Persecute
Sorcery
Choose a color. Target player reveals their hand and discards all cards of that color.
- CMC
- 4
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Seventh Edition
- Price
- $0.58
- EDHREC rank
- #22986
Persecute empties an opponent's hand of an entire color — one spell can strip three or four cards at once if you name right. Four mana for that kind of reach is a reasonable rate, and in black-heavy metas it routinely overperforms.
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 |
Commander is where Persecute earns its slot — with four players at the table, naming the dominant color in an opponent's hand can strip their entire grip in one shot, a tempo swing that's nearly impossible to recover from. In Legacy and Vintage, it's legal but too slow and too conditional against fast, multi-color combo decks that don't care about hand size by turn four. Modern is the same story: the format moves too fast for a four-mana sorcery that does nothing to the board. Persecute is fundamentally a multiplayer card, and Commander is the only format where its ceiling is regularly reachable.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.58 bulk tier
At $0.58, Persecute sits firmly in bulk territory, which makes it an easy inclusion decision — the cost of trying it is negligible. The price is unlikely to move much given how many printings it has, but that just means you're never paying a premium for what it does.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.