The 38 Best Big Instants and Sorceries in Magic Ranked

Last updated on April 14, 2026

Breach the Multiverse | Illustration by Liiga Smilshkalne

Commander has a reputation for big, bombastic battlecruisers—massive creatures like Eldrazi and Koma, Cosmos Serpent that dominate the game and thrive in the slow, ramp-centric environment of Magic's most popular format.

But big instants and sorceries deserve love too. They might not stick around on the battlefield, but they're just as impactful and game-warping, and even have some unique payoffs Koma couldn't dream of. Let's dig into it!

What Are Big Instants and Sorceries in MTG?

Primevals' Glorious Rebirth | Illustration by Noah Bradley

Big instants and sorceries are cards with the requisite types with a mana value of 7 or more mana. This ranking doesn't include X spells, but spells with cost reduction mechanics like delve are viable. These were ranked with Commander in mind.

Big instants and sorceries exist in all colors with a range of effects to match. What they have in common are powerful abilities to justify the high cost. These are great ways to turn the screws and finish off your opponents, especially when you can copy them.

#38. Death Begets Life

Board wipes get pretty big and impactful, and Death Begets Life is a great example of that. It costs more than your average Wrath of God but hits an additional permanent type, and it often draws a ton of cards with three other players' worth of board to destroy.

#37. Enduring Ideal

Enduring Ideal trends towards meme territory, but some memes deserve attention. An Enduring Ideal deck wants to ramp out the namesake card, then jam lock pieces like Humility and Overwhelming Splendor to prevent your opponents from winning.

#36. Ezuri's Predation

Board wipes are pretty far from green's domain, but Ezuri's Predation takes a crack at it. You won't kill any battlecruisers, but it handles plenty of chaff. It gets better the wider your opponents play; this would be a nightmare for Anim Pakal, Thousandth Moon, for example.

#35. Primal Surge

Primal Surge has to be the only non-permanent card in your deck. That's a steep deckbuilding restriction, but flipping your entire deck onto the table makes up for it. You should probably leave a few cards in your library just to avoid decking out.

#34. Genesis Ultimatum

Genesis Ultimatum also requires a significant permanent count, but it's far less restrictive, and it plays nicely with blue topdeck manipulation like Brainstorm to set up your top five.

#33. Subjugate the Hobbits

Subjugate the Hobbits is more of a meta call than these other big instants and sorceries. If your pod frequently plays small creature decks with commanders like Tymna the Weaver and Arabella, Abandoned Doll, this can be a back-breaking finisher. But if you live in a battlecruiser meta, you might be better off with something else.

#32. Restoration Seminar

Restoration Seminar is one of the most powerful paradigm spells because you get free recursion on some of your most useful permanents. This is hard to stop if you have any sort of controlling artifacts, enchantments or creatures to return.

#31. Rise of the Eldrazi

The high, sort of color-intensive cost means Rise of the Eldrazi is cheated out more often than not, but it's worth jumping through some hoops to get the cast triggers of the original Eldrazi titans.

#30. Primevals' Glorious Rebirth

Primevals' Glorious Rebirth has a fairly steep deckbuilding cost, as you need a high concentration of legendary creatures to cast it and maximize the effect. If you meet those conditions, this can single-handedly win the game.

#29. Rise of the Dark Realms

Rise of the Dark Realms is black's answer to Insurrection, a massive sorcery that potentially ends the game if you resolve it. It's unfortunately vulnerable to board wipes, but it does a lot. It pairs nicely with creaturefall effects like Impact Tremors and The Great Henge since you toss so much stuff into play.

#28. Insurrection

Insurrection liberates opposing board states and gives you a huge combat step. This is the perfect Bracket 2-3 card: It’s a big, splashy finisher that takes advantage of sprawling board states and ends the game on an epic note.

#27. Sea Gate Restoration / Sea Gate, Reborn

Modal double-faced cards are peak Magic design, and they're all at least a little playable—but Sea Gate Restoration might be the best MDFC that qualifies as “big”. Doubling your hand provides all the resources needed to win the game, all at the low cost of replacing an Island in your mana base.

#26. Star of Extinction

True “destroy all creature” board wipes are typically the domain of black and white, while red's sweepers deal damage to each creature. Star of Extinction blurs the line between the two by dealing a whooping 20 damage to each creature. Besides being an effective board wipe, you can use it as a combo piece with Stuffy Doll effects.

#25. Temporal Mastery

Any deck with considerable topdeck manipulation would be happy to run Temporal Mastery for a crack at a Time Walk effect. Extra turns are so powerful that even paying the full 7 mana isn't terrible.

