Quest for Ancient Secrets
Enchantment
Whenever a card is put into your graveyard from anywhere, you may put a quest counter on this enchantment.
Remove five quest counters from this enchantment and sacrifice it: Target player shuffles their graveyard into their library.
- CMC
- 1
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Zendikar
- Price
- $0.23
- EDHREC rank
- #18006
Quest for Ancient Secrets resolves as a one-sided Timetwister for five mana total — one to cast and four counters accumulated by having opponents discard or mill cards. The ceiling is enormous and the floor is miserable: in any game where you're not consistently forcing discards or filling graveyards, those counters never arrive.
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 |
In Commander, Quest for Ancient Secrets occupies a narrow niche: mill and forced-discard decks that can reliably stock counters before the card becomes irrelevant. Outside that context, four opponents and a slower counter rate make it a win-more inclusion. In Legacy and Vintage, the enchantment is simply too slow — formats that can win before the fourth counter ever lands have no use for it, and better library-reset effects exist at lower cost. Modern could theoretically support it in a dedicated mill shell, but Glimpse the Unthinkable and Fractured Sanity do the same job faster and more reliably without needing to untap. Quest for Ancient Secrets is a Commander card, and even there it belongs only in the decks built specifically around filling graveyards.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.23 bulk tier
At $0.23, Quest for Ancient Secrets is deep bulk — zero barrier to inclusion if the strategy calls for it. Price stability is essentially guaranteed in that range; there's no meaningful downside to picking up a copy today, and no reason to expect it to spike outside a dedicated mill deck breaking into competitive relevance.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.