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Darkest Hour

Enchantment

All creatures are black.

CMC
1
Mana cost
{B}
Color identity
B
Rarity
rare
Set
Urza's Saga
Price
$5.02
EDHREC rank
#14849
Buy on TCGplayer
Darkest Hour card art
Darkest Hour makes every creature on the board black, and that single line of text is the entire reason Teysa, Orzhov Scion goes infinite. For two mana, it turns Teysa's token-generating ability into an engine that triggers on every creature death — including the tokens it just made.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Teysa, Orzhov Scion

Teysa, Orzhov Scion

61.2% of decks · synergy 0.60

Darkest Hour is the missing piece that makes Teysa, Orzhov Scion a genuine combo deck — with every creature now black, each death triggers Teysa's ability to exile another creature and produce a white token, creating a loop that wins on the spot with any free sacrifice outlet and a damage or drain piece.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

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

Darkest Hour is legal in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but it barely registers outside Commander — the effect is too narrow to compete in Legacy or Vintage, where the games end before a symmetrical color-blanket matters. In Commander, it occupies a specific and powerful niche: it exists almost entirely to enable the Teysa, Orzhov Scion combo, and in that shell it's a four-of-one-in-the-format staple with over 60% inclusion in Teysa decks on EDHREC. Outside of that pairing, the card has fringe applications in any black aristocrats shell that cares about creature color, but those uses are incidental rather than the reason you're sleeving it up.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Budget Alternatives

Cheaper options that do most of the same work

There's no true budget replacement for Darkest Hour because no other card replicates the blanket color-change that makes the Teysa, Orzhov Scion loop function — it's not a role-player you can swap out, it's the combo piece. If you're building around a different aristocrats payoff that only needs black creatures to trigger, running more black creatures natively or a token producer like Ophiomancer gets you some of the way there, but none of that substitutes for what Darkest Hour actually does.

Price Context

Current price

$5.02 mid tier

At $5.02, Darkest Hour sits in the mid tier — affordable enough that it's not a barrier to building the Teysa, Orzhov Scion combo, but not a throwaway inclusion either. It's a reserved-list card with a narrow use case and consistent demand from one specific deck archetype, so the price reflects steady niche demand rather than broad staple status.

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Sources

Mentioned

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