Spiteful Shadows
Enchantment — Aura
Enchant creature
Whenever enchanted creature is dealt damage, it deals that much damage to its controller.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- Dark Ascension
- Price
- $0.15
- EDHREC rank
- #21968
Spiteful Shadows turns any creature into a damage-on-death trap — enchant a blocker and your opponent pays life every time it dies, which in Commander means repeated pain across a long game. It's a niche effect that earns its slot only in decks that can reliably kill or sacrifice their own creatures.
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 | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Commander is where Spiteful Shadows has the most legitimate home, slotted into aristocrats or forced-sacrifice shells where creatures die constantly and every trigger compounds across three opponents. In Pauper it's legal and theoretically usable in recursive black creature lists, but the effect is too slow and too conditional to compete with more direct damage payoffs. Legacy and Vintage are non-starters — the effect doesn't scale to those formats' speed. Spiteful Shadows is a Commander card, full stop.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.15 bulk tier
At $0.15, Spiteful Shadows is deep bulk — you're paying for cardboard, not demand. That price is stable because the card sees almost no competitive play, so don't expect movement in either direction.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.