Top 10 Best Discard Spells in Magic: The Gathering

As the name suggests, discard spells are cards that make the opponent discard cards from their hand. They can be divided into two categories: Targeted, where its controller looks at their opponent's hand and chooses a legal target from among them to discard, and General, where more than one card is taken from the opponent's hand, but of their choice or randomly.

Discard spells are essential for Magic because they are one of the main sources of disruption against degenerate decks, protection against Counterspells and removals, in addition to ensuring good interaction in the early game and even archetypes built around this theme.

In this article, we delve into the ten best discards in the game, ranked by their power level and impact on the competitive Metagame!

10 - Wrench Mind

Wrench Mind has a very straightforward effect and is comparable to other discards like Mind Rot, but it guarantees a good trade in resources and mana: an efficient two-for-one as long as the opponent doesn't have many artifacts in hand.

9 - Duress

Duress is Magic's classic targeted discard, with high flexibility and being relevant in competitive formats since its original release in Urza's Saga, but it does not have the same versatility as other cards in its category and, often, ends up relegated to the Sideboard instead of the Maindeck to deal with Control and Combo matchups.

Still, it is an excellent choice for different formats and has solidified itself as one of the cards that are always present in Standard as a safety valve and interaction.

8 - Go Blank

Mind Rot is certainly one of the worst discard spells in Magic, but the effect coupled with Go Blank adds a lot to one of the biggest defects this category has: feeding the opponent's graveyard, preventing them from returning creatures, feeding spells with Delve or other powerful interactions, making it a Pioneer Sideboard staple.

7 - Unmask

Unmask is a free spell that works as an unconditional discard, allowing to protect your combos without having to spend mana, it has been a staple in Legacy and Vintage for years and remains a powerful card to this day. However, the card received a power creep with Grief in Modern Horizons II, which basically limited its space in the competitive scene.

Still, Unmask's power level when compared to other cards in its category is remarkable, and it remains one of the most powerful discard spells ever released.

6 - Inquisition of Kozilek

Inquisition of Kozilek was, for a long time, a staple in Modern and Legacy and remains an essential card in Timeless as it can discard any early game piece, being ideal for the first turns where discard spells, in general, they tend to be more relevant.

It lost ground in the Metagame as Modern Horizons 2's Evokers gained notoriety, but we can still find some copies of them in most Midranges.

5 - Cabal Therapy

The potential in Cabal Therapy depends on two factors: if we have enough creatures to sacrifice and ways to extract information from the opponent's hand, it is a two-for-one for one mana and can potentially break the opponent's entire strategy to the point it was one of the pieces that led to Gitaxian Probe being banned in Legacy.

On its own, it is a little less efficient than other targeted discard spells due to the whiff rate, but the first Therapy can always serve to extract information while the second removes the opponent's key piece.

4 - Hymn to Tourach

Hymn to Tourach is one of the most efficient spells when it comes to ruining plans in the first turns. For a few years, the sequencing of Dark Ritual, Thoughtseize and Hymn to Tourach was enough to remove any expectation of our opponent having a chance in the game, especially when accompanied by a large threat like Tarmogoyf or Tombstalker.

Time passed, and this combination lost its effectiveness. Still, discarding two cards randomly for two mana is a strong move, and guarantees Hymn to Tourach some space in the Sideboards in Legacy and also a preventative ban on Pauper.

3 - Mind Twist

At its base, Mind Twist is less efficient than Hymn to Tourach in terms of cost and effectiveness, requiring three mana to do what its successor does with two. However, Mind Twist's ceiling is much higher and would mean that this spell could easily take over grindier games in Legacy, where it is currently banned.

In the distant past, Mind Twist was another card combined with Dark Ritual and other fast mana sources such as Lake of the Dead to deplete the opponent's resources quickly, and its mana cost makes it much easier to play with other colors that would certainly find ways to get the most value out of it.

2 - Thoughtseize

For over a decade, Thoughtseize was the best discard spell in Magic: The Gathering. For one mana, it allowed you to choose any non-land from your opponent's hand and replaced Duress as a staple - its reign remained and remains relevant in the competitive scene to this day, where it is still one of the best pieces of disruption in the game's history.

From Legacy to Pioneer, there is no shortage of decks that run Thoughtseize as the main early game interaction and a means of keeping combos and other degenerate strategies in check, and even its life loss has been used to an advantage by some archetypes, such as the Death's Shadow lists.

1 - Grief

Grief appeared as part of one of the most powerful cycles in Magic: the Evokers from Modern Horizons II, where they all have powerful effects that can be cast for free by paying an alternative cost.

In theory, it wasn't much different from Unmask, just with a creature body rather than as a spell - but in practice, players found ways to abuse its ETB effect on an archetype that became known as Scam, which consists of using Grief's Evoke to discard a card from the opponent's hand and, with the trigger on the stack, use some effect to bring it back to the battlefield, removing a second card from the hand as early as the first turn.

This combination is so powerful that it became the best strategy in Modern and Legacy, and Grief remains the main target of debate when we discuss the health in these formats today - after all, in addition to taking away two specific resources from the opponent, it remains in play as a threat to win the game, doing everything a disruptive deck wants with just one slot.

Nothing compares to Grief when it comes to discard spells today, and its interaction with Not Dead After All, Reanimate, Ephemerate or even Fable of the Mirror-Breaker puts it at a level far above the rest of the competition.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading!