Last updated on April 10, 2026
Cyclonic Rift (Double Masters) | Illustration by Chuck Lukacs
Blue is perhaps the worst color at removal, whether targeted removal or board wipes. Hey, you can’t be good at everything. Leave some pie for the other colors, hm?
It feels like bad news if you’re building a mono-blue EDH deck and are looking for something besides the Cyclonic Rift that your LGS or playgroup has just banned. But there is hope.
Let’s dive deep into blue board control!
What Are Blue Board Wipes in Magic?
Crush of Tentacles | Illustration by Jama Jurabaev
Blue doesn’t generally have destruction and exile effects the way you see in most colors’ board wipes. The few spells that do that tend to replace the creatures with tokens, which is a definite step down from Day of Judgment or Shadows' Verdict type of effects. You could say blue deals in board control instead of wipes.
Blue is best at temporarily wiping the board through returning creatures to hand or phasing them out. Those are clearly more tempo in nature than something like red's best board wipe, Blasphemous Act, but it can have the same effect as a board wipe on the outcome of the game. Blue board wipes are kind of temporary at best against go-wide or aggro strategies.
Blue’s approach to board wipes has some hidden benefits. Imagine you’re playing Talrand, Sky Summoner, still one of the most popular mono-blue commanders. You don’t really want to wipe your drakes off the board but you’d love to lock down an opponent (or all opponents!) so that your drakes can swing in freely. Blue has more one-sided board wipes than any other color when put in that perspective.
Note that blue has quite a few mass tap-down effects, cards like Reality Spasm and Blustersquall, but these don't actually remove creatures from the battlefield or stop utility creatures from working, so they've been excluded from the sweeper category.
In an increasing aristocrats Commander world, sometimes your opponent(s) might want a destructive board wipe to start stacking up The Meathook Massacre triggers. Blue can lock down the board without generating any pesky triggers like that.
#41 Siren’s Call
Siren's Call is a destructive board wipe for 1 mana. It hits only one opponent, but it’s still useful. The trouble is that you need to pair it with something like No Mercy to seal the deal. That’s janky, but it’s good to know it exists if you’re playing in this space of effects.
#40. Perplexing Test
There are lots of times Perplexing Test allows your Drake tokens to have the last laugh or your Voltron commander to sweep aside a table of tokens. There’ll usually be a mix of things out there, and Perplexing Test just feels frustrating. It’s still worth building around.
#39. Thousand Winds
This seems like a gotcha. An opponent attacks and bam! Flip Thousand Winds and got ‘em! Your opponents also play Magic, so they know there’s rarely a morph card in a predominantly blue deck that’s not this or Willbender. They’ll take steps.
I don’t know if this is worth it as a regular 6-drop, even in a blink deck.
#38. Hurkyl’s Final Meditation
Seven mana to bounce everything or 10 mana to staple on a Time Stop during someone else’s turn. Hurkyl's Final Meditation is expensive no matter which way you cut it, but mass bounce that skips over someone’s turn forces them to discard most of the cards they picked up, so there’s blowout potential here.
#37. Distorting Wake
You can bounce three things for 6 mana. Distorting Wake is unplayable from that perspective. This can give you a mass bounce of everything but your stuff if you have a deck that makes a lot of mana. That’s nice, but it’s still a lot of mana.
#36. Zimone’s Hypothesis
Zimone's Hypothesis is neat, though I’m not sure what kind of deck really wants it outside the Jump Scare! Commander precon, since that deck floods the board with 2-power manifests. If nothing else, you always get to modulate one of your creatures as this resolves, so you’ll always be left with your most important creature in play.
#35. Crush of Tentacles
This is okay for a mass bounce. If you’re playing Two-Headed Giant, the surge cost and added effect of Crush of Tentacles is wacky.
#34. Desynchronization
Desynchronization reads like a powerful blue instant, but I’ve played with Urza's Ruinous Blast enough to temper my expectations. So many cards fall into the “historic” bucket that this’ll leave much of the field intact, though it’s cheap enough that you can build around it and hope for the right match-ups.
#33. Aetherize
Bouncing a side swinging at you with Aetherize is good. It used to be better than some later entries, but I almost prefer tapping down to bouncing in an age of power-creeping ETBs.
#32. Wave Goodbye
You don’t normally want too many board wipes in your +1/+1 counter decks, since they undo most of the work you’ve been putting into growing your creatures, but sweepers like Damning Verdict in white and Wave Goodbye in blue get around that. This blue sorcery has the potential to be a one-sided board wipe, though it’ll fail to tag any opposing creatures that happen to have +1/+1 counters on them.
#31. Wash Out
Wash Out is sneaky good. In a local meta it could be the best card on this list. Everyone plays green ramp, huh?
