If you play Commander long enough, you’ll see the same movie on repeat.
Someone spends the first few turns “doing nothing” except looting, milling, and sacrificing random creatures. Then they cast one spell and suddenly their graveyard is a second hand… and their board is a problem.
That’s why I treat graveyard hate like a seatbelt. You don’t need it every game. But when you need it, you really need it.
This is my personal top 10 list for Commander. I’m ranking these by how often they’re useful, how easy they are to include, and how often they avoid being a dead draw.
How I pick graveyard hate (so it actually gets played)
A lot of graveyard hate looks great on paper and then rots in your hand because it’s too narrow. I like hate pieces that do at least one of these things:
- Low opportunity cost (a land slot or a cheap artifact)
- Flexible (hits one card now, threatens a bigger wipe later)
- Instant-speed (so you can catch the reanimate spell on the stack)
- Not a brick when nobody’s on the graveyard plan
Quick cheat sheet:
| Type of hate | What it’s best at | What it’s weak at |
|---|---|---|
| One-shot nuke | Stopping a big turn right now | Graveyards refill fast |
| Repeatable pressure | Keeping the yard small over time | Can be slow vs combo |
| Hard shutdown | Turning graveyard decks off | Draws heat, can hurt you too |
Now let’s get into the cards.
1) Scavenger Grounds
This is my favorite because it barely costs you anything. It’s a land. It comes in untapped. It taps for colorless. And when things get out of hand, you hit the button and exile all graveyards. This is great for MTG commander.
The real win is psychological. Grounds sits there and changes how graveyard players sequence their turns. They can’t just chill for six turns stocking the yard. They have to move.
When to fire it: Don’t wait until you’re dead. Pop it when the graveyard deck is about to convert the yard into a win (mass reanimation, recursion engine online, etc.).
Deckbuilding note: If your deck can spare a colorless land, this is one of the easiest “I’m not losing to Meren” includes you can make.
2) Bojuka Bog
Bojuka Bog is the classic. It’s basically free graveyard hate stapled to a land drop. The downside is real (tapped land, only in black), but the upside is huge: you delete the one graveyard that matters most.
Best use: Hold it until you know who the threat is. Dropping it early “just because” is how you waste it.
Extra spicy: If you’re already doing land recursion, Bog becomes repeatable pressure. And that gets ugly fast.
3) Soul-Guide Lantern
If I could only run one graveyard-hate artifact in a random deck, this might be it.
Lantern does three important things:
- Snipes one card immediately (great against reanimation targets)
- Threatens to exile each opponent’s graveyard
- Can cash in to draw a card when you don’t need the hate
That last part is why it makes my list. It’s rarely dead.
How to play it: Use the first exile to hit the “best” card, not the most recent one. Your goal is to break their next turn, not clean up their past turn.
4) Unlicensed Hearse
Hearse is graveyard hate that also ends games.
It keeps one graveyard under control with repeatable exiling, and then it turns into a real attacker/blocker later. On top of that, being a Vehicle matters: it dodges a lot of creature-only sweepers and removal.
Where it shines: Against slower graveyard value decks that want to build a big yard over multiple turns. You just tap every turn and keep them from ever reaching critical mass.
Small tip: Don’t get cute and spread your exiles around. Pick the scary graveyard and keep it empty.
5) Grafdigger’s Cage
Cage doesn’t exile anything. And that’s exactly why people misplay it.
What Cage does is stop the graveyard from becoming a launchpad. It shuts down a bunch of Commander staples and game-ending patterns: reanimating creatures and casting spells from the graveyard.
When it’s best: Before the graveyard player “goes off.” If you already let them stock the yard, Cage may buy time, but it won’t undo the damage.
Also relevant: Cage hits more than graveyards. It clips plenty of library-cheat effects too, which is a nice free bonus in many pods.
6) Rest in Peace
This is the nuclear option.
