Guide

Commander Game Changers list, with prices

Game Changers are the cards Wizards of the Coast has singled out as able to warp a game of Commander. As of September 2026 the official list holds 53 of them, and it caps how many a deck may play: none in Brackets 1 and 2, up to three in Bracket 3, no limit in Brackets 4 and 5. Below: who keeps the list and why, every change since February 2025, and the full list with each card's cheapest known price, EDHREC salt score and roles.

This guide was written entirely by AI, from Lotus Vault's code and the official sources listed at the end.

What the list is, and who keeps it

The list belongs to the Commander Brackets, the five-tier scale — 1 Exhibition, 2 Core, 3 Upgraded, 4 Optimized, 5 cEDH — that Wizards launched on February 11, 2025 to help players match decks of similar power. It is one of the few concrete checks on a deck's bracket, alongside mass land denial, extra turns and two-card combos; the Commander brackets guide covers the rest.

Wizards of the Coast keeps the list, advised by the Commander Format Panel, a group of advisers it convenes. Each update is announced on Wizards' site, signed by Gavin Verhey on behalf of the panel, as a “Commander Brackets Beta Update”: more than a year and a half after launch, the system is still officially a beta.

Scryfall, the card search engine, mirrors the list as a tag — searching “is:gamechanger” returns it — but it is a copy, not the source: Wizards chooses the cards and Scryfall follows. Lotus Vault reads the list from Scryfall in turn, once a week.

A Game Changer is not a banned card: it stays legal in Commander, and the list only decides which brackets a deck that plays it can enter. Wizards keeps the two lists apart even where they meet: in February 2026, Biorhythm joined the list as it came off the banned list, while Lutri, the Spellchaser, unbanned the same day, was kept off.

Wizards' criteria, in its own words

Wizards' launch announcement, on February 11, 2025, defined the list by what its cards do to a game: “Game Changers dramatically warp Commander games, allowing players to run away with resources, shift games in ways that many players dislike, block people from play, efficiently search for their strongest cards, or have commanders that tend to take away from more casual games.” That one sentence names five patterns:

Running away with resources. Getting so far ahead on mana or cards that the rest of the table cannot catch up. Fast mana such as Mana Vault, Chrome Mox and Ancient Tomb sits on the list.
Shifting games in ways many players dislike. Wizards' reason for adding Farewell in February 2026 fits: it “removes pretty much everything” and sends the table back to “square one, which isn't enjoyable for many players.”
Blocking people from play. The kind of lock that leaves someone at the table with nothing to do.
Searching efficiently for the strongest cards. Five cards on the list have “Tutor” in their name; since October 2025, the list is the only way Wizards' brackets restrict tutors.
Commanders that take away from casual games. A pattern Wizards has since narrowed, as the next paragraph explains.

The October 21, 2025 update tightened the standard: “Game Changers should generally be cards that easily and dramatically warp Commander games.” It also dropped two kinds of card the list had gathered. Expensive spells went first: “If you're spending tons of mana on something in Commander, it's going to be strong. We want to keep the focus on cards that can change the game in the earlier turns.” Legendary creatures whose strength lies mostly in sitting in the command zone went next — for those, “power alone isn't a reason to list it as a Game Changer.”

So a Game Changer is not simply a strong card. Sol Ring, for one, is not on the list, and since October 2025 a high mana value alone no longer earns a card its place.

How many a deck may play: none, three or no limit

The rule is a plain count of the Game Changers in the deck, and the allowance depends only on the bracket:

Game Changers allowed per bracket — Wizards of the Coast's rules as of February 9, 2026
Bracket	Game Changers allowed
1 · Exhibition	None
2 · Core	None
3 · Upgraded	Up to three
4 · Optimized	No limit — only the banned list applies
5 · cEDH	No limit — only the banned list applies

Read the count as a floor, not a target: four Game Changers or more put a deck in Bracket 4 at least, one to three rule out Brackets 1 and 2, and none leaves every bracket open as far as this rule goes. Nor does the count ever pull a deck down: Wizards' April 22, 2025 update put intent first, and a deck that plays stronger than its card list suggests should move up a bracket, Game Changers or not.

Nor is the count the only check: Brackets 1 to 3 also limit mass land denial, extra turns and two-card combos, so a deck with no Game Changers can still belong in Bracket 4 — the brackets guide takes them one by one.

Every change since February 2025

The list is not fixed, nor does it only grow: in October 2025, a single update took ten cards off. Three updates have revised it since launch; a December 2025 announcement left it untouched.