#30. Consuming Tide
Consuming Tide leaves everyone their best thing, but it may be worth it at 4 mana. You might even draw a few cards once the water settles.
#29. Faerie Slumber Party
As long as you can nab at least one creature from each opponent, Faerie Slumber Party should reset the board and leave you up six 1/1 flying Faerie tokens. They can’t block, and this sorcery gets worse the more opponents die off, but it seems like a mainstay of faerie typal decks.
#28. Curse of the Swine
I get less and less excited about Curse of the Swine and have started dropping it from decks. It exiles the targets and replaces them with nerfed tokens. That’s decent against decks with creature synergies (read: lots of decks).
You need the mana to pay for it, though I’m sure you can think of something better to do with 30 spare mana than this. It’s legit if used as a 3-drop to exile a problem creature, though.
#27. The Phasing of Zhalfir
I still haven’t figured out how to use the first two chapters effectively, and The Phasing of Zhalfir doesn’t do much good against most token decks. The third chapter actually destroys things in blue, which is noteworthy for this. It doesn’t exile like Curse of the Swine, but it’s cheap to cast compared to the Curse.
#26. Illithid Harvester
Illithid Harvester has a tap-down effect for an adventure, but the ETB that turns creatures into 2/2s is close enough to our previous entries that this still qualifies as pseudo-board wipe territory. Throw in Ixidron while we're at it.
#25. River’s Rebuke
River's Rebuke is for the blue player with a vendetta against exactly one opponent. You’d pretty much always pay the extra mana to make this Cyclonic Rift instead, but Rebuke’s also a whopping $0.30 by comparison. It’s especially great if one of your opponents is a clear archenemy, putting them way behind the other remaining players. Just don’t get hit by Deflecting Swat!
#24. Cresting Mosasaurus + Cyclone Summoner
Here we’ve got a duo of expensive creatures that bounce all but their own kin. Cresting Mosasaurus has emerge to make itself cheaper and wipes away every creature but dinosaurs, whereas Cyclone Summoner hits all non-land permanents and extends an olive branch to giants and wizards. Easy includes in the typal decks that support them, and not of much use anywhere else. I suppose Mosasaurus could be a cheap sweeper in decks with enough sacrifice fodder.
#23. Raise the Palisade
Raise the Palisade is to blue typal decks what Kindred Dominance is to black ones, at a much more manageable cost, too. Merfolk, faeries, homarids, you name it—if your deck is built around a blue-forward creature type, you should consider this blue card.
#22. March of Swirling Mist
Assuming you have lots of mana or are running Hinata, Dawn-Crowned, March of Swirling Mist can really create havoc. If you phase out opposing attackers they don’t phase back in until the start of their turn. That player is now wide open for a crackback.
One of the best phasing cards in the game, March of Swirling Mist can be used to just flick aside defenders at the right time. It’s also great to defend against opposing removal.
#21. Turtles in Time
Turtles in Time is pricey for bouncing all creatures. If you build the draw payoffs into your deck you'll come out far ahead with this wheel. Only the meanest of you would use the game changer Narset, Parter of Veils to leave opponents in the time of the prehistoric turtlesaurus.
#20. Flood of Tears
Flood of Tears is another 6-mana bounce spell. It hits all nonland permanents and can bounce or drop a new creature for you. Or, you know, Omniscience.
#19. Whelming Wave
Four mana for a mass bounce is great. You can facepalm if running against a changeling deck or that other person you know who plays a kraken deck, but Whelming Wave is good. Not overwhelming, not underwhelming.
#18. Coastal Breach
Four mana for a mass bounce is great, and that’s the cost of a fully undaunted Coastal Breach at a 4-player table.
#17. Fade Away
The downside here is that your opponents need to be tapped out and that this is sorcery. Sometimes the stars align and Fade Away just wrecks the table.
It also always wrecks a tokens board because they generally don’t have enough lands to cover this. Opponents you target can sac other permanents instead of their creatures, so they could get around Fade Away with a Treasure hoard.
#16. Displacement Wave
Displacement Wave climbs the list as the game gets faster and EDH boards are clogged with all kinds of tokens. Two mana to smash all Treasures, token creatures, Clues, Food, and other tokens is pretty decent for this.
This card gets worse at higher mana costs, but part of blue’s historic board control problem is that everything costs at least 4 (usually 6 or more) mana.
#15. Turbulent Dreams
Turbulent Dreams can only wipe a small board if you haven’t drawn a million cards with Reliquary Tower in play. Sometimes you need a board wipe for just a few things.
This is just a bonus in a deck that wants to feed the graveyard. I may put this into my Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver deck now that I really look at it.
