What's in Your Toolbox? Cyclonic Rift in cEDH

Cyclonic Rift | Illustrated by Chris Rahn

The collective groan from a Commander table following the words, "I am gonna cast an overloaded Cyclonic Rift," is nearly as iconic as the card itself. Cyclonic Rift has been a bane of Commander pods for as long as it has been in print, and Saffron Olive has outspokenly banned it from his Commander Clash series. Further, articles suggesting alternatives due to the common disdainful reaction to it have been written across the multiverse of Commander content creation, including here at Commander's Herald! While price has, at various points in time, been a motivator to seek alternatives, Overloaded Cyclonic Rift is synonymous with powerful plays in the Commander format.

But What About the Big Leagues?

So for all the buzz it causes in casual pods, how does it stack up in cEDH? Naturally, during my early days of exploring the cEDH format, I held a large amount of skepticism towards cards and play patterns that appeared to be justified by their performance in lower-power pods. Cyclonic Rift found itself among Consecrated Sphinx, Mana Drain, Cryptic Command, and Rhystic Study for blue cards I was initially skeptical of when building my first cEDH decks in 2016.

Rhystic in particular has proven its worth without a doubt, and the rest of the line up largely does not make the cut for cEDH decks that don't have some really weird gimmick going on. However, Cyclonic Rift is a card that I've found difficult to evaluate. For games where the board gets messy and full of stax permanents, Cyclonic Rift has a dramatic impact on the game, but in games where speed is the name of the game, it might as well be blank cardboard. Still, despite this wide range of performances, I believe Cyclonic Rift is at home in many cEDH decks.

Abandoning Hammers for Swiss Army Knives

When discussing cards that are "hammers", or cards powerful in very specific situations but fairly inflexible otherwise, it is important to discuss the genesis of cEDH. As part of carving out of cEDH as an unique identifier for a deck, there was a sort of revolution around deckbuilding philosophy that led to deckbuilders moving away from cards played for narrow circumstances, or with the sole role of winning the game, and reaching for cards that were "swiss army knives" and are serviceable in wide variety of situations. This a phenomenon we have seen in formats like Modern; be it the presence of Grapeshot and Remand in Gifts Storm or Pyrite Spellbomb in the now-banned Krark-Clan Ironworks deck, it's generally accepted that if you can play a win condition that has other applications at no other cost, you should.

The singleton and high card count requirements of Commander decks caused deckbuilders to become overzealous on these principles, and cards that existed for narrow situations outside of dedicated "toolbox" decks were referred to as "dead cards". The push to minimize these "dead cards" is easy to get swept up in, and following the idea can often lead you to passing on Cyclonic Rift given its generically reactive nature. Cards like Chain of Vapor and Dress Down are often substituted instead, given their additional utility when not needed to be reactive, but they are certainly less flexible when it comes to answering large amounts of opposing problematic permanents.

This philosophy is a good general heuristic, and being narrow is the core argument I made against the card Stifle earlier this year. However, the heuristic breaks down when you start to consider the composition of more linear decks. Consider a deck like Birgi, God of Storytelling. Birgi is a "non-deterministic" Storm deck that requires a critical mass of red cards that either generate mana or cards in order to amass enough resources to eventually win the game. A narrow reactive card like Cyclonic Rift would be problematic in a configuration like that (if you were allowed to play it, of course; just pretend it's colorless for the sake of this example) given it does not play well towards the primary gameplan and is narrow in its game-breaking applications. Compound that with a general lack of tutors to find it when it is needed, and Rift would just be out of place were it legal in Birgi.

Now consider instead a deck like Tymna the Weaver and Kraum, Ludevic's Opus "Blue Farm". This deck looks to utilize its commanders to accumulate card advantage, but its wins are fairly compact, requiring only 2-3 dedicated cards that have some amount of other limited applications. The rest of the deck is free to be packed full of interaction, tutors, and "hammers" for complicated situations. Here Cyclonic Rift is right at home! The access to multiple variations of tutors to find it when you need it, and the desire to keep the board clear to keep the cards flowing from Tymna the Weaver triggers makes the shell ideal for Cyclonic Rift.

So clearly Cyclonic Rift has at least some homes in cEDH, but how do you know if it's the best card you could be playing for clogged up boards?

