Purgatory
Enchantment
Whenever a nontoken creature is put into your graveyard from the battlefield, exile that card.
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay 
and 2 life. If you do, return a card exiled with this enchantment to the battlefield.
- CMC
- 4
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- BW
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Mirage
- Price
- $1.13
- EDHREC rank
- #27334
Purgatory gives you a repeating creature-recursion engine stapled to a white enchantment — whenever a creature you control dies, it returns to play at the beginning of the next upkeep, at the cost of 4 life per trigger. The catch is steep enough that it reads like Second Chance built into every combat, bleeding you dry in exchange for board persistence — worth it only in decks that actively want creatures dying and life loss managed.
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 |
Purgatory is legal in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, and realistically sees play only in Commander where the game goes long enough for the recursion loop to matter. In Legacy and Vintage the four-mana setup cost and symmetry-adjacent life drain are too slow against the format's kill speed — there's no world where this resolves and does enough work before the game ends. In Commander it finds a home in life-payment decks, aristocrats shells, and commanders that weaponize creature death, where the four-life-per-trigger is a resource you're already spending rather than a penalty. Oathbreaker could support it in a narrow self-damage brew, but the card pool there makes more efficient recursion easy to find.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$1.13 cheap tier
At $1.13, Purgatory sits in budget territory — cheap enough to slot in without a second thought if the effect fits your deck. Demand is low and the card has never spiked, so the price is stable but unlikely to rise unless a new commander pushes self-damage recursion into the spotlight.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Second Chance
- Ajani Goldmane
- Opalescence
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.