Commander games have a habit of going from manageable to ridiculous in a single turn cycle. One player builds twenty creature tokens. Another has three value engines and a commander that doubles every trigger. The artifact deck suddenly controls enough mana to threaten the entire table. At that point, destroying one permanent is no longer enough.
That is what board wipes are for.
The best board wipes in Commander do more than destroy creatures. Some exile graveyards and artifacts at the same time. Some leave your own battlefield almost untouched. Others cost very little mana when the table gets crowded, operate at instant speed or get around indestructible creatures by reducing toughness or forcing sacrifices.
There is no single board wipe that belongs in every Commander deck. A creature-heavy deck usually wants something different from an enchantress deck, an artifact deck or a control strategy. The goal is to choose mass removal that solves the problems your deck is likely to face without destroying more of your own game plan than necessary.
Here are ten of the best board wipes in Commander and, more importantly, the decks in which each one makes the most sense.
White Has the Best All-Purpose Board Wipes
White remains the easiest color for finding traditional mass removal. It can destroy creatures efficiently, exile multiple permanent types and use modal effects to shape a wipe around the battlefield.
1. Farewell
Few cards provide a cleaner emergency reset than Farewell. For , you choose one or more modes to exile all artifacts, all creatures, all enchantments and/or all graveyards.
The word exile is what separates Farewell from an ordinary creature wipe. Indestructible does not save creatures from it, death triggers that require a creature to die will not trigger simply from exile, and problematic cards do not sit in graveyards waiting to be reanimated.
Its flexibility is equally important. If your enchantment deck has a dominant battlefield but an opponent has assembled a creature army, you can choose only creatures. If graveyards and artifacts have become the real threat, you can attack those instead.
The downside is six mana. Farewell is not the card you want to discover after an opponent has already assembled a fast combo on turn three. But at casual and mid-power Commander tables where games develop into large permanent-heavy boards, it is one of the strongest reset buttons available.
Austere Command costs the same six mana, but approaches the problem through asymmetry rather than exile.
It lets you choose two modes: destroy all artifacts, all enchantments, all creatures with mana value 3 or less, or all creatures with mana value 4 or greater.
That can create spectacularly one-sided wipes.
A deck built around expensive creatures can eliminate every small creature plus every artifact while leaving its primary threats alive. A token deck can destroy large creatures and enchantments without touching most of its army. An enchantment-heavy table can be punished without automatically erasing every creature.
Austere Command is therefore not simply another version of Wrath of God. Its strength is that you evaluate the battlefield first and then choose the two categories that hurt you least.
For decks that regularly establish a meaningful board of their own, I often prefer this kind of selective wipe to unconditional „destroy everything“ effects.
If you are still determining how many sweepers belong in the deck at all, our How to Build a Commander Deck guide explains how board wipes fit alongside targeted removal, ramp and card advantage.
Blue Board Wipes Win Through Tempo Instead of Destruction
Blue usually does not destroy every creature outright. Instead, its best mass interaction returns permanents to their owners‘ hands.
That sounds temporary, but in Commander it can be devastating. Tokens disappear when they leave the battlefield, expensive permanents have to be recast, commanders may return to the command zone, and a player who has spent several turns building a battlefield can suddenly lose an enormous amount of tempo.
Cyclonic Rift is one of Commander’s defining mass-interaction spells for a reason.
Normally it costs to return one nonland permanent you do not control to its owner’s hand. With overload for , it instead returns every nonland permanent you do not control.
That asymmetry is extraordinary.
You keep your creatures, artifacts, enchantments and planeswalkers while everyone else is forced to rebuild. Because Rift is an instant, it can also be cast immediately before your turn, leaving opponents with very little opportunity to reconstruct their boards before you untap and attack.
That makes it more than defensive interaction. In many games an overloaded Rift is effectively a finisher.
It does have limitations. It does not permanently answer cards because nontoken permanents can be replayed, it costs seven mana to overload, and it does nothing to lands. But if your deck can exploit the enormous tempo swing, very few blue cards can reproduce what Cyclonic Rift does.
Perplexing Test is narrower but much cheaper to cast at instant speed. For , you choose either to return all creature tokens to their owners‘ hands or return all nontoken creatures.
Against a token strategy, the first mode is essentially a true wipe because tokens cease to exist after leaving the battlefield. Against a table dominated by traditional creatures, the second mode can remove most of the threatening board.
The card becomes particularly attractive when your own deck strongly favors one side of that divide. A token deck can bounce every nontoken creature while keeping its army. A deck containing very few tokens can clear opposing token armies without touching its own creatures.
It is not universally stronger than a straightforward blue mass bounce spell. Its value comes from finding a deck where one of the two modes is naturally asymmetric.
Black Kills Creatures That Ordinary Wraths Struggle With
Black has some of the strongest creature sweepers in Commander, particularly when the problem is indestructible.
