Rakdos's Return
Sorcery
Rakdos's Return deals X damage to target opponent or planeswalker. That player or that planeswalker's controller discards X cards.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- BR
- Rarity
- mythic
- Set
- RNA Guild Kit
- Price
- $0.59
- EDHREC rank
- #13548
Rakdos's Return hits every opponent's hand and life total simultaneously — at sorcery speed and for X mana, making it one of the few spells that closes out a stalled Commander table by itself. The cost is real: cast it for less than five or six mana and the impact rarely justifies the slot, but pair it with Zevlor, Elturel Exile and each opponent takes the full blast independently, turning one spell into a near-game-ending event.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Zevlor, Elturel Exile
Zevlor, Elturel Exile's ability copies any spell that targets 'each opponent' and retargets each player individually, which means Rakdos's Return resolves once per opponent rather than once total — tripling or quadrupling the hand disruption and damage in a four-player pod.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
In Commander, Rakdos's Return earns its slot specifically in high-mana shells that can reliably cast it for X equal to six or more, where stripping three or four hands at once ends the game's resource war in a single turn. In 1v1 formats like Legacy, Modern, and Pioneer, the card competes against faster, cheaper discard that doesn't require tapping out at sorcery speed — it sees essentially no competitive play there. Vintage offers the mana acceleration to make large X values realistic, but the format's combo density means sorcery-speed hand disruption rarely arrives in time to matter. Rakdos's Return is a Commander card through and through: it scales with the larger life totals, rewards big-mana payoffs, and punishes the late-game parity that multiplayer pods naturally create.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.59 bulk tier
At $0.59, Rakdos's Return sits firmly in bulk territory despite being a splashy mythic — high reprint volume has kept the price floor low and there's no reason to expect it to climb. It's an easy include at this price for any Rakdos-colored Commander deck that can reliably produce large amounts of mana.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Zevlor, Elturel Exile
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.