The 35 Best Board Wipes in Magic Ranked

Last updated on March 23, 2026

Balance | Illustration by Randy Gallegos

Board wipes are some of the strongest tools in a Magic player’s kit. They generate a powerful card and mana advantage that makes them staples in control lists for many competitive, 60-card formats and auto-includes in many Commander deck lists.

Like any general staple category, such as counterspells and spot removal, players have plenty of options for wraths. What are the best wraths to send your opponents back to square one? Let’s find out.

What Are Board Wipes in MTG?

Day of Judgment | Illustration by Vincent Proce

Board wipes remove most or all creatures from the board. They often do this by destroying all creatures, as we see in Wrath of God, but total destruction isn't the only way wraths wipe the board. Board wipes can deal damage to all creatures, exile them, or return everything to their owner's hands. Some even toss them back into the library.

Board wipes come in two primary flavors: hard and soft. They each have different strengths and weaknesses.

Hard board wipes do what you expect. They destroy or exile everything without regard for who controls it or what it is. Wrath of God, Damnation, and Farewell are all examples of hard board wipes.

Soft board wipes are more situational, usually because they impose a limit on the creatures they remove. This could be related to size, like how Brotherhood's End can’t kill most large creatures, and Dusk / Dawn ignores smaller creatures. There could be other factors, like creature type (Kindred Dominance) or the creature’s state on the board (Don't Move).

Commander players often utilize soft board wipes as one-sided effects. Asymmetrical board wipes destroy everything you don’t control, with Plague Wind being a notable example. For example, an aura-based EDH deck would run Winds of Rath to destroy everything but their creatures, allowing them to leverage the board wipes as a catch-up mechanism and finisher.

When ranking board wipes, efficiency is important because we want the most bang for our mana investment. Flexibility is also useful: Sweepers are not a great replacement for spot removal. Using Wrath of God to remove one creature is incredibly inefficient and bad; wipes with options that mitigate these downsides are powerful.

#35. Summon: Leviathan

Summon: Leviathan is a saga creatures introduced in Final Fantasy. Chapter I returns each creature that isn’t a kraken, leviathan, merfolk, octopus, or serpent to its owner’s hand; it's technically a symmetrical effect, but savvy deckbuilding minimizes the drawback.

Just as a board wipe, Summon: Leviathan is definitely nothing to write epic sagas about. But you get a 6/6 and a nice attack trigger for the next couple of turns, and lets this blue enchantment see quite a bit of casual Commander play.

#34. Scourge of Fleets

Scourge of Fleets is far from a card many would expect in a list of board wipes, but I’m fond of this for casual EDH. It's easy to reuse the ETB ability with cards like Displacer Kitten or Teleportation Circle, making this an excellent finisher that prevents your opponents from maintaining a board state. Another big, blue sea creature with a mass bounce on top….

#33. Settle the Wreckage

Settle the Wreckage sets up incredible blowouts but becomes less effective if your opponent knows it’s coming, as they’ll attack with one or two creatures instead of all of them. An instant-speed wrath is still useful since you can hold up countermagic if you don’t need to wrath, and the devastation is immense if your opponents don’t know how to play around it.

#32. Restricted Office / Lecture Hall

Sending half the school of creatures to the Restricted Office is pretty useful, as is the late-game benefit of Lecture Hall. With all the 2-power creatures decks want to run, this room is good to build into a number of decklists.

#31. Phyrexian Scriptures

Phyrexian Scriptures works best in an artifact deck but can also be useful in enchantress decks. Sagas continue to see a surge of support across sets, so this has become even more appealing as a board wipe with functional suspend 1.

#30. Anger of the Gods

Anger of the Gods is a great example of a soft wrath that deals with early threats. Three damage is enough to sweep aside the board of many white weenie-type decks. Exiling the creatures is a nice little bonus that’s effective against Bloodghast and similar persistent creatures.

#29. Game Over

Game Over is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Eternal Wrath of God: a black sorcery that destroys all creatures, and it costs less if any player is at or below half their starting life total. The “starting life” clause is the whole point: This black board wipe gets turned on very easily in Commander once somebody’s been smacked around, although it may be too slow to be useful as a speed bump against aggro decks in the early game.

