The 35 Best Blue Cantrips in Magic Ranked

Ponder | Illustration by Dan Scott

Every color in Magic has an iconic class of card that shows up set after set. Red has its burn spells, green its mana dorks, and so on. When it comes to blue, we get cantrips.

Blue cantrips are often subtle cards that replace themselves, providing a decent chunk of value or some control over what we draw. But the best blue cantrips are game-changing cards that elevate blue to Magic’s best color.

What Are Blue Cantrips in MTG?

Portent | Illustration by Christopher Burdett

Blue cantrips are simply any blue spell that draws a single card, or “cantrips”, when you resolve it. Cantrips are card-neutral at first; if you have seven cards in hand when you cast one, you have seven cards in hand after resolution. Looting doesn’t count, nor does drawing two cards. A cantrip can have other effects, like countering a spell or bouncing a permanent. Really anything.

While blue cantrips are often associated with 1-mana instants or sorceries like Ponder and Opt that give players control over their next draw or two, you can expand the definition to include many more strong spells and even some permanents.

#35. Everdream

Everdream is a fascinating little card that asks a simple question: What if your cantrip made all your other instants and sorceries cantrip? It’s more neat than amazing, but a Commander deck with ample mana could probably squeeze some cards out of this or just cast it early to smooth out their hand.

#34. Unending Whisper

We’ll see many variations on “draw now, then draw later”, and Unending Whisper is just the first. Harmonize makes Unending Whisper perfect for self-mill decks, and it’s incredibly efficient that it only costs upfront (and potentially later).

#33. Whispers of the Muse

While you typically want your cantrips to be cheap, paying additional mana into buyback gives Whispers of the Muse powerful longevity. Buyback also makes this a useful combo piece, as it becomes an outlet for infinite mana.

#32. Predict

Predict is kind of cheating because a deck that wants it rarely casts it without drawing two cards due to ample topdeck manipulation. But the default of cycling it for a card always keeps it relevant, even without Brainstorm or Sensei's Divining Top.

#31. Pondering Mage

Modern Horizons sets love to take an iconic card and reference it in some way; i.e. put Ponder on a stick and call it Pondering Mage.

Ponder makes for a good enters ability. The Mage is rather expensive, but it’s a great card to blink in slower blue decks.

#30. Radical Idea

Radical Idea cantrips on the first cast, and it effectively rummages when you jump-start it. Still, one card that can be cast twice, once from the graveyard, and that discards a card opens the door to plenty of synergies.

#29. Aquitect’s Will

As the type line suggests, Aquitect's Will generally sees play in merfolk decks, where a kindred sorcery matters and the flood counter enables islandwalk from lords like Lord of Atlantis.

But the card has applications beyond typal strategies as it synergizes with commanders like Xolatoyac, the Smiling Flood and Eluge, the Shoreless Sea.

#28. Peek

Taking a quick Peek at your opponents’ hand while drawing a card gives you tons of information. It’s easier to map out your turns and play around threats or answers.

#27. Shadow Rift + Leap + Slip Through Space

Shadow Rift is much better than Leap because creatures with shadow hardly appear in any format, but both are incredibly effective to give creatures evasion at a low, low cost.

Slip Through Space is the best of this evasive trifecta due to the completeness of “can’t be blocked,” though you lose the utility of an instant that you can cycle at any time.

#26. Spreading Seas

Another common islandwalk enabler, Spreading Seas doubles as land hate. Slap one of these down on an Urza's Tower, and you buy a lot of time before you deal with that Karn Liberated. That gives you a good reason to run it in the sideboard of blue decks, as you see occasionally in Modern.

#25. Omen of the Sea

Omen of the Sea is a fine little cantrip that sets up multiple draw steps. You’d normally find this effect on an instant or sorcery, but the enchantment typing has its advantages. In addition to enchantment synergies like eerie and constellation, you can flicker the Omen with cards like Yorion, Sky Nomad.

#24. Illusionist’s Stratagem

Blinking two creatures and drawing an additional card gives Illusionist's Stratagem an incredible ceiling. The extra mana compared to Ghostly Flicker or Displace hurts and likely relegates this to the lower Brackets of Commander, but it’s not unplayable.

#23. Fblthp, the Lost

Elvish Visionary is never a bad card, and Fblthp, the Lost looks like an especially promising variant in the color of blink effects, with the tantalizing promise of extra cards if you can find a way to sneak it into play.

#22. Borne Upon a Wind

cEDH decks often leverage Borne Upon a Wind to combo off at the most ideal time, even if that isn’t their turn. It’s a great way to accelerate your win, and a fine card if you care about casting spells on other players’ turns in more casual situations.