Changes to the Game Changers list, from Wizards of the Coast's announcements
Date	Change	Wizards' stated reason
February 11, 2025	Launch: 40 cards, alongside the five brackets — among them Cyclonic Rift, Demonic Tutor, Force of Will, Rhystic Study, Gaea's Cradle and The One Ring.	Cards that “dramatically warp Commander games”, in the five ways quoted above.
April 22, 2025	18 added, among them Teferi's Protection, Humility, Necropotence, Orcish Bowmasters, Food Chain and Deflecting Swat. 5 more added as they came off the banned list: Braids, Cabal Minion; Coalition Victory; Gifts Ungiven; Panoptic Mirror; Sway of the Stars. 2 removed: Trouble in Pairs and Trinisphere.	No per-card reasons given; the update's message was about intent: a deck that plays stronger than its card list suggests should move up a bracket.
October 21, 2025	10 removed. Four for their high mana value: Expropriate; Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur; Sway of the Stars; Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger. Four legends strongest in the command zone: Urza, Lord High Artificer; Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow; Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy; Winota, Joiner of Forces. Plus Deflecting Swat and Food Chain. Rhystic Study and Thassa's Oracle, both debated by players, stayed on. The same update dropped the brackets' separate guidance on tutors.	Expensive spells and command-zone legends: see the criteria above. Deflecting Swat sits “a notch below the free countermagic like Force of Will and Fierce Guardianship”; as for Food Chain, “the brackets already do a good job of restricting combos.”
December 11, 2025	No change to the list: the Commander Format Panel's yearly rotation of members.	Wizards made no format changes that day.
February 9, 2026	2 added: Farewell, and Biorhythm as it came off the banned list. Lutri, the Spellchaser, unbanned the same day, was kept off. The list reached the 53 cards it still counted in September 2026.	Farewell is “a large reset to a lot of what has happened in the game before it.” Biorhythm: “This is what we do when a card comes off the banned list.” Lutri “was not banned because of its inherent power, or because of the companion mechanic making it an auto-include, so making it a Game Changer doesn't really make any sense.”

The arithmetic adds up: 40 at launch; 18 added, 5 unbanned onto it and 2 removed in April 2025; 10 removed in October 2025; 2 added in February 2026 — 53 cards as of September 2026. Wizards has announced no date for the next update, and updates have gone both ways.

Using the list when you build

The list is most useful before the game, while the deck can still change. A few habits help:

Count first. Know how many Game Changers the deck plays before you name a bracket: it is the quickest check, and the only one that is a list of names rather than a category of effects.
In Bracket 3, spend the three on purpose. Three is a budget. The roles column in the table below tells a tutor from a mana rock or a source of card draw; keep the Game Changers the deck's plan leans on.
Off the list is not the same as harmless. Plenty of strong cards are not Game Changers, and a deck built from them can still play above Bracket 3.
Check again after each update. A count can change overnight: when Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow left the list in October 2025, a deck running it with three other Game Changers dropped from four to three, within Bracket 3's allowance. Farewell did the reverse in February 2026.

Analyse does the counting for you: paste a Moxfield or Archidekt link, or pick one of your saved decks if you have an account, and it names each Game Changer next to the deck's tutors, fast mana, extra turns and mass land denial. The count feeds its bracket estimate as Wizards' rules say — four or more put a deck in Bracket 4 at least — and weighs in its power level too. What it adds on top of Wizards' rules, such as tutor limits or what it takes to reach Bracket 5, comes from Lotus Vault's house rules, which the brackets guide spells out. When Commander Spellbook answers, its Game Changer flags join the count and its bracket estimate can raise Analyse's.

Every card page on Lotus Vault flags a Game Changer, with a reminder of the limits. To find a card that does the same job without counting toward the three, Explore filters the catalogue by the same roles as the table below — then check that your pick is not in it.

The full list, with prices

The table below is the official list as Lotus Vault last refreshed it from Scryfall, which it does once a week; each name links to the card's page. Salt is the card's EDHREC salt score, an average of 0-to-4 community votes (the salt score guide explains it); roles are up to four tags from the Scryfall Tagger; the price is the cheapest known for any paper, non-foil printing, in euros, or in US dollars when no euro price is known. Sort by name, salt or price; the line above the table gives the count, median price and cheapest card, computed from the list as shown.