#28. Single Combat

Single Combat works best in Voltron-style decks that focus on making one creature the best it can be. It’ll often be the best of the four surviving creatures and slows your opponents’ ability to rebuild post-wrath. Hitting planeswalkers is useful, as many wraths ignore them.

#27. Starfall Invocation

Starfall Invocation is a great gift card and not the kind that needs an envelope! You pick your strongest creature and can immediately bring it back while your opponent has a chance of drawing a harmless late land, or a card unlikely to match yours. Either way, reset complete.

#26. Evacuation

Five mana to bounce all creatures is pretty strong. Evacuation is a fantastic tool for mono-blue and blue-green decks that often lack the tools to deal with creatures en mass. Being an instant also lets you leverage the ability by holding up countermagic, card draw, or bouncing your opponents’ board states to remove all blockers before your turn.

#25. Nibelheim Aflame

Nibelheim Aflame is a side-grade to Chandra's Ignition. In both cases one of your creatures goes nuclear and deals damage equal to its power to all other creatures. But Nibelheim Aflame is cheaper, you can cast it twice thanks to flashback, and the second time you cast it, you discard your hand and you draw four cards.

It's easy to disrupt, and you do need a creature worth pointing at (big, and ideally with keywords like lifelink or deathtouch). But since you have two shots, it can be very annoying to shut down completely.

#24. Fire Magic

This Final Fantasy instant is a tiered damage sweeper, with the damage scaling depending on how much mana you spend. It’s flexible, but this red instant still hits your own board, so it rewards decks whose creatures naturally survive (big toughness), or decks that don’t care about their creatures living. It also works great with damage amplifiers, like Ghyrson Starn, Kelermorph decks.

#23. Winds of Rath

Winds of Rath needs a specific deck to work, but it’s often a powerful one-sided board wipe in decks that can meet the condition. Unlike other wraths that ignore things like tokens or artifact creatures, not many people run auras, so this is more likely to be a true Plague Wind than others.

#22. The Meathook Massacre

A board wipe so strong it got banned in Standard, The Meathook Massacre not only sweeps away creatures, but also drains life in the process. If you're just playing it as a sweeper, you get the Blood Artist effect for free, and some decks can lean into that part of the card. You can even plan around wiping your own board with this to drain your opponent out of the game.

#21. Sunfall

Former Standard powerhouse, Sunfall can be devastating. Exiling is far better than destroying. It circumvents lots of protection spells, such as Heroic Intervention and Selfless Spirit, and prevents cards like Second Sunrise and Agadeem's Awakening from rebuilding boards. Getting a potentially massive threat ices this powerful cake.

#20. Martial Coup + White Sun’s Twilight

Martial Coup and White Sun's Twilight are the next best thing to a true one-sided board wipe, as they create an instant board state for a powerful one-two punch. Scaling up or down depending on your available mana is also a great trait of the Twilight spells.

#19. The Battle of Bywater

Three mana for a wrath is incredibly efficient, though you need small creatures to maximize The Battle of Bywater. This is at its best in stax decks leveraging cheap creatures like Collector Ouphe and Archon of Emeria or token decks building out massive numbers of 1/1s.

#18. Cataclysm

Cataclysm requires you to control a card capable of winning the game, such as Blightsteel Colossus. If you can leverage this by having the best permanent left over, your opponents will rarely make a comeback.

#17. Organic Extinction

Organic Extinction is pretty costly, but your artifact creatures can help cast it, taking quite the edge off. This is best with cards like Breya, Etherium Shaper that focus on building a wide board of artifact tokens to churn it out as cheaply as possible.

#16. Pyroclasm

Blasphemous Act at home! Pyroclasm is too puny for Commander, where pretty much everything is tougher than 2. But this red sorcery is a pretty strong card in Standard since Duskmourn: House of Horror made it legal in that MTG format. Dealing 2 for just is an excellent rate. It's also a top-tier sideboard card in Premodern and Pioneer, and even shows up in Legacy from time to time.

#15. Wrath of God + Damnation + Day of Judgment

We call board wipes wraths because of Wrath of God. Damnation is its colorshifted cousin and Day of Judgment is the relative that is resistant to Standard rotation. Four mana to destroy everything is the absolute going rate. Wraths don’t get better than this without restriction. For decks looking to remove everything cheaply that don’t care about leveraging one-sided wipes, it’s hard to do better than these iconic sweepers.

