The 26 Best Black Cantrips in Magic Ranked

Last updated on March 12, 2026

Mephitic Draught | Illustration by Lauren K. Cannon

Good Magic decks share a few elements. They have a concise win condition, a solid game plan, and good removal. But all those factors rely on one last pillar: card draw. If you can't keep the cards flowing, you risk losing tempo and falling prey to variance's uncaring grasp.

Cantrips keep cards flowing. Even though they don't generate raw card advantage, they smooth out your draws and let you see enough cards to overwhelm your opponents.

What Are Black Cantrips in MTG?

Resentful Revelation | Illustration by Justyna Dura

Black cantrips are cards with a black color identity that replace themselves, either by drawing a card or putting a card into your hand via other means. Black cantrips commonly draw cards, return creatures from your graveyard to your hand (colloquially known as Raise Dead effects), or let you look at a number of cards from the top of your library, then put one into your hand. As long as resolving the spell in question leaves you card-neutral, it qualifies.

The best black cantrips are either cheap or offer value beyond the cantrip itself. These cards see play in a variety of formats, though my focus is on Commander and Cube.

#26. Call to the Netherworld

Call to the Netherworld wins on efficiency; you can't get much cheaper than , yet the madness cost manages it. I wouldn't play this without a madness theme or at least significant discard outlets, but it's a cute card in the right deck.

#25. Render Inert

Render Inert defines a situational card. You could use it to get the full value of Overlords and battles right away, or as a devastating answer to planeswalkers.

#24. Annihilate

Modern Magic moves so fast that Annihilate is often too slow for competitive play, but it's an excellent removal spell for lower-powered Pauper and Peasant cubes, or maybe a very niche Cube that only uses old Magic cards.

#23. Foulmire Knight

Foulmire Knight cantrips via its adventure, Profane Insight. The adventure is a fine addition to the already-reasonable 1/1 deathtoucher, even if this creature is unlikely to see play outside of Peasant Cubes.

#22. Forever Young

Forever Young works like a Raise Dead because you return any targeted creatures to your library before you draw your card, but it also cycles on its own. The charm comes from pairing it with cards like Syr Konrad, the Grim with abilities that care about cards leaving your graveyard.

#21. Lithoform Blight

Lithoform Blight provides black with a clean answer to threatening lands like Tron lands or Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. It often stays in the sideboard, but a 2-mana cantrip is a reasonable inclusion for your Commander deck if your friends love lands.

#20. Vault Plunderer + Phyrexian Rager + Blade Juggler

Phyrexian Rager is the OG black cantrip, a powerful creature that often scores the top spot among a Limited set's black commons. It's a great flicker target, and a must-have in any Pauper cube. Vault Plunderer and Blade Juggler riff on this idea, and they’re just as handy.

#19. Rune of Mortality

Rune of Mortality is a fine card because it can enchant lands, so you can always cycle it. To get the most from the rune, pair it with equipment that give first strike or trample like Ace's Baseball Bat or Loxodon Warhammer.

#18. Eerie Gravestone

Raise Dead effects that mill before they return a creature are deceptively powerful, even when they’re restrictive like Eerie Gravestone. In the right deck, it’s almost worth 2 mana just to mill four cards.

#17. Slay + Execute

Slay and Execute are immensely niche since they only kill creatures of specific colors, but the two-for-one they offer makes them appealing if you know that one player who never abandons white or green.

#16. Bladebrand

Bladebrand has a host of uses. You can pair it with a pinger like Goblin Sharpshooter to blast through an opposing board or make a creature with first strike or menace far more threatening. Even something as simple as a double block becomes disastrous when Bladebrand hits the stack.

#15. Dredge

At a glance, Dredge looks worse than Nighthaze since you have to give up another permanent, and I’d agree in any other color. But in black, Dredge becomes a sly synergy piece that triggers your Blood Artist or Midnight Reaper, and it has a moderate edge over Village Rites as it can sacrifice a land.

#14. Nighthaze + Aphotic Wisps

Nighthaze and Aphotic Wisps are simple cantrips that only need a player—not even you—to control a creature. They're most interesting in Voltron strategies that need evasion, and Wisps has the upside that it makes an opponent's creature unblockable for political purposes.

#13. Dark Dabbling

Dark Dabbling costs too much to just run as a cantrip, but its regenerate ability is fascinating, especially with spell mastery. Black protection spells are often single-target effects that resurrect a dead creature, like Malakir Rebirth. Team-wide protection such as this is rare enough to make Dark Dabbling noteworthy.

#12. Gravedigger + Graveshifter

Gravedigger is one of black's most iconic cards, worthy of parodying in Graveshifter. These two are excellent cantrips because black cares deeply about creatures. You can loop Gravediggers in combat to stall a game, copy them or flicker them to construct a different engine, or enjoy the value of a creature that redraws your best threat.