Rest in Peace is the “no more graveyards” card. It exiles all graveyards when it lands and then replaces future “go to graveyard” events with exile. If you’re facing self-mill, recursion, aristocrats loops, or reanimator, this can feel like flipping their deck off.
Who should run it: Decks that don’t need their own graveyard. If you’re trying to reanimate things yourself, this becomes self-sabotage.
Table politics warning: Expect heat. People don’t ignore Rest in Peace. If you cast it, you’re announcing, “I’m the fun police.”
7) Dauthi Voidwalker
Voidwalker is graveyard hate plus theft.
Instead of letting opponents’ cards hit the graveyard, it exiles them. Then it can sacrifice itself to cast one of those exiled cards for free. So it doesn’t just stop recursion. It can steal the exact spell they were going to use to win.
Best use: Treat it like a priority target. If you’re a graveyard deck and this hits the table, you should assume it’s going to ruin your next big turn.
If you’re the one playing it: Protect it. Your opponents are correct to kill it.
8) Tormod’s Crypt
Sometimes you just want the simplest tool possible: “Exile that graveyard. Right now.”
Crypt costs zero mana, which means it shows up early and sits there like a loaded gun. That alone changes the game. Graveyard players can’t go for clean, obvious lines when you have a free answer on board.
How to use it well: Don’t crack it early unless you have to. The threat is often stronger than the activation.
How to beat it (if you’re the graveyard player): Bait it with a “pretty good” reanimation target before you commit the real one.
9) Relic of Progenitus
Relic is my favorite “slow pressure” artifact.
It chips away at graveyards over time, and then it can cash in to exile all graveyards and draw a card. The big tradeoff: it’s symmetrical, so it can mess with your own yard too.
When to run it: In decks that don’t care about their graveyard much, or in metas where you constantly face graveyard value piles and you want to keep everyone honest.
Play tip: The single-card exile mode is sneaky good. If you keep picking off the key targets, some graveyard decks never get off the ground.
10) Scavenging Ooze
Ooze is the green classic: repeatable, targeted graveyard control that also becomes a threat.
You exile the key cards (especially creatures), gain life, and Ooze grows. It’s interaction that doesn’t feel dead, because even in a “no graveyard deck at the table” game, there’s usually something worth eating eventually.
What Ooze is best at: Breaking combo lines and deleting the “best thing” in the graveyard before it turns into value.
Small warning: Ooze asks for mana. If your deck is always tapped out, it’ll look impressive and do nothing. Make sure your curve supports holding up activations.
How to use graveyard hate without wasting it
Most people don’t lose because they didn’t run graveyard hate. They lose because they fired it too early.
A few timing rules that help a lot:
- Wait for commitment. If they haven’t spent mana yet, you might be deleting “potential” instead of stopping a real line.
- Hit the enablers, not the filler. Exile the reanimation target, the recursion engine, or the card that turns the graveyard into mana/cards.
- Use the threat. Crypt, Lantern, and Grounds force opponents to play differently just by existing.
- Don’t announce it. If you say “I’m holding graveyard hate,” you’ve basically dared the table to bait it out.
Honorable mentions (still great)
If your meta is extra graveyard-heavy, these are worth real consideration:
- Endurance — the instant-speed “surprise, your graveyard is gone” play that punishes all-in lines
- Nihil Spellbomb — excellent in black decks that like the option to replace it with a card
- More hard shutdowns — if your pod is all recursion all the time, leaning into stronger hate can be the right call (just know it changes table vibes)
Conclusion
If you want the simplest “build rule” that actually works, it’s this:
Run one graveyard-hate land (Scavenger Grounds or Bojuka Bog) and one flexible artifact (Soul-Guide Lantern, Unlicensed Hearse, or Tormod’s Crypt).
That package covers most games without clogging your deck with narrow cards. And when the graveyard player tries to turn their discard pile into a win condition, you get to be the person who says, “Nope.”