#14. Singularity Rupture

From Edge of Eternities (EOE), Singularity Rupture is a 5-mana Dimir () sledgehammer: destroy all creatures, then any number of target players mill half their library (rounded down).

Not strong enough to see competitive play, but pretty popular in casual Commander decks. In particular, Captain N'ghathrod loves having Singularity Rupture in the 99!

#13. Dusk / Dawn

Plenty of wraths protect small creatures, but Dusk / Dawn is the best because it offers a secondary mode. This is a wrath for your small creature deck, but it's also wrath protection that helps you rebuild after an opponent casts their sweeper. It’s even better in decks with ways to discard it.

#12. Hour of Reckoning

Tokens are commonplace in Commander, making Hour of Reckoning a fearsome one-sided wrath. Token decks go wide quickly enough that convoke keeps this free. It’s trivial to set up a winning sequence by casting this and following it up the next turn with Craterhoof Behemoth or another Overrun effect.

#11. Kindred Wraths

Kindred decks are often about building up a massive force of their creature type, so they’re perfectly poised to take advantage of one-way board wipes like Kindred Dominance and Raise the Palisade. These get weaker when you're playing common creature types like humans, though.

#10. Terminus

Another board wipe that sees very little play in Commander despite being a competitive house in other formats. In particular, Terminus is expensive at 6 mana, but it most often costs 1 with top deck manipulation. With work, this is the most efficient board wipe available that ignores all forms of protection short of phasing.

#9. Fire Covenant

Fire Covenant’s strength comes from not needing to be a wrath. Sometimes, this wipes opposing board states clean. Other times, it just handles the Collector Ouphe and Orcish Bowmasters preventing you from going off. That flexibility is well worth the life.

#8. Damn

Damn is one of the most elegantly designed cards in the game. It’s also quite powerful. Wrath of God that becomes efficient if you only want to remove a single threat is hard to beat.

#7. Final Showdown

Final Showdown lets you turn the board into vanilla creatures or lets you isolate your game-winner and destroy the rest. That one initial cost to start the spree is well worth it.

#6. Farewell

Farewell is one of the most brutal wraths you can play in Commander. It hits enchantments and artifacts, which are often unphased by sweepers, and exiling everything leaves pretty much no options for protection or rebuilding. Six mana is a ton, but it certainly gets its value.

#5. Supreme Verdict

Wrath of God but uncounterable. Supreme Verdict is as close to strictly better than Wrath of God as you can get when making a card 2-colored. Many decks interested in wraths want to play blue anyway, and being uncounterable is way more relevant than preventing regeneration, since it’s mostly been phased out, and common protection spells use phasing or indestructible. This is the complete package for control decks.

#4. Blasphemous Act

Blasphemous Act is a complete color pie break, which is part of its power. Dealing 13 is close enough to destroy all creatures that Wizards won’t make cards like it anymore. That gives Temur () decks access to an effect they shouldn’t have, which is always powerful. It’s even better when you factor in the sheer efficiency of this excellent red sorcery. It’s often on rate with Wrath of God or better.

#3. Cyclonic Rift

Blue's best board wipe, Cyclonic Rift, is also the best one-sided board wipe in Commander. The flexibility of being an instant and bouncing an early problem is incredible. It doesn’t take much to turn an overloaded Rift into a win, especially since your non-green opponents need to rebuild their mana and creatures.

#2. Toxic Deluge

Toxic Deluge is the best creature wrath in the game. Paying life is a real cost, but the efficiency! It’s also flexible. You can remove all your opponents’ small creatures while leaving your larger ones intact. Giving -X/-X rounds this out, evading most forms of protection.

#1. Balance

It takes a little work to leverage Balance, but boy is it worth the one copy in Vintage. Not only does this attack your opponents’ board state, but you get to go after their lands and their hand. A sweeper’s goal is to remove as many of your opponents’ resources as possible with one card, and no card does it better than Balance. This is white's best sorcery, and one of white's strongest cards.