The Right Tool For the Job

As creature decks continue to dominate the most visible cEDH tournaments, discussion around the need to "play more removal" is often brought up, but rarely do two people expressing that sentiment agree on the right cards to reach for. Among the list of commonly quoted cards are Dress Down, Toxic Deluge, Fire Covenant, Fatal Push, Lightning Bolt, Path to Exile, Damn, and even seemingly narrow, yet efficient, removal like Blue Elemental Blast! The power of creature decks within the wildly diverse cEDH metagame is that there are very few catchall cards that allow decks to "incidentally" hate them out, and each removal spell comes with relevant drawbacks. Dress Down, previously mentioned for its flexibility to draw a card if it's irrelevant, is only a temporary fix, and if that is your only mass removal and you get stopped for a turn, that may not be good enough.

By the same token, Toxic Deluge being a sorcery comes up against decks like Winota, and efficient, targeted removal can easily get overwhelmed if drawn too late. This is where the flexibility of Cyclonic Rift shows itself. Despite being somewhat temporary and seemingly overcosted, the ability to clear all nonland permanents puts it a cut above a card like Dress Down, instant speed gives it an edge over something like Damn or Toxic Deluge, and the option to play it for much cheaper to surgically remove an impactful permanent allows it to do a reasonable impression of all the other narrow removal that comes extremely cheap. Despite being narrow in that it only answers permanents in play, it is the best single card for the job, especially if you only want to play one card of that effect.

I mentioned Tymna and Kraum as a deck interested in Cyclonic Rift before due to the desire to play long games and room for interaction, but Tymna and Kraum is also likely interested in more of those effects like Dress Down, Damn, Swords to Plowshares, Chain of Vapor, etc.

So what about decks that seek to interact a little less in favor of speed? Consider a deck like Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh and Silas Renn, Seeker Adept "Turbo Ad Nauseam". This deck looks to trim back a bit on the density of interaction due to the disinterest in playing longer games garnered from choosing the additional mana generation opportunities offered by having a 0-mana commander instead of commanders that accumulate card advantage in some way.

I thought for a long time that this deck specifically is the kind of deck that should be disinterested in Cyclonic Rift due to its increased interest in additional mana, payoff for that mana, and interaction that can also be used to defend a win attempt. However, as time progressed, I saw many specific scenarios in which boards would get clogged up with prison elements, and the targeted removal combined with Dress Down wasn't enough to answer all the problems. Simply having access to a Cyclonic Rift somewhere in the 98 would make a huge difference on the texture of the game and allow for the opportunity to punch in a win after an end step Overloaded Cyclonic Rift.

All of this says nothing of the synergies that Cyclonic Rift can have alongside Wheel of Fortune effects late in the game to permanently answer opponents' game objects. All told, despite initially viewing Cyclonic Rift as narrow, given how much of cEDH revolves around spells on the stack over permanents on the battlefield, recent shifts and misevaluation of the true flexibility of rift lead to a difficulty reconciling how powerful it was in formats too powerful for Chromatic Lantern.

The Warning Label

The final note worth mentioning about Cyclonic Rift is that there is extreme danger to having to use it prematurely. A perfect example can be found in this Playing With Power video in which a Cyclonic Rift is fired off, by necessity, before the caster is the next player to take a turn. This provides an opportunity for the player before the Rift caster to win the game unimpeded by the host of problems plaguing the board state beforehand. Cards like Defense Grid also boast similar opportunities to asymmetrically help opponents win the game over yourself, and are important to keep in mind the risks associated with casting a card as impactful as Cyclonic Rift before you can be the first to capitalize on the new game state.

Ultimately, Cyclonic Rift is seeing more play as the chants to "play more removal" recruit more voices. The stats side of cedh.guide has Cyclonic Rift as the 43rd most played card in cEDH at the moment, and I expect that stock to continue to rise in the coming months. Popularity obviously does not correlate with power (after all, Sylvan Library is 59th on the list), but trends over time tell a story, and the story here certainly communicates that people are tired of the bogged down cEDH boards. This is supposed to be a turn 2 format, after all!

I frequently call out cards I think are good, cards I think are medium or situational, and particularly cards I think downright suck. However, the cards that hold my attention the most in any format are ones that defy my attempts to accurately analyze them. Often nailing down the analysis also comes with valuable deckbuilding insight I carry forward into future evaluations. In the case of Cyclonic Rift, a valuable lesson about having a few more hammers in lieu of a few of the weaker swiss army knives was conveyed, and it is a lesson easily applied to one of my favorite cEDH decks filled with tutors: Najeela. If you already have Cyclonic Rift in your deck, then I commend you; if not, I hope I have convinced you to give it another look. If I convinced you of nothing else, at the very least, please play more removal.