Confront the Past
Sorcery — Lesson
Choose one —
• Return target planeswalker card with mana value X or less from your graveyard to the battlefield.
• Remove twice X loyalty counters from target planeswalker an opponent controls.
- CMC
- 1
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Strixhaven: School of Mages
- Price
- $0.21
- EDHREC rank
- #17798
Confront the Past returns a planeswalker from your graveyard to the battlefield and removes a counter from an opponent's planeswalker — two relevant effects on one card, with the second being a clean answer to superfriends decks that most black removal ignores. Liliana, Heretical Healer is the clearest beneficiary, since getting her back from the bin skips the flip condition entirely and puts loyalty counters right where you need them.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Liliana, Heretical Healer
Liliana, Heretical Healer is exactly the planeswalker Confront the Past was built for — rebuying her from the graveyard bypasses the discard-a-nontoken-creature trigger that normally drives the flip, letting you reactivate her minus abilities immediately and keep the engine running.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Confront the Past is legal in Commander, Legacy, Modern, Pioneer, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but it only earns a slot in Commander, where graveyards fill up, games go long, and planeswalker-heavy decks are common enough that the counter-removal clause has real targets. In Modern and Pioneer the card sees essentially no play — sorcery speed rebuy at three mana is too slow against the tempo those formats demand, and dedicated planeswalker recursion isn't a strategy that competes there. Legacy and Vintage have access to far more efficient graveyard and planeswalker tools, so Confront the Past gets passed over entirely. Commander is its natural home: the 100-card singleton environment rewards narrow-but-powerful effects, and a planeswalker deck can realistically expect to cast this twice in a game.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.21 bulk tier
At $0.21, Confront the Past sits firmly in bulk territory — the kind of card you grab as a throw-in without thinking twice. Bulk rares rarely appreciate unless a format shift pushes them into competitive relevance, and nothing in Confront the Past's current usage pattern suggests that's coming.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Liliana, Heretical Healer
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.