Malicious Affliction
Instant
Morbid — When you cast this spell, if a creature died this turn, you may copy Malicious Affliction and may choose a new target for the copy.
Destroy target nonblack creature.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Commander 2014
- Price
- $1.85
- EDHREC rank
- #8552
Malicious Affliction kills two creatures for two mana — that's the whole story. The morbid condition is trivially easy to satisfy in Commander, where someone almost always has a creature dying before your turn, and Toshiro Umezawa lets you flash it back from the graveyard for free on every subsequent kill.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Toshiro Umezawa
Toshiro Umezawa's ability triggers whenever an opponent's creature dies, letting him flash back instants from the graveyard — and Malicious Affliction is the single best target, turning every opponent's death into two more removals and compounding into a loop that can strip a board clean over a few turns.
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 where Malicious Affliction does its best work: three opponents mean three creatures dying every turn cycle, so morbid is almost never a question, and the card scales into a genuine engine in Toshiro Umezawa builds. In Legacy and Vintage it's legal but sees no meaningful play — black has Fatal Push, Dismember, and Snuff Out for single-target efficiency, and two-mana conditional two-for-ones don't clear the bar in those formats. Oathbreaker has the same Commander-style free-for-all dynamics that make the morbid condition easy to meet, so it translates cleanly there too.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$1.85 cheap tier
At $1.85, Malicious Affliction sits in the cheap tier and is an easy include — you're paying near-bulk price for a spell that routinely two-for-ones in Commander. It's not a card that spikes or gets reprinted into obscurity, so the price is stable and the value proposition is straightforward.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Toshiro Umezawa
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.