53 cards · median price €21.05 · cheapest: Braids, Cabal Minion

	Type		Roles
Ad Nauseam	Instant	1.78	Draw	€7.81
Ancient Tomb	Land	1.41	Ramp	€41.63
Aura Shards	Enchantment	2.18	Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€14.48
Biorhythm	Sorcery	0.00	—	€12.45
Bolas's Citadel	Legendary Artifact	1.72	—	€6.46
Braids, Cabal Minion	Legendary Creature — Human Minion	2.21	Creature removal, Artifact removal	€0.57
Chrome Mox	Artifact	1.47	Mana rock	€25.63
Coalition Victory	Sorcery	1.21	Win condition	€2.03
Consecrated Sphinx	Creature — Sphinx	1.80	Draw, Tax	€24.27
Crop Rotation	Instant	0.92	Tutor	€3.63
Cyclonic Rift	Instant	2.36	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€23.48
Demonic Tutor	Sorcery	1.58	Tutor	€28.66
Drannith Magistrate	Creature — Human Wizard	2.46	—	€9.88
Enlightened Tutor	Instant	1.15	Tutor	€17.03
Farewell	Sorcery	2.13	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€3.81
Field of the Dead	Land	1.47	—	€21.05
Fierce Guardianship	Instant	2.30	Counterspell	€53.02
Force of Will	Instant	2.01	Counterspell	€17.17
Gaea's Cradle	Legendary Land	2.17	Ramp	€272.97
Gamble	Sorcery	0.76	Tutor	€15.08
Gifts Ungiven	Instant	1.26	Tutor	€3.04
Glacial Chasm	Land	1.99	—	€17.49
Grand Arbiter Augustin IV	Legendary Creature — Human Advisor	2.58	—	€10.55
Grim Monolith	Artifact	1.42	Mana rock	€22.20
Humility	Enchantment	2.51	Creature removal	€52.51
Imperial Seal	Sorcery	1.35	Tutor	€107.26
Intuition	Instant	1.40	Tutor	€228.56
Jeska's Will	Sorcery	1.49	Ramp	€31.31
Lion's Eye Diamond	Artifact	1.54	Ramp	€492.05
Mana Vault	Artifact	1.63	Mana rock	€49.79
Mishra's Workshop	Land	1.55	Ramp	€3,777.22
Mox Diamond	Artifact	1.47	Mana rock	€749.82
Mystical Tutor	Instant	1.20	Tutor	€7.48
Narset, Parter of Veils	Legendary Planeswalker — Narset	2.01	—	€0.75
Natural Order	Sorcery	1.31	Tutor	€16.71
Necropotence	Enchantment	1.73	—	€15.81
Notion Thief	Creature — Human Rogue	1.96	Draw	€1.14
Opposition Agent	Creature — Human Rogue	2.32	Tutor	€23.97
Orcish Bowmasters	Creature — Orc Archer	2.07	Creature removal	€36.61
Panoptic Mirror	Artifact	1.16	—	€6.57
Rhystic Study	Enchantment	2.73	Draw, Tax	€36.73
Seedborn Muse	Creature — Spirit	1.77	—	€9.22
Serra's Sanctum	Legendary Land	1.47	Ramp	€363.78
Smothering Tithe	Enchantment	2.58	Ramp, Tax	€35.88
Survival of the Fittest	Enchantment	1.67	Tutor	€97.84
Teferi's Protection	Instant	2.13	Protection	€28.61
Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern	Legendary Creature — God // Legendary Artifact	2.80	Land ramp, Reanimate, Creature removal, Artifact removal	€15.21
Thassa's Oracle	Creature — Merfolk Wizard	2.59	Win condition	€13.62
The One Ring	Legendary Artifact	2.55	Draw, Protection	€98.53
The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale	Legendary Land	2.68	Board wipe, Creature removal, Tax	€2,755.24
Underworld Breach	Enchantment	1.81	Reanimate	€6.63
Vampiric Tutor	Instant	1.60	Tutor	€26.71
Worldly Tutor	Instant	1.15	Tutor	€17.75

List updated on October 24, 2026

Two cautions. The list can trail an announcement by several days: Scryfall updates its tag first, then Lotus Vault refreshes its copy once a week, and the date under the table says when it last did. And a price is the lowest Lotus Vault knows from Scryfall's price data, not a shop's offer: prices move, and one printing of a card can cost many times another.

Paste a Moxfield or Archidekt link into Analyse to count your deck's Game Changers, see each one named, and get the bracket they point to.

Open Analyse

Related guides

Sources

Last updated: September 26, 2026