Noetic Scales
Artifact
At the beginning of each player's upkeep, return to its owner's hand each creature that player controls with power greater than the number of cards in their hand.
- CMC
- 4
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- C
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Urza's Saga
- Price
- $18.26
- EDHREC rank
- #15354
Noetic Scales bounces any creature whose power exceeds the number of cards in its controller's hand — at the start of each upkeep, across every player, for free once it's on the board. Decks built around low-power creatures like Wormfang Manta or commanders like Tadeas, Juniper Ascendant that reward small creatures dodge the effect entirely while locking opponents out of their fatties.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Tadeas, Juniper Ascendant
Tadeas, Juniper Ascendant rewards creatures with power 2 or less, so Noetic Scales acts as a one-sided board suppressant — your team is built to slip under the threshold while anything large on the other side of the table gets bounced back to hand every upkeep.
Tinybones, Trinket Thief
Tinybones, Trinket Thief wants opponents depleted of cards, and Noetic Scales accelerates that plan by forcing them to choose between replaying bounced threats or keeping a hand deep enough to protect them — either way, Tinybones punishes the empty-handed result.
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 |
Noetic Scales is legal in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, and that's essentially the full list of formats where it sees any real play. Commander is by far its natural home — the four-player game means the bounce trigger fires on three opponents' upkeeps every turn cycle, which generates enormous cumulative pressure that a two-player format wouldn't replicate. Legacy and Vintage are legal on paper, but Noetic Scales is far too slow and narrow to compete in either; those formats have better ways to handle large creatures and no reason to spend four mana on a conditional bounce engine. In Oathbreaker it has occasional niche use in the same small-creature shells it favors in Commander.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Budget Alternatives
Cheaper options that do most of the same work
If the engine you want is repeated bouncing tied to hand size, Temporal Distortion and Overburden both apply persistent pressure on creature-heavy opponents at a fraction of the price, though neither scales as cleanly across multiple opponents in the same way Noetic Scales does. There's no direct functional reprint — the specific "power greater than cards in hand" clause is unique to Noetic Scales — so budget replacements are really just adjacent disruption pieces, not true substitutes.
Price Context
Current price
$18.26 mid tier
At $18.26, Noetic Scales sits in mid-tier pricing for a card with a narrow application and no reprint history, which explains the tag. It holds that price through genuine scarcity and a dedicated Commander audience rather than broad demand, so the cost is real but the ceiling for most players is whether the synergy is worth it in their specific build.
Explore
Sources
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.