The 40 Best Card Advantage Spells in Magic Ranked

Last updated on January 28, 2025

Dig Through Time | Illustration art by Ryan Yee

Magic, like most other card games, has pillars of strategy and gameplay that often determine who wins a given game. Things like value, tempo, interaction, bluffing, and card advantage all have serious impacts determined by the players and their choices throughout the game.

Card advantage specifically comes down to deckbuilding and opportunities during a game. I’m sure you’ve heard of card draw before, but that isn’t exactly what card advantage is.

So what counts as card advantage, and why is it important? How can you gain card advantage? Which cards are the most card advantageous? Let's find out!

What Is Card Advantage?

Brainstorm | Illustration by Daarken

Card advantage is just getting more cards out than you put in when you use a card, which can happen in a few different ways.

The most common are card draw spells that draw more than a single card, like Divination. This sorcery is card advantageous because you’re spending one card to draw two, effectively having one more card in your hand than when you started.

This is an interesting way of looking at the game, and it’s something that’s present and important in just about every card game. Card advantage doesn’t always necessarily need to account for the mana spent or other factors because it's measured on a card-for-card scale.

Card draw’s advantageous effect can also be mimicked by cards that don’t even draw cards in the first place. If you cast Snapcaster Mage to flashback a spell from your graveyard, then the Mage supplies you with a creature on top of whatever other card you get to cast again. That’s effectively the same as drawing another card and casting it right away. You played one card, you got two cards' worth of effects from it.

Another way to generate card advantage doesn’t even involve drawing cards or casting spells a second time. If your opponent played three creatures while you only played one, a board wipe like Wrath of God would be card advantageous because you’re spending two cards in this transaction: your creature and Wrath of God. Meanwhile your opponent spent and lost three creatures in this exchange.

The idea of card advantage is the entire premise that control decks are built on. They win by using cards to get two-for-ones and draw surplus cards to burry an opponent in card advantage. The opposite effect appears in aggressive decks. They instead willingly take one-for-ones and are often forced to take a one-for-none while banking on overwhelming opponents with speed instead of strength or value.

Honorable Mentions: Timetwister & Ancestral Recall

As members of the Power Nine – the strongest Magic spells ever printed (think of The Avengers, but for MTG cards) – Timetwister and Ancestral Recall are so powerful that they're off the charts. Nothing comes close, to the point that Ancestral Recall is among the most restricted cards in MTG: It's banned everywhere save Vintage, and in that format you can play just a single copy.

They are of course as good as card advantage gets, but it would be an insult to them to even try to rank them among cards outside this elite group.

#40. Two-Mana Card Draw Creatures

Throughout Magic's history, there have been many 2-mana creatures that draw you a card when they enter the battlefield. Some of these are very popular across various formats, like Baleful Strix in Legacy, Fblthp, the Lost in Commander, and Elvish Visionary and Helpful Hunter in Pauper.

Each of these creatures provides a body that replaces itself by drawing an extra card, making them essential in enter-the-battlefield (ETB) strategies that often rely on blinking permanents to generate card advantage.

Arguably, cards like Hard Evidence, Thraben Inspector, and Novice Inspector fulfill a similar role, but they require more mana investment in the long run. However, they can fit well into artifact-based strategies due to the tokens they generate.

#39. Sun Titan

A titan by name but a giant by creature type, Sun Titan is a good example of a spell that provides card advantage without actually drawing you a card.

One of the best white creatures, Sunny's a big body that returns a cheap permanent from the graveyard to the battlefield (any permanent, not just a creature), and if our foe doesn't want our Sun Titan to keep generating value every turn, they'll have to spend at least a card dealing with it ASAP.

#38. Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath

Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath is about as good as it gets. It draws multiple cards over the course of the game, accelerates you on lands, and even gains you some life.

The card draw here is significant. It can be played in just about any deck that needs a long-term win condition, and it supplies just that.

#37. Glimpse of Nature

Glimpse of Nature is the greatest card advantage spell there is in the right setting. It’s an incredibly important piece in Legacy elves decks, allowing them to continuously churn through cheap creatures that replace themselves to eventually land on Craterhoof Behemoth as a closer.

#36. Court of Grace

Court of Grace is a great example of enchantment-based card advantage because it brings that advantage through different means. It introduces the monarch, which draws you plenty of cards and replaces itself, but it also creates 1/1 and 4/4 flying tokens.

Those tokens aren’t exactly stable and consistent value like card draw or two-for-ones, but they exert a lot of pressure on the board and contest your opponents’ non-token creature threats that they spent a card on. There are just so many ways to get card advantage with this card that I couldn’t leave it off the list.

