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Gideon's Sacrifice

Instant

Choose a creature or planeswalker you control. All damage that would be dealt this turn to you and permanents you control is dealt to the chosen permanent instead (if it's still on the battlefield).

CMC
1
Mana cost
{W}
Color identity
W
Rarity
common
Set
Murders at Karlov Manor Commander
Price
$0.39
EDHREC rank
#5675
Buy on TCGplayer
Gideon's Sacrifice card art
Gideon's Sacrifice redirects all damage that would be dealt to you and your permanents onto a single chosen creature — at instant speed, for one white mana. Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer turns every point of that redirected damage into poison counters on opponents, which makes Gideon's Sacrifice less a combat trick and more a one-mana poison engine.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer

Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer

72.4% of decks · synergy 0.69

Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer converts damage dealt to it into poison counters on the source's controller, so Gideon's Sacrifice funneling a massive incoming hit onto Anti-Venom translates directly into a lethal poison stack — often from a single spell.

02
Jared Carthalion, True Heir

Jared Carthalion, True Heir

69.5% of decks · synergy 0.68

Jared Carthalion, True Heir wants to absorb damage to grow his counter total, and Gideon's Sacrifice lets you pile an entire combat's worth of hits onto him at once, accelerating that growth while keeping your life total clean.

04
Wayta, Trainer Prodigy

Wayta, Trainer Prodigy

28.5% of decks · synergy 0.27

Wayta, Trainer Prodigy rewards creatures that survive damage, and Gideon's Sacrifice lets you stack a huge damage event onto a single tough blocker to trigger that payoff at scale.

05
Piru, the Volatile

Piru, the Volatile

24.1% of decks · synergy 0.24

Piru, the Volatile deals damage to all non-legendary creatures on death, and Gideon's Sacrifice can redirect a lethal hit onto Piru to deliberately trigger that board wipe on your own schedule.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

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

Gideon's Sacrifice is a fringe card everywhere except Commander, where the specific combo lines it enables — particularly with damage-redirection payoffs — give it a real home. In competitive formats like Modern and Legacy it sees essentially no play; one-mana instants need to affect the board more broadly to earn a slot, and this one requires a setup piece to matter. Pauper is legal but the card has found no traction there either. Commander is where Gideon's Sacrifice is actually worth thinking about, and even there it's only correct in dedicated shells built around a commander that cares about absorbing damage.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

$0.39 bulk tier

At $0.39, Gideon's Sacrifice is firmly bulk — you're not paying for scarcity, you're paying for a niche enabler that only a handful of commanders want. The price is stable because demand is narrow and supply is plentiful; buy it if you're building the deck, skip it if you're not.

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Sources

Mentioned

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