#11. Carrion Cruiser

Carrion Cruiser does Gravedigger dirty because it's just better. Not strictly better, of course; this isn't a creature. But it's cheaper and it mills cards, and it doesn't target the creature you bring back, which foils graveyard hate like Ghost Vacuum. All those little details make this the better card, even if it blocks worse.

#10. Street Wraith

Street Wraith excels because its cantrip costs no mana and isn't cast. Paying life to cycle it often becomes a boon, as Modern Death's Shadow decks demonstrated. If you need to lose life or get a creature in the graveyard or trigger that Monument to Endurance, you can't do much better than this.

#9. Callous Bloodmage

Callous Bloodmage doesn't have to cantrip, but it often does. Though it has a stat line similar to Phyrexian Rager and friends, the added utility makes it far better.

#8. Emergency Weld

Emergency Weld does a bit of everything for black decks. It recurs a creature or artifact (which becomes increasingly important as sacrifice outlets interact with artifacts or creatures), provides a token as sacrifice fodder, and works with spellslinger cards like Professor Onyx and Kess, Dissident Mage. It might not be the flashiest card in your deck, but it's rarely the worst.

#7. Resentful Revelation

There are many cantrips similar to Resentful Revelation, like Commune with Evil, but this is the best by far. It's a great self-mill enabler, but it works as a payoff since milling a card with flashback basically draws a card.

#6. Dusk Legion Zealot + Clattering Augur

The difference between Dusk Legion Zealot and Clattering Augur’s mana values of 2 compared to Phyrexian Rager‘s 3 is significant. It's easy to double-spell with these, they feel better to sacrifice to a Deadly Dispute, and they just hit the table faster.

#5. Cremate

Cantrips are rarely flashy. They're the producers behind the scenes that keep everything running on time, and Cremate is a perfect example. It’s basically free to run it in your deck; you won't notice cycling it for 1 mana. But every now and again, it saves you from a disastrous reanimation spell or keeps Kroxa from escaping, and you'll be glad you brought it along.

#4. Mephitic Draught

Ichor Wellspring is a powerful card, even when it costs you 2 life along the way. Mephitic Draught earns its place because of a subtle change to black's cards: Wizards keeps printing sacrifice outlets that sacrifice artifacts instead of just creatures. As a result, a cheap artifact with a good enters trigger and a good death trigger becomes valuable grist for the mill.

#3. Cling to Dust

Cling to Dust works as an engine that obliterates your opponents' hopes of using the graveyard while it pads your life total. It does an incredible amount of work for 1 mana, especially since it comes back again and again.

#2. Archon of Cruelty

What Archon of Cruelty loses in efficiency, it makes up for in sheer power. This is one of black's best bombs, frequently the first choice of players who want to reanimate or otherwise cheat something impactful into play. The cantrip is arguably the least of its abilities, but it makes the archon incredibly hard to keep up with; between drawing you a card and making your opponent sacrifice and discard a card, this is a four-for-one on ETB alone. Your opponent might as well give up when you attack with it.

#1. Overlord of the Balemurk

Overlord of the Balemurk manages to be both a cheap early play and a mid-game bomb thanks to impending. This is easily the strongest of the Overlords for Commander due to its costs. to mill four and get a creature from them into your hand is a perfectly playable spell in its own right. Tack on the inevitable threat and the late-game utility, and you have one of the best black creatures printed in recent memory.

Best Black Cantrip Payoffs

While a cantrip is a reward in its own right, you can do more with these cards. The simplest payoff are effects that reward you for card draw, like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse or Psychosis Crawler.

Since many of these cards are instants and sorceries, cards that care about them like Sedgemoor Witch and Extus, Oriq Overlord reward you for casting them. Cantrip creatures can be flickered with Ghostly Flicker, copied with Double Major, or combined with a Malakir Rebirth effect and a sacrifice outlet to wring the most value from them.

Cantrips commonly facilitate storm strategies, which cast them early to sculpt the perfect hand then reuse them with Yawgmoth's Will or Past in Flames to build their storm count and find that Tendrils of Agony.

As for the cantrips that self-mill or mimic Raise Dead effects, black has a variety of graveyard synergies at your disposal. You can fill the graveyard to help escape Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger or delve Tasigur, the Golden Fang, or remove cards from the graveyard for Teval, the Balanced Scale and Teval's Judgment.

Wrap Up

Dark Dabbling | Illustration by Bastien L. Deharme

Black's cantrips aren't as powerful as blue's cantrips, but they have many uses and a surprising amount of synergistic depth if you take the time to look at how they interact with the rest of your deck. Whether you want to mill yourself or access simple card draw, there's a black cantrip for you!

What's your favorite black cantrip? How do you work card draw into your deck's theme? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!