#14. Aetherspouts
No one plays around cards like this. There’s a whole sub-category of instants that just completely wreck people during combat, like Aetherspouts, Settle the Wreckage, and Inkshield. Aetherspouts isn’t even mass bounce but forces your opponent to tuck their attackers into the library, which means they can’t just re-deploy all those threats on their second main phase.
#13. Evacuation
Five mana for Evacuation is about as good as it gets for this kind of table-wide bounce, and it’s on par with the cost of board wipes in other colors.
#12. Devastation Tide
Take our previous card and pump it up to 11 by also hitting noncreature permanents. Devastation Tide has that janky miracle option.
#11. Spectral Deluge
At 6 mana, Spectral Deluge is still decent. Being able to foretell it and cast it for 3 mana is ridonkulous.
#10. Filter Out
Filter Out ranges from mediocre to game-winning, and I find it’s in the latter camp more often. We’re used to seeing blue board wipes that make everyone pick up their creatures, but rarely anything this cheap that resets all non-creatures. It’s a great way to undo all the Treasure-making from Smothering Tithe and force people to spend a few turns developing their board again.
#9. Scourge of Fleets
Scourge of Fleets just locks the table in misery in a blink deck, which is the definition of blue mage fun. I like to run it as the only creature in my Talrand, Sky Summoner deck and tutor up my Polymorph to act as a Transmogrify on one of my drakes. You’re welcome.
#8. Summon: Leviathan
Summon: Leviathan does a one-up on one-sided wipes and returns extra card draw for the two turns after it enters. Aside from mirror matches, this will knock even the most aggressive decks back hard.
#7. Kederekt Leviathan
The get-wrecked leviathan is a blinkable overloaded Cyclonic Rift for 1 more mana from hand. What’s nice is that the unearth effect reanimates itself to cause mayhem in any graveyard recursion deck.
Kederekt Leviathan is expensive to cast, but a Rift on a stick you can Reanimate? Sure!
#6. Thing in the Ice / Awoken Horror
Awoken Horror blanks against the rare horror deck and against changelings, but Thing in the Ice can trigger astonishingly quickly, perhaps even on the turn it hits the table.
#5. Sunderflock
Sunderflock is easy to build around with Magic's history of amazing elementals. The cost reduction is great and easily gets this down to 4 or 5 mana which is incredible for a one-sided wipe.
Then there's the non-EDH scenario, where you follow up a Sunderflock with a Sunderflock for and your big fliers look extra scary then. Plus, the reset of blue etb effects like Dragonologist or Transit Mage is just filthy.
#4. Season of Weaving
I’m pretty fond of these modal pawprint Seasons from Bloomburrow, and I kind of wish we’d seen more of them. The use case for Season of Weaving is to combine the 2-paw mode with the 3-paw mass-bounce, leaving a token of your best creature or artifact in play, as well as any other tokens you controlled. Alternatively, you can double up on tokens and cantrip, or dump all five paws into a draw-5 for 5 mana. A reasonable deal no matter how you slice it.
#3. Ugin’s Binding
Ugin's Binding being this high on the list is completely predicated on your ability to trigger the graveyard ability. Unlike Kozilek's Return, which heavily inspired this card, you don’t need to cast an Eldrazi to trigger it; any colorless spell with mana value 7 or greater will do. Cast one of those, and you get a manaless Cyclonic Rift. Absurdity. And none of this accounts for just casting this as a 3-mana interactive spell to begin with.
#2. Upheaval
It would feel weird to give the top spot to a card that’s banned in Commander. Upheaval just resets the game. Mass land bounce is second to mass land destruction on people’s salt-inducers, and for good reason.
If you play this and don’t have a way to claw back and win, it just makes the world hate your guts. If you do this with some mana floating and drop a bomb, oops you win?
#1. Cyclonic Rift
Could there be anything else? Cyclonic Rift ranks highest among these cards on EDHREC’s salt list. It can reset the game when cast for its overload cost because it bounces all nonland permanents.
In a pinch you can just use Cyclonic Rift like the adventure side of Brazen Borrower. Power plus flexibility is a winner.
Wrap Up
Flood of Tears | Illustration by Adam Paquette
Wiping the board feels like a hard reset. Everything’s gone. Begin again. The slate may be clean, but your opponents may have fresh new threats ready to go. In the end, wiping the board is always only a temporary solution.
Blue board wipes have a place at the table. They’re the most temporary, but they can do things other board wipes can’t. You can rebuy your ETBs or you can avoid generating death triggers or filling opponents’ graveyards. You have better answers to indestructible in Commander.
What are your favorite board wipe effects in blue? Are you ready to try a few of these for yourself? Let us know in the Draftsim Discord, on Twitter, or in the comments below.
See you later, blue mages. You got this!
Note: this post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to make a purchase, you’ll help Draftsim continue to provide awesome free articles and apps.
Add Comment