#35. Reckoner Bankbuster

Reckoner Bankbuster can offer up to three extra cards while being a decent 4/4 body if it’s crewed.

I loved this card in Standard while it was legal, and it’s even recently made it into some of my casual control Commander decks. It’s just great.

#34. Damnation

Board wipes are the most brutal, ruthless form of card advantage: Your foes spend turns and mana putting several permanents on the board, then we wipe away all that effort and hard work with a single card of ours.

Damnation is among the best board wipes for black: Four mana to destroy everything is an excellent rate–exactly the same cost and effect as the grandparent of all wrath effects, Wrath of God.

#33. Moldervine Reclamation

Moldervine Reclamation is a sweet enchantment that's often overlooked in casual Commander decks. It provides a difficult-to-remove card advantage effect for sacrifice decks, which are very often Golgari (). The lifegain is a nice touch, but that’s not what you’re here for.

#32. Greater Good

Greater Good is, well, great. This 4-mana enchantment lets you sacrifice a creature at instant speed to draw cards equal to its power. The downside is that you then have to discard three cards, but the kinds of huge creatures you can pitch to this in green often have double that power.

This also helps hedge against removal spells which in turn just furthers the card advantage.

#31. Mystic Forge

Mystic Forge provides two interesting effects, both tightly tied to card advantage.

The first ability is similar to drawing an extra card, but with a huge upside. If it's not a spell we can (or want to) cast, then this ability is virtually the same as drawing a card and having it sitting in our hand. But if we cast our top spell then it's like drawing two cards (since now we have access to the next card on top of our library), and so forth.

Because of this, Mystic Forge‘s third ability provides both card filtering (by getting rid of cards we don't need) and card advantage: Any time we find a spell we're happy to cast, it's like having drawn an extra card.

This third ability comes in handy in several Commander strategies (filtering cards by paying life is usually a very good deal), but of course Mystic Forge is most valuable in colorless or artifact-focused builds.

#30. Consecrated Sphinx

Consecrated Sphinx is still one of the kings of card advantage. It draws massive numbers of cards, but you also get extra advantage by outdrawing your opponent at every turn.

It doesn’t matter what kind of card draw engine an opponent has in this case because you can always double their output and come out ahead.

#29. Grim Haruspex

Grim Haruspex is a 3-mana 3/2 that draws you a card whenever another non-token creature you control dies. This plays well into black’s sacrifice themes but also completely negates the potentially card-advantageous aspects of certain removal spells.

Drawing a card when a creature dies is great. It offsets the loss from your previously played card dying and eventually pays for the Haruspex itself. Midnight Reaper, Morbid Opportunist, and High-Society Hunter are all worth checking out if you want more cards in this same category.

#28. Necropotence

Necropotence suffered the grim fate of those that wield too much power: Magic's best black enchantment, it got banned in most formats and now it's only playable in Vintage (where it's restricted), Timeless on Arena, and Commander.

It's still a massive powerhouse in the 100-cards format: Drawing cards in exchange of life is an excellent deal in EDH. It's quite the staple in Vintage, though, for black-heavy decks that want to dig deep for their combo pieces.

Luckily for those willing to wield such power, Necropotence was reprinted as part of Wilds of Eldraine's Enchanting Tales bonus sheet (in several versions, including the Anime alternate style), driving its price down.

#27. Dig Through Time

Often compared with Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time offers good card draw and excellent card filtering. If there's a card you desperately need then Dig Through Time is the next best thing after tutor effects like Demonic Tutor, and with Dig Through Time you're always up a card.

The delve keyword lets us cast this spell soon enough. Notice that every type of card works for delve, so lands (like a fetch land you sacrifice early) helps to pay the bill.

#26. Treasure Cruise

“Mom, can we have Ancestral Recall?”

“We have Ancestral Recall at home.”

And, well, at sorcery speed. But for decks that can fill their graveyard quickly, Treasure Cruise is indeed the homemade, slow-food version of Ancestral Recall.

#25. Black Market Connections

Black decks tend to have access to lifegain and usually have no problem making these connections shine. Just don't be too greedy and keep in mind you can choose just one of the options every time.

Extremely popular in Commander since printed in Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate, Black Market Connections provides two of the most straightforward ways to gain card advantage: either by directly getting cards in your hand, or by slamming extra cardboard on the table.

And, of course, you also get to ramp and fix your mana with the first ability. That's not card advantage, but it always comes in handy!

These connections used to cost north of $30, but a couple back-to-back reprints dropped it below the $10 mark.

