Cunning Wish
Instant
You may reveal an instant card you own from outside the game and put it into your hand. Exile Cunning Wish.
- CMC
- 3
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- World Championship Decks 2002
- Price
- $2.38
- EDHREC rank
- #27627
Cunning Wish fetches any instant from outside the game at instant speed — effectively a toolbox in a single card slot for formats that allow a sideboard or companion zone. Three mana is a real cost, but the ability to grab a counterspell, a removal spell, or a combo piece exactly when you need it makes that cost worth paying in the right shell.
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 |
In Commander, Cunning Wish is a niche inclusion: the rules permit fetching from your owned-cards collection, but most pods treat that as a "wish board" by mutual agreement, and without that agreement the card does nothing. Where that agreement exists — or in rule-0 power tables that explicitly allow it — Cunning Wish becomes a flexible silver bullet, especially in control or combo decks that want one answer for every situation without dedicating 99-card slots to redundancy. In Legacy, it's a proven quantity in blue combo and control shells that maintain a sideboard of one-ofs, turning a two-card sideboard slot into a live in-game answer. Vintage allows it and the logic is the same, though the format's raw speed means three mana is a steeper ask. Modern, Pioneer, Standard, and Pauper don't allow it.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$2.38 cheap tier
At $2.38, Cunning Wish sits in impulse-buy territory — cheap enough to pick up speculatively if you're building any blue Commander table with wish-board agreements. It's a narrow card, so price is unlikely to spike without a format shift, but it won't get cheaper either; casual demand keeps it steady.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.