Magic: The Gathering – The 14 Best Black Sorceries
By Chris Guest
3. Hymn To Tourach
Two Random Discards For Two Black Mana... What A Deal!
Discarding cards at random might be the most debilitating effect in MTG. While getting cards chosen from your hand to be discarded is hard enough, at least you know what you’re losing as you’re losing it.
With this two-black-mana discard card, you have no idea what cards are being chucked from your hand. Could just be some innocuous lands or could be your best plays for the next two turns – you simply don’t know. This card remains a hugely annoying and powerful play, and it certainly deserves its place in the top three of best black sorceries of all time.
2. Reanimate
One Mana For Any Creature Card In Any Graveyard
While it might not be the first reanimation spell (that would be Alpha’s Animate Dead), this card from 1997’s Tempest set gave the effect its name, so that means it must be immensely powerful. As Chris Farley amusingly cooed in Billy Madison: “That is correct!”
For one black mana, you can grab any creature card in any graveyard and put it onto the battlefield under your control, then lose life equal to its mana value. Usually, you’ll be running a deck primed around this card by putting as many huge threats into your graveyard as quickly as possible so you can Reanimate them and then win the game within a turn or two. However, the ability to also steal a foe’s reanimation target is absolutely unreal. What a card.
1. Yawgmoth's Will
Absolutely Busted And Either Banned Or Restricted In All Formats
The best-ever black sorcery spell is another one that deals with graveyard shenanigans. For only two colorless and one black mana, you can play lands and cast spells from your graveyard for the rest of your turn. While that might not sound as impressive as other cards on this list, it is banned in the Legacy format and restricted in Vintage.
Why? Because in combination with hugely powerful, zero-mana or one-mana spells, this card can potentially end the game on turn one (with a little help from ramp spells and various Moxen). Simply cast as many zero-cost or one-cost spells from your graveyard as quickly as possible, then toss off a storm card such as Brain Freeze or Tendrils of Agony and you win – simple as that.