Powerbalance
Enchantment
Whenever an opponent casts a spell, you may reveal the top card of your library. If you do, you may cast that card without paying its mana cost if the two spells have the same mana value.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- R
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Modern Horizons 3 Promos
- Price
- —
- EDHREC rank
- #2210
Powerbalance puts a copy of any instant or sorcery on the stack whenever a player casts one — free, every time — as long as the power totals on the board stay unequal. That condition is trivially satisfied in most Commander games, making this effectively a passive doubler for your entire spell suite, and Clive, Ifrit's Dominant turns that engine into a repeating value machine from the command zone.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Clive, Ifrit's Dominant
Clive, Ifrit's Dominant is the premier home for Powerbalance because Clive already wants to fire spells repeatedly and rewards doing so with escalating payoffs — Powerbalance means every instant or sorcery in the deck is quietly doing double duty without spending an extra mana.
Ian Malcolm, Chaotician
Ian Malcolm, Chaotician thrives on chaotic, high-volume spell casting, and Powerbalance feeds that engine constantly — each copied spell is another trigger, another random effect, another piece of the controlled chaos Ian wants to generate.
Elsha of the Infinite
Elsha of the Infinite already casts spells off the top of the library for free, and Powerbalance turns that stream of instants and sorceries into a cascade of copies, compounding Elsha's inherent card advantage into something genuinely threatening.
River Song
River Song's time-manipulation gameplan involves casting lots of instants and sorceries at unusual times, and Powerbalance rewards that naturally — every spell cast out of sequence gets copied, accelerating the chaotic advantage River Song is already built to exploit.
Norin the Wary
Norin the Wary builds around flickering and re-entering the battlefield repeatedly, and Powerbalance slots in as a spell-copying engine that rewards the instants and sorceries the deck uses to manipulate combat and capitalize on Norin's constant exits and entrances.
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 Powerbalance is built to live — four players means wildly asymmetric board states by default, so the power-inequality condition is almost always live, and the free copy on every instant and sorcery compounds across a long game in ways that shorter formats punish less consistently. In Legacy and Vintage, Powerbalance is legal but faces a much faster clock and more redundant disruption, so the payoff rarely materializes before the game ends; it's a curiosity rather than a staple there. Modern is the same story — it's on the legal list, but the format moves too fast for a three-mana enchantment that requires board context to generate value. Oathbreaker is a reasonable home for the same reasons Commander is, especially in spell-heavy signatures that want doubled effects cheaply.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
unknown tier
Powerbalance doesn't have a confirmed market price in the current data, which likely means it's either a recent release still finding its footing or lightly distributed enough that prices are volatile. Given its 40% inclusion rate in Clive decks and strong synergy scores across multiple popular commanders, it's worth watching — if you need it, buy before broader adoption sets the price.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Clive, Ifrit's Dominant
- Ian Malcolm, Chaotician
- Elsha of the Infinite
- River Song
- Norin the Wary
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.