Traditional „destroy all creatures“ cards can fail badly against a battlefield protected by indestructible effects. Black has access to a different solution: reducing toughness.
5. Toxic Deluge
Toxic Deluge is one of the benchmarks against which Commander creature wipes are measured.
For only , you pay X life and every creature gets -X/-X until end of turn.
Three mana is exceptionally efficient for a scalable board wipe. More importantly, toughness reduction is not destruction. An indestructible creature can still end up with toughness 0 or less and be put into the graveyard as a state-based action.
The ability to choose X also gives the card an element of asymmetry. If your commander is a 6/6 surrounded by an army of 2/2 and 3/3 creatures, choosing X=3 may erase most of the opposing battlefield while leaving your commander alive.
Life is a resource, and Commander starts you with 40 of it. Spending five or six life to prevent an opponent from killing you is usually an excellent exchange.
There are creatures too large for Deluge to remove comfortably, and life totals eventually become restrictive, but the combination of three mana, scalability and an answer to indestructible makes it one of the most useful creature wipes ever printed.
If the interaction between damage, toughness reduction and life loss is unclear, our MTG Damage vs. Loss of Life guide explains why something like Toxic Deluge behaves so differently from a damage-based sweeper.
6. Damnation
Sometimes flexibility is less important than efficiency.
Damnation costs and destroys all creatures while preventing them from being regenerated. There is no complicated setup and no requirement to pay life. Four mana simply resets the creature battlefield.
That predictability is valuable.
Damnation is not as customizable as Toxic Deluge, does not get around indestructible and cannot selectively preserve your largest creature. What it gives you is a clean four-mana answer when the creature board has become unacceptable.
It is especially suitable for control decks that expect to spend their early turns interacting lightly before clearing several creatures at once and rebuilding afterward.
Not every card on a Commander list needs hidden upside. Sometimes „destroy all creatures“ is exactly the text you need.
Red Turns Crowded Battlefields Against Themselves
Red’s mass removal tends to use damage rather than unconditional destruction. That means sufficiently large or indestructible creatures can survive, but it also creates some incredibly mana-efficient sweepers.
Blasphemous Act is almost tailor-made for multiplayer Commander.
Its printed mana cost is , but it costs less for each creature on the battlefield. It then deals 13 damage to each creature.
In a four-player format, reaching eight creatures across the entire table is not difficult. When that happens, Blasphemous Act costs only .
A one-mana spell capable of clearing most creature boards is an extraordinary efficiency advantage. It lets you wipe the battlefield while retaining enough mana to redeploy your commander, develop another threat or hold up interaction.
The fact that it deals damage also creates opportunities that traditional Wraths do not have. Decks built around effects that care about creatures taking damage can turn Blasphemous Act into part of their own engine rather than simply an emergency reset.
But 13 is still damage. Creatures with indestructible survive unless another effect changes the outcome, protection can matter depending on the source and extremely large creatures can occasionally survive.
That is a useful example of why understanding MTG Protection and the DEBT Rule matters. A global damage spell does not target, but protection can still prevent matching damage.
Chain Reaction provides another scalable red wipe. For , it deals damage to each creature equal to the number of creatures on the battlefield.
At a crowded Commander table that can easily mean ten, fifteen or twenty damage to every creature.
Unlike Blasphemous Act, its mana cost does not get cheaper as the board grows. Instead, the amount of damage increases. That makes it a useful budget-friendly alternative for decks that simply need another reliable red sweeper.
It also highlights an important deckbuilding point: do not judge board wipes only by their theoretical ceiling.
Blasphemous Act is usually the stronger generic option, but Commander is a singleton format. You cannot put four copies of your best wipe into the deck. If your strategy needs several mass-removal effects, the second- and third-best options matter too.
Green and Colorless Decks Need Different Types of Wipes
Green is deliberately poor at simply destroying every creature. Its strength lies elsewhere, particularly in destroying artifacts and enchantments.
That means a „green board wipe“ should not be evaluated by whether it imitates Damnation. It should solve the battlefield states green is designed to attack.
Bane of Progress is devastating against artifact- and enchantment-heavy tables.
When it enters, it destroys all artifacts and enchantments, then receives a +1/+1 counter for each permanent destroyed this way.
The important word here is all. This is not Naturalize with a creature attached. Against decks built around Treasures, mana rocks, Equipment, Auras and enchantment engines, Bane of Progress can remove an enormous number of permanents at once while leaving behind a large creature.
The obvious cost is symmetry. Your own artifacts and enchantments disappear too.
That makes Bane strongest in decks deliberately constructed to survive it. If most of your ramp comes from lands and mana creatures while your opponents rely heavily on mana rocks, the supposedly symmetrical effect can become heavily one-sided.
