Spinning Darkness
Instant
You may exile the top three black cards of your graveyard rather than pay this spell's mana cost.
Spinning Darkness deals 3 damage to target nonblack creature. You gain 3 life.
- CMC
- 6
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- Weatherlight
- Price
- $0.84
- EDHREC rank
- #24860
Spinning Darkness kills a nonblack creature outright for zero mana, as long as you can exile three black cards from your hand to pay the alternate cost. That condition is real but easy to meet in mono-black or black-heavy decks, making this one of the most efficient removal spells available to those shells.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
In Commander, Spinning Darkness earns a slot in any deck running enough black cards to hit the exile-three threshold reliably — mono-black lists almost never miss it. Pauper is where Spinning Darkness has historically seen the most competitive friction: free removal at common is a meaningful rate, and black-heavy Pauper decks can trigger the alternate cost consistently enough to treat it as a genuine staple. Legacy and Vintage both allow it, but the formats' speed and the prevalence of nonblack threats that dodge the restriction limit its ceiling there. Outside black-dense shells, the cost structure punishes you hard — exiling three cards from hand is a steep tempo loss if you're only splashing black.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.84 bulk tier
At $0.84, Spinning Darkness sits at the top of bulk pricing — cheap enough to pick up without a second thought. The price is stable; free removal with a real payoff condition doesn't trend toward zero, and casual demand in Commander keeps it from falling further.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.