Vintage. If it weren’t for its ban in Legacy and Commander, the same would hold true there. Time Walk’s ubiquitousness made it an obvious choice for the top spot.
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