#24. Big Score

Big Score and cards like it have brought some incredible power creep goodness to the hands of Standard and Commander players. This and similar cards like Unexpected Windfall and Pirate's Pillage are technically card neutral, so they only count as card advantage if you consider Treasure as enough of a bonus.

The extra mana on top is great fixing, and this card also slots great into multicolored decks.

#23. Combat Damage Card Draw

While there are many ways to generate card advantage, one of the most reliable methods is drawing cards whenever your creatures deal combat damage. Enduring Curiosity is a powerful example, and other Coastal Piracy effects tend to be quite popular. Toski, Bearer of Secrets is another heavily-played Commander card in this vein.

While there are other ways to grant this ability to creatures—like with Curiosity—having an effect that impacts your entire board is critical for tempo decks that rely on cheap and evasive creatures to deal even small amounts of damage.

Of course, there are creatures that have this ability built-in, like Ohran Viper, but they tend to cost more to cast, and most lack inherent evasion.

#22. ETB Card Draw

I’ve already mentioned some cards that draw when they enter the battlefield, but there are others that impact the entire board by letting you draw a card whenever a creature enters.

Recent examples include cards like Enduring Innocence or Welcoming Vampire. Some older options include Mentor of the Meek and Garruk's Uprising, though these may require a bit more effort or specific conditions to draw a card.

#21. Rishkar’s Expertise

Rishkar's Expertise is a 6-mana sorcery that draws you cards equal to the highest power among creatures you control. Green loves playing big creatures, so having a draw-eight (or draw-10) isn’t out of the question.

To top things off it lets you cast a 5-drop from your hand without paying its cost, effectively making it a 1-mana draw spell with an upside.

#20. Deadly Dispute

Sacrificing a creature that was just about to die from a violent case of Fatal Push is a subtle way of gaining card advantage – we're basically driving the opportunity cost to zero.

Yet even when we can't outmaneuver our foe in such a way, Deadly Dispute is an amazing source of card advantage for any deck that has an abundance of either cheap creatures or artifact tokens (like Treasures), and if timed correctly can even help fix your mana.

Similar to Big Score, effects like Deadly Dispute only count as card advantage if the Treasure is enough of a bonus, since you're otherwise exchanging a creature and a spell for two different cards (a 2-for-2 exchange).

#19. Bolas’s Citadel

Bolas's Citadel offers instant-speed card information on the top of your library and also lets you cast spells from the top of your library by paying life, including playing lands.

You can carefully craft your draws with this broken black artifact. Play cards off the top when they’re useful or when you need to find better ones, or leave them on top when the cost is too high or you don’t mind holding them for later.

#18. Solemn Simulacrum

A Swiss Army artifact, Solemn Simulacrum does it all! It ramps, it chump-blocks to buy us some time, then draws us another card as it bids us farewell.

Solemn Simulacrum will never be the star of the show, but every team needs these team players!

#17. The Great Henge

The main reason to play The Great Henge is for its ramping capabilities, working as a green-tinted Sol Ring that also heals you back to top shape.

But of course, drawing a card every time a nontoken creature enters the battlefield is a terrific source of card advantage!

One of the best creaturefall cards in the game, such a “remove or die” threat commands quite the price: The Great Henge sits at around $35-$45, making it the second most expensive card in this ranking after Wheel of Fortune.

#16. Sylvan Library

Unlike some of the other green cards, Sylvan Library offers guaranteed dividends in either card draw or selection.

Have plenty of life to spend? Draw all three. Running low? You still get the excellent selection. This excellent green enchantment is the best card draw spell in green.

#15. Windfall

Windfall does require some setup and a deck that knows how to put it to good use; this is not a card you can just jam and call it a day. But for decks that empty their hand fast, and/or decks that thrive on discard synergies, Windfall can be a 3-mana draw-seven (and even more, if you have ways to force your foes to draw!).

Windfall is so good that you can only play it in Vintage (where it's restricted) and Commander, and is one of the best wheel effects available to blue.

#14. Phyrexian Arena

Phyrexian Arena provides card advantage in the most basic sense of the word: You play one card and then you either get several cards out of the deal, or force your foe to spend a card in response. And sometimes you get both! It's not hard to see why Phyrexian Arena is so popular in Commander. 

#13. Austere Command & Farewell

White has no shortage of good board wipes–after all, it's the color that started it all with Wrath of God. So much so that we'll highlight two for this ranking.

Austere Command costs 2 more mana than its wrath-y ancestor, but the higher price comes with a lot of flexibility: It can remove enchantments and artifacts, and if you tailor your deck accordingly you can make sure either your weenies or your big boys are spared.

