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Mortuary

Enchantment

Whenever a creature is put into your graveyard from the battlefield, put that card on top of your library.

CMC
4
Mana cost
{3}{B}
Color identity
B
Rarity
rare
Set
Stronghold
Price
$26.84
EDHREC rank
#12954
Buy on TCGplayer
Mortuary card art
Mortuary turns every creature death into a library-top guarantee, and in a deck built around that loop — like Gwenom, Remorseless — it functions as a persistent engine rather than a one-shot effect. The cost is real: you're paying two black mana for a static enchantment that does nothing if your opponents are the ones losing creatures, and it actively buries you if your own graveyard synergies need cards to stay dead. Run it only if Death Cultist or a similar sacrifice outlet is already doing consistent work.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Gwenom, Remorseless

Gwenom, Remorseless

40.7% of decks · synergy 0.40

Gwenom, Remorseless generates repeated death triggers by design, and Mortuary closes the loop — creatures that die keep cycling back to the top of the library, feeding further sacrifice and drain effects without requiring graveyard recursion spells.

02
Gyruda, Doom of Depths

Gyruda, Doom of Depths

23.6% of decks · synergy 0.23

Gyruda, Doom of Depths mills even-costed creatures into play, and Mortuary ensures that anything dying off those triggers returns to the top of the library rather than the graveyard, keeping the chain alive across multiple activations.

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 Mortuary actually sees play — the format's singleton density and long game length give the enchantment time to generate repeated value, and sacrifice-focused commanders provide the consistent death triggers it needs. In Legacy and Vintage it's technically legal but functionally irrelevant; the formats move too fast and efficiently for a two-mana enchantment that requires setup to matter. Oathbreaker shares enough of Commander's structure that Mortuary could function there in the right shell, though the compressed game length works against it. Outside those formats, Mortuary is off the table entirely.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Budget Alternatives

Cheaper options that do most of the same work

Athreos, God of Passage does similar work at the creature level — it returns creatures to hand rather than library top, which trades the precise positioning of Mortuary for resilience and a lower setup requirement. If the specific library-top placement matters for your combo line, Mortuary has no true budget replacement; cards like Heirloom Mirror or Volrath's Dungeon approximate graveyard loops but don't replicate the on-death trigger mechanic that makes Mortuary tick.

Price Context

Current price

$26.84 premium tier

At $26.84, Mortuary sits in premium territory for a card that sees narrow, combo-specific play. It holds that price because the effect is genuinely unique and supply is limited, but it's not a card you buy speculatively — you buy it when a specific deck needs it.

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Sources

Mentioned

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