Best Board Wipe Payoffs

The best board wipe payoffs are conceptual. Decks that don’t care about building a board with creatures benefit the most from board wipes. Control decks are often filled with wraths and very few creatures for this reason. Other decks that benefit from board wipes are those that accumulate value through non-creature means, like many enchantress or superfriends decks.

The other most basic payoffs are from abilities that trigger when creatures get destroyed or removed from the battlefield.

Another sneaky payoff for board wipes are cards that steal from your opponents' graveyards, such as Magic staples like Animate Dead or Reanimate or newer cards like Tinybones, the Pickpocket. It's always better to steal from somebody who's got their pockets, or in this case graveyard, full. Milling and discarding are the usual tools for this specific job, but wiping a board clean can also put a lot of valuable creatures where you can steal them.

How Do You Not Get Blown Out by A Board Wipe?

Cards like Selfless Spirit, Heroic Intervention, and Teferi's Protection help protect your board from a variety of sweepers.

To avoid a blowout without protection, you need to show restraint with your threats. Sandbag a few cards if you suspect a wrath is incoming. The goal is to apply maximum pressure with minimal threats to force your opponent to crack their wrath for minimal value.

How Many Board Wipes Should I Run?

The number of board wipes you should run varies widely based on your general strategy. They’re a great option for controlling decks to set their opponents back and buy them the time needed to win, but set yourself behind.

In general, EDH players overrate board wipes, and their value can really depend on local metas, but putting yourself behind often isn’t worth it. That said, one-sided board wipes like Cyclonic Rift and Winds of Abandon are incredibly effective tools. I’d play as many one-sided wipes as my EDH deck can support, but I rarely want more than one or two universal wraths.

Do Board Wipes Destroy Indestructible Creatures?

Indestructible creatures can’t be destroyed by sweepers like Wrath of God that destroy all creatures or wraths that deal damage like Anger of the Gods. Board wipes that remove permanents through other means, like Cyclonic Rift or Sunfall, do remove indestructible creatures.

Do Board Wipes Hit Protection?

Board wipes that destroy, exile, bounce, or give all creatures -X/-X are unaffected by protection. However, protection does prevent damage, so wraths like Anger of the Gods and Burn Down the House are stopped by protection.

How Do You Know When to Use a Board Wipe in Multiplayer? And When to Hold Off?

You know when to board wipe based on these important considerations: How many creatures are you removing, how much danger are you in, and do you benefit? Try to maximize your card and mana advantage.

Your opponents have large board states that can be intimidating, but are they swinging at you? If the two biggest threats at the table are attacking each other to keep their greatest rival in check, you can probably hold off (this is also a great stage where politicking can help).

Finally, how much do you benefit? Most wraths only destroy creatures, so players who have garnered a mana or card advantage can often maximize on the reset more than you. If firing off a wrath leaves you with nothing and allows an opponent with a planeswalker and the monarch to keep accumulating value unchecked, it’s likely better to try and deal with those threats first.

Are There Any Board Wipes That Destroy Lands in MTG?

There are quite a few board wipes that hit lands. Armageddon and Ravages of War are two examples that only destroy lands, but some wraths like Balance, Obliterate, and Worldfire hit pretty much everything.

How Do Planeswalkers Interact with Board Wipes?

Planeswalkers and board wipes are among the best of friends. As long as the board wipe doesn’t destroy or damage the planeswalkers themselves, they stay on the board while all creatures get destroyed.

Are There Board Wipes That Don’t Exile or Destroy Permanents?

There are a few options for board wipes that don’t exile or destroy permanents. Sweepers that bounce permanents, like Cyclonic Rift and Engulf the Shore, can provide great tempo and slow your opponents down. Black also has spells like Toxic Deluge that reduce the power and toughness of all creatures, which kills them without destroying or exiling them.

Wrap Up

Terminus | Illustration by James Paick

Board wipes have incredible potential. For just a few mana and a single card, you can undo multiple turns' worth of effort from your opponents at a fraction of the cost. Sweepers that are one-sided cards can absolutely equalize the board or finish the game.

What are your favorite wraths in EDH? How many do you run in your decks? Need an idea of how many creatures go in Commander decks? Let me know in the comments or in the Draftsim Discord. Take care!