Sanity Grinding
Sorcery
Chroma — Reveal the top ten cards of your library. For each blue mana symbol in the mana costs of the revealed cards, target opponent mills a card. Then put the cards you revealed this way on the bottom of your library in any order.
- CMC
- 3
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Eventide
- Price
- $1.76
- EDHREC rank
- #23355
Sanity Grinding mills each opponent for a number of cards equal to the blue mana symbols among your permanents — in a dedicated mono-blue or heavy-blue shell, that number routinely hits double digits from a single casting. The catch is hard: outside a deck built to maximize blue pips, Sanity Grinding mills three cards and does nothing relevant.
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 |
Sanity Grinding is a Commander card in practice — multiplayer means three targets, and a high blue-pip board can mill all of them simultaneously in a way no other format rewards. In Legacy and Vintage it's legal but sees no play; faster mill options like Glimpse the Unthinkable and more reliable combo lines make it irrelevant in those formats. Modern is the same story: the conditional nature of the mill count makes it too inconsistent against a field where every card has to earn its slot. Commander is where the math lines up, specifically in mono-blue or near-mono-blue builds where Sanity Grinding regularly mills eight to fifteen cards per opponent off one blue mana.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$1.76 cheap tier
At $1.76, Sanity Grinding sits in the cheap tier — low enough that there's no real barrier to picking one up for the right deck. The price reflects its narrow playability accurately; it won't trend upward unless a breakout Commander build pushes demand.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.