Sudden Demise
Sorcery
Choose a color. Sudden Demise deals X damage to each creature of the chosen color.
- CMC
- 1
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- R
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- The List
- Price
- $0.25
- EDHREC rank
- #15672
Sudden Demise wipes every creature of one color off the board for X red mana — the whole table, not just one player. The cost is the color restriction: it blanks entirely against colorless or multicolor-heavy boards, so you run it when you know your meta and not when you're guessing.
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 | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Commander is where Sudden Demise earns its slot — multiplayer boards routinely stack multiple creatures of the same color, making the X-spell ceiling high enough to justify the color dependency. It shines most in metas with predictable color concentrations: a table that always has a blue player going wide with tokens, for instance, turns Sudden Demise into a lopsided wipe that leaves your own non-blue board untouched. In Legacy and Vintage it's legal but almost never played; those formats demand interaction that doesn't ask you to preselect a color before knowing what you're trading into. Oathbreaker is a smaller format with tighter color profiles, so the read-your-meta requirement is easier to satisfy there than in open Commander pods.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.25 bulk tier
At $0.25, Sudden Demise is deep bulk — this is an easy pickup that costs less than a sleeve. Bulk rare prices like this tend to stay flat unless a breakout commander suddenly makes color-specific wipes mandatory, so grab it for a quarter now and don't think about it again.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.