Forbidden Alchemy
Instant
Look at the top four cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand and the rest into your graveyard.
Flashback 
(You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost. Then exile it.)
- CMC
- 3
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- BU
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Innistrad Remastered
- Price
- $0.19
- EDHREC rank
- #5213
Forbidden Alchemy digs four deep and puts three cards exactly where graveyard decks want them — all for three mana at instant speed, or one with flashback. The overhead is real only if you're not already planning to use your graveyard; for Sauron, Lord of the Rings and every reanimator shell in the format, that cost is the point.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Sauron, Lord of the Rings
Sauron, Lord of the Rings needs specific high-cost Amass payoffs and reanimation targets in the graveyard fast, and Forbidden Alchemy delivers three of them at once while digging past dead draws.
Araumi of the Dead Tide
Araumi of the Dead Tide's Encore ability needs creatures in the graveyard before it does anything, and Forbidden Alchemy is one of the most efficient ways to stock that resource while still filtering toward action.
Teval, the Balanced Scale
Teval, the Balanced Scale rewards filling the graveyard with permanents, and Forbidden Alchemy's four-card dig frequently pitches multiple hits in a single cast — at instant speed, so you can time it to maximize Teval's triggers.
Sefris of the Hidden Ways
Sefris of the Hidden Ways fires whenever any creature hits your graveyard, so Forbidden Alchemy pulling creatures out of the top four is both setup and potential trigger in one spell.
Mairsil, the Pretender
Mairsil, the Pretender wants specific activated-ability creatures exiled from hand or graveyard, and Forbidden Alchemy can bin the exact pieces Mairsil needs while filtering away redundant copies.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Forbidden Alchemy is a Commander staple first — the combination of instant speed, graveyard synergy, and a usable flashback clause lines up perfectly with the format's longer games and recursive strategies. In Pauper it's a genuine role-player, seeing real play in control shells that want cheap cantrip-adjacent filtering and don't mind the discard. Legacy and Vintage have access to far more powerful selection spells, so Forbidden Alchemy never competes there outside of dedicated graveyard strategies that need raw volume over efficiency. Pioneer and Standard have never hosted it, which is fine — it lives and dies by graveyard context, and those formats rotate faster than such synergies typically develop.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.19 bulk tier
At $0.19, Forbidden Alchemy is deep bulk — a card that costs less than a sleeve and belongs in nearly every blue-black graveyard Commander deck you'd build. Bulk rares that see consistent Commander play tend to stay in this range unless a reprint removes them entirely, so there's no financial hesitation here: just buy the copy.
Explore
Sources
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.