Sickening Shoal
Instant — Arcane
You may exile a black card with mana value X from your hand rather than pay this spell's mana cost.
Target creature gets -X/-X until end of turn.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Betrayers of Kamigawa
- Price
- $14.42
- EDHREC rank
- #18708
Sickening Shoal kills a creature for free — pitch a black card with the same mana value and it costs nothing, at instant speed, with no mana investment. That makes it one of the few hard removal spells that can answer a threat on turn one or through a Thalia, Guardian of Thraben without opening your mana.
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, Sickening Shoal occupies a narrow but real role: decks that run enough high-CMC black cards to fuel the pitch cost reliably, particularly reanimator and black-heavy control shells. Legacy is where it has seen the most competitive play, slotting into Reanimator lists that need interaction without tapping mana on the turn they're assembling a combo. Modern has never embraced it seriously — Fatal Push and Dismember handle most of the same targets with more consistency and no hand-size penalty. Vintage is legal but the format's speed and the presence of harder removal makes Sickening Shoal a fringe consideration at best.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Budget Alternatives
Cheaper options that do most of the same work
Dismember is the closest functional substitute — one mana and four life gets the same instant-speed, no-color-requirement kill at under $1, though it doesn't have the zero-cost pitch mode that makes Sickening Shoal uniquely powerful in mana-denial or fast combo contexts. If you're in a pure Commander budget build, Snuff Out fills an almost identical niche by going free when you control a Swamp, trading the pitch flexibility for a simpler payment condition.
Price Context
Current price
$14.42 mid tier
At $14.42, Sickening Shoal sits in mid-tier territory — expensive enough to feel like a deliberate inclusion, not a bulk pickup. It's a reserved-list-adjacent niche card with a small but consistent demand from Legacy Reanimator and EDH spice players, so the price is unlikely to crater, but it's also not a card that demands immediate acquisition unless your deck genuinely exploits the free-spell mode.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.