Desperate Research
Sorcery
Choose a card name other than a basic land card name. Reveal the top seven cards of your library and put all of them with that name into your hand. Exile the rest.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Invasion
- Price
- $0.52
- EDHREC rank
- #28777
Desperate Research lets you name a card and draw until you hit seven copies or deck yourself — the upside is surgical and enormous, the downside is you exile your entire library on a whiff. Run it only when you can reliably name a card you're certain is in your deck and when losing your library on a miss is survivable or irrelevant.
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 |
Commander is the only format where Desperate Research earns serious consideration — singleton means you're naming something you have exactly one copy of, so the risk is real, but in a tutor-light black deck it can find a specific win condition or combo piece nothing else reaches. Legacy and Vintage both permit it, but redundancy-driven construction in those formats makes naming a single card feel clunky when Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor exist. Desperate Research is legal in Oathbreaker as well, where the smaller deck size tightens the math in your favor. Outside these formats it's not legal, and even where it is, it sees play almost exclusively in Commander.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.52 bulk tier
At $0.52, Desperate Research sits firmly in bulk territory, which is accurate — it's a narrow role-player with real deck-building constraints attached. The price is unlikely to climb unless a new commander makes the self-mill downside a feature rather than a bug.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.