Increasing Ambition
Sorcery
Search your library for a card and put that card into your hand. If this spell was cast from a graveyard, instead search your library for two cards and put those cards into your hand. Then shuffle.
Flashback 
(You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost. Then exile it.)
- CMC
- 5
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Dark Ascension
- Price
- $1.70
- EDHREC rank
- #9630
Increasing Ambition tutors for any two cards when cast from the graveyard — that's the whole argument for running it. The cost is real: five mana baseline, and you need to spend it twice to unlock the full payoff, which means you're looking at a two-turn investment that Walk the Aeons or a similar engine can enable, and Witherbloom, the Balancer commanders that churn through the yard accelerate that loop considerably.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Witherbloom, the Balancer
Witherbloom, the Balancer's graveyard recursion loop turns Increasing Ambition from a one-shot tutor into a repeatable two-card search engine — bin it early, flash it back, and the 'tutor for two' mode pays off inside the same game arc the commander already wants to execute.
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 | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Increasing Ambition is a Commander card through and through — the flashback clause only reaches its ceiling in a 100-card singleton format where finding exact pieces matters and you have enough turns to spend ten mana across two casts. In Legacy and Vintage it's legal but irrelevant; Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor do the job faster and cheaper, so Increasing Ambition never sees competitive play there. Modern and Pioneer have better options at every price point on the curve, and the card's power comes from redundancy you can't exploit in 60-card formats anyway. Oathbreaker is the one other home where it occasionally pulls weight, specifically in black control signatures that want to chain threats in the late game.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$1.70 cheap tier
At $1.70, Increasing Ambition sits comfortably in the budget tier — cheap enough to slot into any black deck without a second thought. That price is stable; it's a niche tutor with a ceiling in Commander and no competitive-format demand pulling it upward.
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Sources
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.