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Living Death

Sorcery

Each player exiles all creature cards from their graveyard, then sacrifices all creatures they control, then puts all cards they exiled this way onto the battlefield.

CMC
5
Mana cost
{3}{B}{B}
Color identity
B
Rarity
rare
Set
Judge Gift Cards 2003
Price
—
EDHREC rank
#481
Buy on TCGplayer
Living Death card art
Living Death swaps every graveyard on the board for every battlefield at instant-board-wipe speed — your graveyard becomes your hand, and everyone else's becomes collateral damage. Five mana for that scale of swing is not a fair price; it's a steal, and any deck that fills its graveyard on purpose should be running it.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Sauron, Lord of the Rings

Sauron, Lord of the Rings

70.3% of decks · synergy 0.64

Sauron, Lord of the Rings mills aggressively and wants the graveyard full, so Living Death lands as a one-sided army reassembly — you get back a board of Orcs while opponents recover from whatever scraps they've accumulated.

02
Imotekh the Stormlord

Imotekh the Stormlord

64.3% of decks · synergy 0.54

Imotekh the Stormlord generates Necron tokens and incentivizes artifact creatures hitting the graveyard, making Living Death a reliable reset that refills your side of the table while punishing opponents who haven't been stacking bodies in the bin.

03
Teval, the Balanced Scale

Teval, the Balanced Scale

61.9% of decks · synergy 0.49

Teval, the Balanced Scale oscillates between life-gain and death triggers, and Living Death fits as both a mass reanimation event and a graveyard-to-battlefield engine that reloads every ETB and death trigger in one cast.

04
Henzie "Toolbox" Torre

Henzie "Toolbox" Torre

49.6% of decks · synergy 0.42

Henzie "Toolbox" Torre cheats big creatures into the graveyard via blitz, so Living Death doubles as a full-scale recovery spell that brings back everything that died without paying blitz costs again.

05
Indominus Rex, Alpha

Indominus Rex, Alpha

54.2% of decks · synergy 0.41

Indominus Rex, Alpha self-mills to find keywords to splice, stocking the graveyard fast enough that Living Death reads as a free army — everything milled to fuel Rex comes back at once.

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

Commander is where Living Death does its best work: graveyards are larger, the creature counts are higher, and the asymmetry you can manufacture — mill your own stuff, then cast it — is trivially achievable with the format's toolbox of self-mill and sacrifice outlets. In Legacy and Vintage, Living Death is legal but rarely played at a competitive level; the formats move too fast for a five-mana sorcery to reliably set up the graveyard state it needs, and reanimation at those tables typically just cheats something into play directly for less. Oathbreaker gives it a similar home to Commander with a lower life total and fewer players, which only sharpens how punishing a well-timed Living Death can be.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

unknown tier

Price data isn't available in the current snapshot, so check Scryfall or your preferred vendor for the live number. Living Death has been reprinted several times and generally sits in an accessible range — it's not a budget afterthought, but it's rarely the most expensive card in the decks that want it.

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Sources

Mentioned

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