Damping Sphere
Artifact
If a land is tapped for two or more mana, it produces 
instead of any other type and amount.
Each spell a player casts costs 
more to cast for each other spell that player has cast this turn.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- C
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Dominaria Remastered
- Price
- $0.78
- EDHREC rank
- #4955
Damping Sphere shuts down two of the most oppressive patterns in Commander simultaneously — lands that tap for multiple mana and spells that get cheaper as the turn goes on — for just two colorless mana. It's not a silver bullet against every deck, but against storm, Magda, Brazen Outlaw, and any engine that chains spells in a single turn, it's one of the most efficient hate pieces available at this price point.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Magda, Brazen Outlaw
Magda, Brazen Outlaw builds treasure fast and chains activations to tutor up artifacts or dragons, exactly the kind of accelerating-mana engine Damping Sphere is designed to punish. Roughly 31% of Magda decks include it as a hedge against the mirror and similarly explosive opponents.
Lavinia, Azorius Renegade
Lavinia, Azorius Renegade already taxes spells cast without paying their mana cost, and Damping Sphere layers on a second stax piece that makes storm and ritual-chaining prohibitively expensive. Together they create a ceiling that most combo decks can't afford to break through.
Oswald Fiddlebender
Oswald Fiddlebender tutors artifacts directly onto the battlefield, so Damping Sphere is both a piece of interaction and a fetchable threat — Oswald can find it on demand the moment a fast-mana opponent starts pulling ahead.
Slicer, Hired Muscle
Slicer, Hired Muscle decks are often aggressive and low to the ground, and Damping Sphere slots in as a cheap speed bump against combo opponents who would otherwise win before Slicer's combat damage strategy can close the game.
Queen Kayla bin-Kroog
Queen Kayla bin-Kroog operates in a low-mana-value artifact space that doesn't rely on chaining spells or floating large pools of mana, so Damping Sphere taxes opponents far more than it taxes the deck running it.
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 |
In Commander, Damping Sphere is a sideboard-quality card that earns a mainboard slot in any stax or hate-bear shell — it answers storm, fast-mana combo, and Nykthos-style land engines with a single two-mana artifact. In Modern and Legacy, it sees dedicated sideboard play as a direct answer to Storm, Tron, and Amulet Titan, and it's one of the few hate pieces that pulls double duty across multiple archetypes in those formats. Pioneer has fewer storm and big-mana targets, so its impact there is narrower, mostly limited to slowing down mana-hungry midrange decks. Vintage is the format where Damping Sphere is most contextually powerful — Moxen and Black Lotus are exactly the kind of mana sources it penalizes — though the card still doesn't see heavy play there because combo is fast enough to win through it. Across all formats where it's legal, the two-mana cost is the card's main limitation: it does nothing the turn before it lands.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.78 bulk tier
At $0.78, Damping Sphere sits firmly in bulk territory for a card with genuine competitive pedigree across multiple formats. That price makes it an easy include — the effect is worth several times that in any meta where fast mana or spell-chaining is prevalent.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.