None of your creatures will be spared with Farewell, but exiling (rather than destroying) and the ability to reset graveyards allows for even greater flexibility.

And in this case there's no such thing as too much of a good thing: Your deck or sideboard can certainly include both if you need to!

#12. Eternal Witness

Eternal Witness demonstrates that card advantage isn't just about quantity, but also about quality. If we go by quantity, Eternal Witness isn't much to look at: For we get a 2/1 body on the board and one extra card in our hand, which is basically what a cantrip offers. But getting anything from our graveyard, without restriction, makes Eternal Witness pretty much a graveyard-focused Demonic Tutor.

#11. Cyclonic Rift

Fun fact: The fine folks at EDHREC keep a Salt index that tracks which cards their website's users consider the saltiest.

Cyclonic Rift sits high on this ranking, and sees a lot more play (sometimes by an order of magnitude or more) than any card above it. It's that good (and annoying!).

Cyclonic Rift serves two functions. In the early game, it can stop a must-answer threat; in fact, you'll actually be down one card if you use this mode, but you'll stay alive and in the game. In the late game though, Cyclonic Rift turns into a brutal win condition: It removes everything that is neither yours nor a land, and since it's not targeted it bypasses color protection and hexproof. 

#10. Skullclamp

Got extra tokens or mana dorks? Start equipping them with Skullclamp! They’ll drop like flies, you’ll draw cards, and your opponents will start sweating. “If they don’t need the mana anymore, what exactly are they looking for…?”

#9. Blasphemous Act

White may have the most board wipes, and blue may have the saltiest… but red happens to have the most popular wrath effect in all of Commander: Blasphemous Act. Undoubtedly the best red board wipe, it may lack blue's braininess and white's finesse, but it gets the job done and then some.

#8. Memory Jar

Wheel of Fortune, but with some very nice twists!

For starters, with Memory Jar you get your exiled cards back at the end of the turn. This is extremely useful when all you have are reactive cards and you need to find more proactive spells: You get to cast whatever you found useful in the 7-card batch, and regain your reactive cards at the end of the turn.

Then again, you may just be able to end the game with whatever you just drew, which is the reason combo decks enjoy wheel effects so much.

Unlike Wheel of Fortune, you can activate Memory Jar during your opponent's turn. Besides letting you find a specific answer for whatever your foe is trying to do, you can often disrupt their combo simply by forcing them to tuck away their whole hand in the middle of the process.

#7. Wheel of Fortune

Wheel of Fortune is one of the kings of both card advantage and draw, and has withstood power creep: It's still the best wheel effect in Magic, and arguably red's best card-draw effect. This wheel doesn’t come with a clause to draw the number discarded but a strict seven, unlike a lot of blue wheels. You’re getting a good trade if you play this on any discardable hand, even if you're already holding seven cards.

The obvious profitable exchange is drawing more cards than you lost, but it’s okay to pitch a poor six or seven and draw what are likely to be much better cards. You might even disrupt game plans from others in the process.

#6. Underworld Breach

One of the best escape cards in the game, Underworld Breach is one of the strongest win conditions in competitive EDH. “Massive card advantage” is at the top of this enchantment's job description: Underworld Breach turns your graveyard into a (huge) extension of your hand, and basically provides flashback to anything you cast.

Powerful enough to be banned in Pioneer and Legacy, Underworld Breach pushes card advantage straight into a victory condition.

#5. Mystic Remora

It's not (just) about card advantage. It's about sending a message.

A message along the lines of: “But being as this is a Mystic Remora, the most annoying fish in the world, and would put you in a tough spot, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feed the fish? Well… Do ya, punk?”

Mystic Remora is among the best EDH cards because of this fish's ability to scale with the amount of players at the table. Thankfully it's kept itself fairly affordable: just around $5, even though it has seen few reprints since its debut in Ice Age.

#4. Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer

You might not think of our little monkey friend as a card advantage generator, but think about it—whenever Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer hits, it creates a Treasure token. On top of that, you can play the card exiled from your opponent’s library if you have enough mana.

Similarly, Kellan, Planar Trailblazer also allows you to play more cards when it deals damage to players, though it requires a bit more investment to achieve this.

#3. Psychic Frog

Since its introduction in Modern Horizons 3, Psychic Frog has become a staple in formats like Modern and Legacy, where it can outgrow other creatures and has evasion to bypass defenses when needed. The combination of countermagic and removal that decks using this card provide is more than enough to help you dominate games once it resolves and consistently connects over multiple turns.

As a fun note, it can also fit into reanimation decks thanks to its ability to serve as a discard outlet.

