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Confusion in the Ranks

Enchantment

Whenever an artifact, creature, or enchantment enters, its controller chooses target permanent another player controls that shares a card type with it. Exchange control of those permanents.

CMC
5
Mana cost
{3}{R}{R}
Color identity
R
Rarity
rare
Set
Mirrodin
Price
$20.42
EDHREC rank
#8007
Buy on TCGplayer
Confusion in the Ranks card art
Confusion in the Ranks turns every enter-the-battlefield trigger into a theft opportunity, and commanders like Lucius the Eternal and Norin the Wary abuse it hardest — one churns artifacts for repeated swaps, the other blinks itself every turn to steal something new for free. Five mana is steep, but the enchantment takes over games the moment it resolves.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Norin the Wary

Norin the Wary

66.2% of decks · synergy 0.64

Norin the Wary is the premier Confusion in the Ranks commander precisely because Norin exiles and returns to the battlefield every single combat and spell — that's a free triggered swap every turn without any additional investment, reliably stealing an opponent's permanent on a predictable schedule.

02
Ian Malcolm, Chaotician

Ian Malcolm, Chaotician

23.5% of decks · synergy 0.23

Ian Malcolm, Chaotician runs Confusion in the Ranks as a natural chaos piece that aligns with his triggered-ability gameplan — every permanent entering the battlefield under any player's control becomes a political grenade, and Malcolm's randomness-rewarding design means the chaotic board state the enchantment creates feeds directly into his value engine.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

FormatVerdict
commander legal
legacy legal
modern legal
pioneer not legal
standard not legal
vintage legal
pauper not legal
oathbreaker legal

Confusion in the Ranks is legal in Commander, Legacy, Modern, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but in practice it's almost exclusively a Commander card. In Legacy and Vintage the effect is too slow and too symmetrical to compete with linear combo decks that simply ignore it. Modern is theoretically legal but the card sees no meaningful play there — the format moves too fast for a five-mana enchantment that doesn't immediately win the game. Commander is where Confusion in the Ranks belongs: multiplayer politics amplify the chaos, dedicated commanders like Norin the Wary weaponize the trigger on a loop, and the enchantment's symmetry becomes a feature rather than a bug when three opponents are fighting each other over stolen permanents.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Budget Alternatives

Cheaper options that do most of the same work

There is no true budget replacement for Confusion in the Ranks — Possibility Storm creates similar chaos but swaps spells rather than permanents, so it scratches a different itch entirely. If the goal is repeated theft rather than pure chaos, Zealous Conscripts offers a one-time steal effect at a fraction of the cost, but it lacks the engine quality that makes Confusion in the Ranks worth five mana in the first place.

Price Context

Current price

$20.42 premium tier

At $20.42, Confusion in the Ranks sits in premium territory for a card with a narrow but devoted audience — it's never been reprinted in a widely distributed product, and its price reflects genuine scarcity rather than format dominance. The demand is stable within dedicated Norin the Wary and chaos-themed builds, so the price is unlikely to crater, but it's also unlikely to drop enough to wait out if you're building the deck now.

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Sources

Mentioned

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Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.