Sphinx's Herald
Artifact Creature — Vedalken Wizard
, 
, Sacrifice a white creature, a blue creature, and a black creature: Search your library for a card named Sphinx Sovereign, put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle.
- CMC
- 1
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Shards of Alara
- Price
- $0.06
- EDHREC rank
- #27725
Sphinx's Herald tutors Sphinx of the Steel Wind directly onto the battlefield — a 7/7 flying, first strike, vigilance, lifelink, protection from red and green threat for the cost of a 1/1 and two artifacts. The setup is real work for a single payoff card that any removal spell answers, and that ceiling makes it a narrow role-player rather than a staple.
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 |
Sphinx's Herald is legal in Commander, Legacy, Modern, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but it sees essentially no competitive play in any of them. In Commander it fits exclusively in artifact-heavy blue-white shells where stocking the battlefield with two spare artifacts is trivially easy — Breya, Etherium Shaper builds occasionally try it as a Sphinx of the Steel Wind tutor-plus-cheat. In Legacy and Vintage, the combination of setup cost and single-target payoff loses badly to raw combo speed. Modern has moved far past anything Sphinx's Herald threatens to accomplish.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.06 bulk tier
At $0.06, Sphinx's Herald is deep bulk — you're not buying it for value, you're buying it because it's essentially free. That price isn't going anywhere; the demand ceiling is too low and the supply too wide for any meaningful movement.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.