#2. Esper Sentinel

Esper Sentinel, aka Rhystic Buddy due to it's amazing Rhystic Study cosplay, could very well read: “All opponents assume Esper Sentinel won't be a big deal; after a few turns, they all realize it's too late.”

Esper Sentinel is among the best card draw effects in white, and quite sought after. Only printed in Modern Horizons 2, it's hard to find a copy at a cheap price.

#1. Rhystic Study

Introduced in Prophecy, players didn't think too highly of “rhystic” spells and we'll most likely never see the mechanic again. But from among that botched batch of spells there's one that is perhaps the best enchantment to run in your Commander decks: Rhystic Study

Hands down one of the best blue enchantments, Rhystic Study triggers with any spell type and doesn't have any of the restrictions cards like Esper Sentinel and Mystic Remora do.

If it's about getting the upper hand by having more cards than anybody else at the table, Rhystic Study is the best of the best.

Best Card Advantage Payoffs

There are plenty of effects that reward you for drawing cards, each offering unique benefits that may suit your game plan.

For example, running a commander like Niv-Mizzet, Parun highly encourages the use of multiple cheap card draw effects to ping as many targets as possible—and, of course, win games out of nowhere when paired with Curiosity.

Other similar creatures, like Psychosis Crawler and Chasm Skulker, also benefit from drawing cards by either dealing damage to opponents or growing into larger threats.

Card advantage also helps you power up win conditions like Jace, Wielder of Mysteries, Sphinx's Tutelage, and Thassa's Oracle.

Additionally, cards like Wheel of Fortune can be paired with draw hate pieces like Narset, Parter of Veils, Notion Thief, and Smothering Tithe to punish your opponents further.

Why Is Card Advantage Important?

Card advantage is important because Magic is often a game of attrition, especially in 1v1 formats. Most games come down to who's left standing with something on their side of the board, outside of aggressive beatdowns.

Think about all the times you’ve barely won a game of Magic. It was probably with one more creature than your opponent, one better spell, or one key piece of interaction that wouldn’t be there if you weren’t just slightly ahead in card advantage.

Are Cantrips Card Advantage?

Cantrips are not card advantage. A cantrip like Ponder or Gitaxian Probe allows you to spend one card and replace it with one card, which is card neutral. There are other benefits to these spells that make them slightly better than a 1-for-1 exchange, but they do not put you up on cards or any sort of permanents in play, and are therefore not card advantage.

There's the concept of “virtual” card advantage, which basically equates getting rid of dead cards as effectively the same as drawing cards. For example, if you scry 2 and put two lands on the bottom of your library that you had absolutely no use for, people will often describe this as “drawing two cards.” Of course, you didn't actually put any material in your hand, so you didn't actually draw anything, hence the “virtual” card advantage.

Cantrip creatures like Pond Prophet and Spirited Companion are card advantage, because you spend one card and you're up another card plus a body in play.

What's the Difference Between Card Draw, Card Selection, and Card Advantage?

While card draw, card selection, and card advantage are all ways to manage resources in Magic: The Gathering, they each serve distinct purposes.

Card draw refers to effects that add cards from your library directly to your hand. Spells like Divination and Brainstorm are classic examples, providing you with more resources to work with immediately by increasing the size of your hand. These cards use the literal word “draw” in their rules text.

Card selection, on the other hand, focuses on improving the quality of the cards you see rather than the quantity in your hand. Mechanics like scry and surveil, as well as spells like Ponder and Preordain, help you filter through your deck to find the cards you need most. This ensures your plays are as effective as possible by setting up optimal draws.

Finally, while card draw and card advantage are often thought of as similar concepts, they aren’t identical. Drawing cards is one way to generate card advantage, but the term card advantage refers more broadly to gaining a net positive number of resources compared to your opponent. This often occurs through efficient exchanges, like casting Blightning, which costs you one card but forces your opponent to discard two. Board wipes are another example, as they can eliminate multiple opposing creatures in exchange for a single card.

Additionally, creating tokens like Treasures, Clues, or Blood tokens can contribute to card advantage in decks that benefit from having these resources on the battlefield. These tokens generate incremental value, further tipping the resource balance in your favor.

Wrap Up

Reckoner Bankbuster | Illustration by Steve Prescott

Card advantage is a part of the game any aspiring Magic player should get to know if they want to succeed. Good card advantage is a sign of efficient game moves, and efficient game moves eventually lead to game-winning results.

What are your favorite types of card advantage? Which specific cards do you like in your decks for card advantage? Are there any that you think beat my picks? Let me know in the comments below or over in the official Draftsim Discord.

Until next time, stay safe and stay healthy!