#24. Kindred Summons

Kindred Summons works best in typal decks that go wide. Elves are the obvious choice, but goblins and humans are also great candidates to maximize this super-charged Collected Company.

#23. Kindred Dominance

Kindred Dominance knocks some mana off Plague Wind in exchange for a deckbuilding restriction to typal decks. You can use it to stall your opponents out or as a finisher to wipe away any blockers that prevent you from attacking for victory.

#22. Magma Opus

Magma Opus’s discard ability makes it exceptional. It doesn't look like much, but discarding this and creating a Treasure sets up an early Mizzix's Mastery or Torrential Gearhulk to recast it—a great combo if your Cube wants to spice up its Izzet selections ().

#21. Bloodline Bidding

The best thing Bloodline Bidding has going for it is convoke to quickly bring this cards cost down exceedingly low for such a powerful mass reanimation effect.

#20. Emergent Ultimatum

Emergent Ultimatum has a reputation as a powerful combo card that often wins the turn you resolve it; rather like Intuition, using this at its peak requires careful deckbuilding to assemble incredibly powerful packages.

#19. Hour of Reckoning

You need to be a token deck to leverage Hour of Reckoning, but that's fine. Convoke makes it incredible because you can reduce the cost enough to rebuild your board state the moment the sweeper resolves.

#18. Temporal Trespass

Temporal Trespass plays incredibly well with copy effects like Fork and Dualcaster Mage since it often costs a mere 3 mana, so it’s easy to sequence multiple spells in a turn.

#17. The Great Aurora + Warp World

The Great Aurora and Warp World contort the game into an unrecognizable state. Since they don't distinguish between token and nontoken permanents, the easiest way to game these cards is to flood the board with Clues, Food, Treasure, and any other easily-made tokens so you see far more cards than your opponents.

#16. Dance with Calamity

Dance with Calamity has a steep deckbuilding restriction since you can't play other expensive spells, but casting a stack of cards more than makes up for it. This card excels with cast-from-exile synergies like Faldorn, Dread Wolf Herald and Passionate Archaeologist.

#15. All Is Dust

All Is Dust is one of the few colorless payoffs in the game, and it does a ton of work to help Commander's worst mono-colored decks out. As a colorless board wipe, it gives green and blue access to a true board wipe, which they don't often get.

#14. Moment of Reckoning

Knock down the four biggest problems, or reanimate your combo pieces all at once? Moment of Reckoning severely alters the board state no matter what.

#13. Decree of Pain

Decree of Pain thrives off its flexibility. The full-price board wipe feels good since it refills your hand while it puts the rest of the table behind on resources, and the cycling ability sweeps away small value creatures. That modality makes it hold up pretty well at lower Commander Brackets.

#12. Afterlife from the Loam

Single-target reanimation is mediocre in Commander since most decks can power out something quickly, but mass reanimation scales well. Afterlife from the Loam poses a serious threat for your opponents for as little as . I'm happy to pay 4 or 5 mana for this effect, so getting it for 3 feels awesome when it works out.

#11. Approach of the Second Sun

Approach of the Second Sun is one of Commander's simplest alternate win conditions. It isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds to cast it twice since Commander encourages heavy ramping, and cards like Dig Through Time and Memory Deluge rip through your top seven cards to find it again.

#10. Breach the Multiverse

Breach the Multiverse looks like Afterlife from the Loam, with a notable difference: This one fuels the graveyard for you. Afterlife requires the means to stock the graveyard before it works, while Breach simply delivers four killer threats. It often delivers far more than 7 mana's worth of threats into play.

#9. Aminatou's Augury

Aminatou's Augury is a spectacular spell that rewards you for stocking your deck with big, explosive plays of many card types. You should keep this card in mind while deckbuilding to ensure you have diverse card types—this would be rather underwhelming in a deck with 50 creatures, for example—but it's just an excellent, explosive card.

#8. Last March of the Ents

Last March of the Ents often draws as many cards on its own as a blue deck's draw engine, which would be valuable in its own right. But you get to just… dump your hand into play. If you have a haste enabler like Concordant Crossroads, that can be game-winning.

#7. Blasphemous Act

Blasphemous Act is another red wrath that deals so much damage to each creature it might as well say “destroy all creatures”, but it's far more useful than Star of Extinction due to its cost reduction. Any board wipe that costs little to no mana does excellent work because you can sweep the board then rebuild straight away.