#21. Proft’s Eidetic Memory

Proft's Eidetic Memory converts your card draw—including its own cantrip—into power via counters. It’s seen a smattering of Standard play alongside cards like Steamcore Scholar, but the ceiling soars as you move into older formats with access to wheels.

#20. Portent

Portent is a fascinating little card that’s almost like Ponder except the draw is delayed, which makes it much worse. But it provides awesome topdeck manipulation for a single mana without setting you back a card, which is good enough for Legacy decks that run Counterbalance.

#19. Into the Roil + Blink of an Eye

Into the Roil and Blink of an Eye are effectively the same incredible card: a powerful interaction spell made flexible with kicker. Notably, you always want to cast these with kicker, which eschews the typical balance you see on kicker cards. Bouncing a creature and drawing a card is a fantastic tempo swing in your favor.

#18. Repulse

Repulse is exceedingly simple, yet it can feel devastating when you cast it at the right time and destroy an opponent’s hopes of a profitable block or attack while you force them effectively to pay twice as much mana as a card’s worth. It goes even harder if you can copy it.

#17. Dismiss

Four mana is pretty steep for a counterspell, but Dismiss offers just enough as a strong two-for-one to make up for it. It fits perfectly into lower-powered Cubes and with commanders like Rashmi, Eternities Crafter that encourage you to hold up large amounts of mana each turn.

#16. Exclude

Exclude has less range than Dismiss, but it’s significantly easier to cast between its reduced mana cost and 1 less blue pip. Creatures are a common enough card type that the loss of flexibility doesn’t hurt as much as it may look.

#15. Repeal

Repeal is almost never a dead draw. It’s incredibly strong due to its great range, hitting any permanent type. Sure, you might not keep up with the green player’s hard ramp, but it’s pretty easy to match cheap permanents like mana dorks and rocks or small, aggressive creatures for a huge tempo swing.

Repeal plays best against tokens, effectively killing them while it draws a card.

#14. Deduce

Deduce is a draw-2 disguised as a cantrip, and I love it. Four mana to draw two cards at instant speed is the going rate in blue, but this card makes it feel so much better by splitting up the cost. You can Deduce turn 2, counterspell turn 3, and crack the Clue alongside another spell turn 4 for sleek mana efficiency. Of course, the Clue itself holds the key to all sorts of synergies, either directly or because it's an artifact token.

#13. Opt

Blue has many variants on “, draw a card, get a little extra”, but we’re getting to the good ones now.

Opt offers very simple card filtration, which decks loaded with cantrips often want to dig for their relevant cards. These are often threats like Cori-Steel Cutter and Arclight Phoenix that don’t just want to be found but need plenty of cheap spells to fuel them.

#12. Aether Channeler

Aether Channeler is simply the best Man-o'-War ever printed. Its modality makes it an excellent flicker target in most decks, becoming a powerful engine that controls the game by giving you resources or denying them to your opponent. I might be cheating with its inclusion since it doesn’t always cantrip, but I’d be remiss to not touch on such a flexible card.

#11. Sleight of Hand

Getting the best card out of two is almost always better than drawing a random card or even scrying and drawing a card. The more information you have when you make a decision, the more likely you are to grab the best card to give you an edge. That makes Sleight of Hand quite the powerful tool.

#10. Consider

At a glance, Consider looks a bit like Opt, but surveilling is generally superior to scrying. It enables all kinds of graveyard synergies, from dumping an Arclight Phoenix into the graveyard to just putting two cards there to delve away.

#9. Serum Visions

I’ve always been fascinated by Serum Visions, which takes the same two sentences on Preordain but flips them around and loses a significant amount of power in doing so. The power loss comes from not setting up what you draw—unlike Preordain, which delivers immediate results, you don’t see this card’s full impact for another turn or two unless you cast another cantrip.

#8. Mental Note + Thought Scour

Mental Note and Thought Scour are incredible self-mill tools. You often see them in Pauper, powering out Tolarian Terror and Cryptic Serpent because these cantrips put a whopping three cards in your graveyard for a mere . It’s an incredible deal that becomes even better as you power the format up, and those cards suddenly fuel threats like Dig Through Time and Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath.

#7. Remand

When I think of tempo strategies in Magic, Remand is one of the first cards that comes to mind. Is it as good as Counterspell or something else that sends the threat to the graveyard rather than the hand? No.

But it provides a meaningful, short-term advantage. Your opponent needs to cast whatever threat they had again next turn, so you’ve effectively bought yourself a turn to turn to the corner, be that by winning the game or finding a proper answer. And the cantrip makes turning that corner all the easier.

#6. Cryptic Command

To reduce Cryptic Command to a “blue cantrip” arguably misses the point of one of blue’s greatest instants and counterspells. Triple blue is a pretty steep mana requirement, but decks that manage it get access to an incredible interactive tool. It’s pretty hard to lose the game in any turn you can cast this card.

