Bulwark
Enchantment
At the beginning of your upkeep, this enchantment deals X damage to target opponent, where X is the number of cards in your hand minus the number of cards in that player's hand.
- CMC
- 5
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- R
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Urza's Saga
- Price
- $0.45
- EDHREC rank
- #25080
Bulwark taxes every opponent's red spells by making them pay 1 life per red mana symbol — a persistent, passive drain that compounds hard in multiplayer. Five mana for a do-nothing enchantment is a steep ask, and Bulwark earns its slot only in dedicated life-drain or group-slug shells.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Commander is where Bulwark actually does work — three opponents casting Lightning Bolts, Blasphemous Acts, and red rituals means the life loss adds up fast, and group-slug strategies can close games off that incremental pressure. Outside Commander, Bulwark is fringe at best: Legacy and Vintage have the card pool to support it in theory, but five mana for an enchantment with no immediate board impact is far too slow against those formats' threat density. Oathbreaker is legal but shares Commander's multiplayer logic at a compressed game length, where the payoff rarely materializes before the game ends.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.45 bulk tier
At $0.45, Bulwark is deep bulk — a price that reflects how narrow and slow it is outside its best shell. It's stable at that floor; there's no broad demand to push it higher, but it's cheap enough to test without regret.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.