#6. Peer into the Abyss

Peer into the Abyss can one-shot your opponents by pairing it with something like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse or Bloodletter of Aclazotz, or target yourself to set up a game-winning combo turn. However you use it, it often ends up as a win.

#5. Nexus of Fate

Nexus of Fate cracked Standard back in its day. It isn't quite as powerful in Commander because you can't chain it as easily, but an instant-speed extra turn spell is wildly powerful. You can hold up your countermagic, then resolve this prior to your turn to take two turns with full mana, or you can use it to disrupt the table's turn order to respond to a sudden shift in the power dynamic.

#4. Time Stretch

Straight up two extra turns and no exile clause makes Time Stretch supremely good, and this Odyssey card never had Commander in mind when it first released.

#3. Expropriate

Expropriate might be the cruelest card you can resolve in Commander. It's certainly unpopular, and a member of the Game Changers list. This might be the best expensive spell on the list to copy. If you find yourself playing against it, remember: Always give your opponents some permanents. If you give a player three or four extra turns, they will win.

#2. Treasure Cruise

Do you know how broken Ancestral Recall is? It's so broken that a sorcery-speed version that requires seven cards in your graveyard still got banned in multiple formats.

Treasure Cruise isn't fair because of how easily you can enable delve. Just play some cheap removal, crack a fetch land or two, and you have five cards in the graveyard before you realize it.

#1. Dig Through Time

The delve mechanic has a host of broken cards associated with it, and Dig Through Time tops the list. It draws fewer cards than Treasure Cruise, but getting the best two cards of seven is far stronger than three random cards. Virtually every blue deck should find room for this.

Best Big Instant and Sorcery Payoffs and Enablers

Since these are expensive spells, cards that care about casting large spells are great payoffs. Up the Beanstalk, Gandalf, Westward Voyager, and Thunderous Snapper are a few good options here.

Some spellslinger payoffs care about the size of your slung spells as well; Deekah, Fractal Theorist and Shark Typhoon get much stronger when your spells cost 7 or more.

Copy effects are also incredible with these big, impactful spells. Cards like Fork and Dualcaster Mage pair nicely with any of these cards.

Remember, those big spells are the payoff so here are a few of the best enablers beyond ramp and dorks. Omniscience is the big one that is a huge spell of it's own and cost replacers like Lorehold, the Historian can enable lots of big time plays. Aside from those killer synergies you can chop the cost down with cost reducers like Case of the Ransacked Lab, Stormcatch Mentor, Primal Amulet, Archmage of Runes, Urza's Filter, and Arcane Melee.

What Are the Best Commanders for Expensive Instants and Sorceries?

The best commanders for expensive instants and sorceries fall into two categories: They either copy the big spells or make casting them easier. These spells are so impactful on their own that copying them likely wins the game.

Anhelo, the Painter and Alania, Divergent Storm are excellent options to copy your spells, while the cost reduction and general mana generation from Elminster and Eluge, the Shoreless Sea make it easier to cast something like Nexus of Fate.

Try to avoid commanders that reward you for casting multiple instants and sorceries in a turn. Talrand, Sky Summoner and Niv-Mizzet, Parun are extremely powerful, but they want you to cast three or four spells with 7 mana, not one. While they probably wouldn't be bad, they’d be underwhelming.

What Are the Best Ways to Cheat Out Big Instants and Sorceries?

These big instants and sorceries are locked behind their high mana costs and do best when you cheat them out early. The first place to look, as underwhelming as it might be, is ramp. Churning out mana rocks or using cost reducers like Mizzix of the Izmagnus and Elminster make it much easier to cast these.

You can also use cards that give them alternate costs. With a little topdeck manipulation, Bolas's Citadel goes pretty far. Fist of Suns and Jodah, Archmage Eternal reduce the cost of these spells to , which is especially useful with extremely color-intensive cards like Rise of the Eldrazi.

Once these cards are in the graveyard, either because you discarded them or resolved them, you can start to reach for cards like Mizzix's Mastery, Torrential Gearhulk, and Arcane Bombardment to cast them from the graveyard at a greatly reduced cost.

Of course, don't over look simple cards that cast spells for free, like Dream Halls, Omniscience, and One with the Multiverse.

Wrap Up

The Great Aurora | Illustration by Sam Burley

Battlecruisers might be the darling of EDH, but that doesn't mean our instants and sorceries have to be small cantrips and removal spells. The best big instants and sorceries are often game-warping, giving you a strong edge in any game they resolve.

Which big instants and sorceries are your favorite? Do you run any of these in your decks? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!