#5. Dress Down

Dress Down has a kind of absurd ability. What do you mean it just shuts off creatures for a turn? There are more ways to exploit that than the space I have to list them.

The cantrip makes it all the better. This is another tempo card that gives you a brief but meaningful window of advantage made playable because you don’t go down a card while you potentially rob your opponent of one of their most meaningful turns.

#4. Gitaxian Probe

Knowing what your opponents have in hand is very, very good. It lets you sculpt your game plan around their cards and gives you a level of control over the game that’s hard to come by.

Gitaxian Probe takes that power and combines it with one of Magic’s most busted abilities.

Free spells are always good, even if they only come with a small advantage. But Gitaxian Probe comes with a massive one: You get to know what your opponents’ hand is for free! You don’t even need to go down a card! It also makes your deck incredibly consistent, as a 60-card list with 4 Git-Probes is really just 56 cards. This is one of those cards that looks okay at first glance but becomes deceptively powerful the moment you cast it.

#3. Preordain

In my mind, there are three great blue cantrips: Preordain, Ponder, and Brainstorm. Preordain is the least of them, but not by much.

This cantrip simply shows you fewer cards than those other options, which is damning because seeing cards makes these spells good. The ability to manipulate upcoming turns, to sculpt your hand into the perfect configuration of cards is key—we run blue cantrips for this reason, so seeing fewer cards is a significant thing. That’s why lower-power formats like Pioneer and Standard get 1-mana cantrips that only scry or surveil 1.

Preordain has one notable strength over the other two: Much of their power comes from interacting with shuffle effects like fetch lands, which are necessary to rearrange the top of your library. Because Preordain scries cards to the bottom, it’s a little stronger if you lack shuffle effects.

#2. Ponder

To Ponder the orbs is to be a wizard, or something.

Ponder offers an incredible amount of control over your next couple of turns. It’s difficult to draw poorly after you cast Ponder because even if it shows you three bad cards, you can just shuffle them away. Savvy fetch land use lets you shuffle away any chaff while you ensure that you draw the card or two you want.

In addition to all that, this gives you topdeck manipulation for cards like Counterbalance and Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign for even more power. And all that for a single ….

#1. Brainstorm

I’ve played a lot of Magic, and I’ve played with powerful decks and format-warping cards and all kinds of nonsense. Casting Brainstorm has always felt like one of the least fair things I could do in Magic.

Much of this card’s power comes from combining it with shuffle effects. The idea is to draw three cards and ditch the two worst cards in your hand. Notably, it doesn’t have to be the two worst cards of the three, like with Ponder; just the worst cards in your hand. You then shuffle them away with a fetch land or something, and you’ve come pretty close to casting Ancestral Recall.

Playing with Brainstorm is the closest you can come to legally stacking your deck in a game of Magic. It doesn’t matter what kind of deck you play. Combo, control, tempo. Almost any blue deck would play Brainstorm if they could for the consistency and the power.

Best Blue Cantrip Payoffs

Cheap card draw spells are payoffs on their own, but they have a variety of other uses. Cheap cards are great for strategies that want to cast many cards, like spellslinger decks that leverage Third Path Iconoclast and Niv-Mizzet, Parun or more specific deck with storm and flurry cards.

They play well with graveyard strategies too, specifically those that care about filling up your graveyard. Spells with delve and cards like Tolarian Terror and Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath become much stronger with lots of cheap spells to send to the graveyard.

Why Are Some Blue Cantrips Banned?

Blue cantrips have caught bans in a couple of formats; you can’t play Gitaxian Probe in Modern or Legacy, Ponder is also illegal in Modern, and even Preordain was only recently freed from Modern’s ban list. But why would such simple spells be worth a ban?

It mostly comes down to consistency. Decks with lots of cantrips are simply more consistent because they see greater amounts of their deck. That consistency especially helps combo decks, and it would push combo decks and blue decks towards the forefront of the format—after all, Preordain and Ponder were initially banned in Modern for the consistency they gave combo decks.

Gitaxian Probe is a little different; its power has more to do with removing the innate lack of knowledge in Magic. Decks like Infect could go all-in more reasonably because they know exactly which answers (or lack thereof) were in their opponent’s hand without committing any resources.

Though blue cantrips are often subtle with their power, the levels of information and control they give a blue player over the direction of the game make them deceptively strong.

Wrap Up

Preordain | Illustration by Svetlin Velinov

At their best, blue cantrips are incredibly strong, even format-warping with the amount of information and control they give. Even the weaker cantrips are still strong—it’s hard for a card to both be bad and say “draw a card.”

What’s your favorite blue cantrip? Do you enjoy powerful, cheap spells like Brainstorm and Ponder? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!