Green may not have the same creature resets as white or black, but Commander boards contain far more than creatures. Sometimes destroying twelve artifacts and enchantments is the most important board wipe anyone can cast.
10. All Is Dust
For decks without access to strong colored sweepers, All Is Dust offers a powerful colorless reset.
For , each player sacrifices all permanents they control that are one or more colors.
There are two major advantages here.
First, sacrifice is not destruction, so indestructible does not protect a colored permanent from All Is Dust. Second, genuinely colorless decks can build around the effect. Eldrazi, colorless artifacts and many colorless support pieces remain while colored opposing boards disappear.
It is not a universal wipe. Most lands survive because lands are normally colorless, and colorless creatures, artifacts and other colorless permanents also remain. Seven mana is substantial as well.
In the right deck, however, those limitations become the reason to play it. An Eldrazi deck can cast All Is Dust and watch most opponents sacrifice their boards while much of its own battlefield remains untouched.
That is exactly the kind of asymmetry a good Commander board wipe should create.
The Best Board Wipe Depends on What Your Deck Keeps
Ranking board wipes without considering the deck around them misses the most important part of Commander deckbuilding.
If you control very few creatures, an unconditional creature wipe like Damnation is easy to exploit. If your strategy revolves around expensive creatures, Austere Command may let you destroy smaller threats while preserving your own. Token decks can turn Perplexing Test into an asymmetrical reset, while colorless decks can abuse All Is Dust.
The same principle applies when deciding how many wipes to play.
A typical casual Commander deck often wants a small number of mass-removal effects rather than filling every interaction slot with them. Too few and you may have no answer when one opponent gets far ahead. Too many and you can repeatedly draw cards that erase a battlefield you were already winning.
Your commander matters as well. A deck that rebuilds easily after a wipe can afford to reset the board aggressively. A deck that requires five permanents working together may want more targeted interaction and fewer symmetrical resets.
The best board wipe is therefore not always the strongest card in isolation.
It is the wipe that leaves you in the best position after it resolves.
Destruction, Damage, Exile and Sacrifice Are Not the Same
A good Commander removal package should ideally avoid relying on only one kind of wipe.
Imagine an opponent creates an indestructible creature army. Damnation may accomplish very little. Toxic Deluge, Farewell or All Is Dust can approach that battlefield from completely different angles.
Graveyard decks provide another example. Destroying every creature can actually help an opponent whose strategy revolves around reanimation and death triggers. Exiling creatures with Farewell denies much of that value.
Tokens behave differently again. A bounce spell such as Perplexing Test may only temporarily answer ordinary creatures, but returning tokens to hand causes those tokens to cease to exist. In that matchup, bounce can function much more like permanent removal.
This is why I would rather run several board wipes that solve different problems than four versions of exactly the same „destroy all creatures“ effect.
A diversified removal package gives you answers to the mechanics that are designed to defeat traditional destruction.
When Should You Actually Cast a Board Wipe?
Having the right wipe is only half the equation. Casting it at the wrong time can turn a powerful card into a favor for the rest of the table.
You do not necessarily need to wipe simply because one opponent has the largest battlefield.
Ask what happens if you wait.
If another player is capable of attacking the current leader, allowing that combat to happen may save you from spending a card at all. If the threatening player is about to untap with lethal damage, waiting is obviously much more dangerous.
Also consider how quickly each deck can rebuild.
Destroying eight creatures sounds like an excellent exchange until you realize one opponent has seven cards in hand while you have one. If you wipe the battlefield and everyone starts from zero permanents, the player with the largest hand may become the new favorite immediately.
Your own follow-up matters just as much. A board wipe is strongest when you can reset the table and then become the first player to establish a meaningful threat.
This is one reason instant-speed effects such as Cyclonic Rift are so dangerous. Casting one immediately before your turn minimizes the amount of time opponents have to exploit the empty battlefield.
Mass removal should not merely make everyone start over.
Ideally, it should make everyone else start over behind you.
Final Verdict
There is no single best board wipe for every Commander deck, but a few cards consistently stand above the field because of efficiency, flexibility or their ability to create asymmetrical games.
Farewell is one of the strongest complete resets when exile matters. Austere Command rewards decks that can manipulate its modes. Cyclonic Rift can turn a defensive answer into a game-ending tempo play. Toxic Deluge provides exceptional efficiency while getting around indestructible through toughness reduction, and Blasphemous Act exploits the naturally crowded battlefields of multiplayer Commander.
Green can punish artifact and enchantment strategies with Bane of Progress, while colorless decks gain access to a very different kind of reset through All Is Dust.
The important thing is not simply putting the ten strongest board wipes into every deck that can cast them.
Choose wipes that attack different types of battlefields, work with your commander’s game plan and leave as much of your own engine intact as possible. In Commander, the best reset button is the one that turns a losing battlefield into a winning one.
