MTG Tutors: The Best Tutor in Every Color for Commander

MTG tutors come in two piles now. The best tutor in every color is a cheap Game Changer: Demonic Tutor in black, Mystical Tutor in blue, Enlightened Tutor in white, Worldly Tutor in green and Gamble in red. If your table plays Bracket 1 or 2, you can't run any of them, so the useful question is which tutor comes next. That's the list below, built from EDHREC's deck counts on October 22, 2026.

Short version: Diabolic Intent in black, Muddle the Mixture in blue, Open the Armory in white, Finale of Devastation in green and Imperial Recruiter in red. Green-white decks get the best deal of all with Eladamri's Call.

How MTG tutors fit the Commander Brackets now

Until October 2025 the brackets asked for "few" tutors in the first three brackets, and nobody agreed on what few meant. Wizards then chose to "remove the tutor restrictions from Commander Brackets entirely and rely on Game Changers to catch the most efficient tutors". Their own example says it all: "Sure, Demonic Tutor is very efficient, but if you're spending four mana on Diabolic Tutor, is that really a huge problem?"

So the rule is simple. Brackets 1 and 2 allow no Game Changers, Bracket 3 allows up to three, and Brackets 4 and 5 have no limit. Wizards describes Game Changers as cards that, among other things, "efficiently search for their strongest cards". Of the 53 cards on the list, Scryfall tags 13 as tutors, and that count includes Gifts Ungiven, Intuition and Opposition Agent alongside the obvious ones. In a Bracket 3 deck, every Game Changer tutor costs one of your three slots, which is the real price of running Demonic Tutor there.

Any tutor not on the list is legal at every bracket. Wizards was blunt about piling them in: "If you want to play tons of inefficient tutors, it may not make for the most replayable deck, but we don't need a safeguard for that." That's a nudge, not a rule. Talk it through in your Rule Zero chat if your deck runs six of them.

The best MTG tutors by color

Prices are Scryfall's TCGplayer market figures for one printing of each card, read on October 22, 2026. They move weekly, so treat them as a rough guide.

Share of EDHREC decks that could run each tutor and do. Image: BaseMTG chart. Data: EDHREC card pages and Scryfall Game Changer flags, October 22, 2026.

Seven of the eight most-played tutors are Game Changers. The odd one out is Eladamri's Call, and it's there because green-white is a smaller pool of decks, not because it beats Worldly Tutor.

Black: Demonic Tutor, then Diabolic Intent

Demonic Tutor is the cleanest tutor ever printed: two mana, any card, straight to your hand. It's in almost one in five black decks on EDHREC, more than any other tutor we pulled. Run it in Bracket 3 if it's worth one of your three slots, and it usually is.

Vampiric Tutor costs one mana and is an instant, but it puts the card on top of your library and costs 2 life. It's the better card for combo decks that win the same turn. For everyone else Demonic is better.

Imperial Seal is a sorcery-speed Vampiric Tutor that cost about $158 on October 22, 2026. It shows up in under 5% of black decks. Skip it unless you're building for cEDH, where our cEDH staples guide covers the rest of that shopping list.

Diabolic Intent is our Bracket 2 pick. It's Demonic Tutor with one extra cost: sacrifice a creature. A Treasure-maker or a token makes that free, and so does a creature that's about to die anyway. It's in roughly 7.6% of black decks, the most-played black tutor outside the list.

• Grim Tutor: three mana and 3 life for any card to hand. Fine if you don't run creatures to sacrifice.
• Diabolic Tutor: four mana, any card, and about two dollars on October 22. The card Wizards used to show why slow tutors don't need a rule. It's the budget pick.
• Entomb: one-mana instant that puts any card into your graveyard. Only for reanimator decks, where it's better than any of the above.

Blue: Mystical Tutor, then Muddle the Mixture

Mystical Tutor finds an instant or sorcery and puts it on top, for one blue mana at instant speed. It's a Game Changer because it's the best way to find the one spell that wins.

Outside the list, blue's options are narrow. Fabricate finds an artifact for three mana and is the most-played of the three. Solve the Equation finds an instant or sorcery, also for three. We'd pick Muddle the Mixture, because it does two jobs. It counters an instant or sorcery for two mana, or you transmute it for three and get any card with mana value 2: a creature, an artifact, a land-fetching spell, whatever your deck needs. It's also the cheapest pick in our table.

White: Enlightened Tutor, then Open the Armory

Enlightened Tutor finds an artifact or enchantment and puts it on top, for one mana at instant speed. In a deck built around one piece of equipment or one enchantment, it's a second copy of that card.

Open the Armory is the pick for Bracket 2. Two mana for an Aura or Equipment to hand, which is exactly what Voltron and equipment decks want, and it costs pocket change. Enchantress decks should play Idyllic Tutor instead: three mana, any enchantment.

Green: Worldly Tutor, then Finale of Devastation

Worldly Tutor finds a creature and puts it on top for one mana. Green also has three more Game Changer tutors: Crop Rotation (sacrifice a land, get any land onto the battlefield), Natural Order and Survival of the Fittest. If you're in Bracket 3, Worldly is the one we'd spend a slot on.

Finale of Devastation is the best tutor green has outside the list, and possibly the best in this whole column. You pay X plus two green, and a creature with mana value X or less goes straight onto the battlefield, from your library or your graveyard. At X of 10 or more your whole team gets +X/+X and haste, so late in a game it's a finisher too. It's also the priciest Bracket 2 pick in our table.

Red: Gamble, then Imperial Recruiter

Red has the fewest real tutors. Gamble finds any card for one mana, then makes you discard a card at random. With a small hand it's close to a Demonic Tutor; with a full hand it's a coin flip on whether you keep what you found.

Imperial Recruiter is the Bracket 2 pick. It's a three-mana creature that finds any creature with power 2 or less. That covers a lot of utility creatures, and the Recruiter can be blinked or recurred for another search. It's in about 3.9% of red decks, which tells you how few red decks bother.

Two colors and colorless

Eladamri's Call is the one two-color tutor worth a mention. Two mana, instant speed, any creature to hand. In green-white decks it's in about 8.6% of eligible decks, the highest share of any tutor off the Game Changers list. Expedition Map finds a land for one colorless mana. It's a tutor for decks with a land that does the winning, and filler for the rest.

Our pick in each color for Brackets 1 and 2. Card images: Wizards of the Coast, via Scryfall.

Which tutors to skip

• Imperial Seal, unless you're in cEDH. It costs more than double Demonic Tutor and does less.
• Vampiric Tutor in decks that can't use the card the same turn. Card on top, 2 life down, and you still have to draw it.
• Gamble in decks that like a full grip. The random discard can take the card you just found.
• Any third or fourth slow tutor in a casual deck. Wizards is right that they're not a power problem, but the same five cards every game get old for the other three players too.

What players said about the change

When The Command Zone covered the October 2025 update, two Commander Format Panel members, Rachel and JLK, went through the changes on the show. One viewer summed up Josh's point on why tutors matter in a paraphrase: "tutors are not just as powerful as the best thing they can get, they are powerful because they can get so many things." That's why Demonic Tutor is a Game Changer and Diabolic Tutor isn't: both find the same card, and one does it for half the mana.

Some players were simply relieved. "Thank you for removing "few tutors"! I have a Bracket 2 hidden commander deck, and it looks on paper to be a lot scarier than it is," wrote @Grimlocksmith under the episode.

On r/EDH, a thread asking whether people actually run tutors in Bracket 2 got a plain answer: "You're allowed to run basically every single tutor in bracket 2 besides the game changers," wrote u/Middle_Chard_8434, adding that the closest thing to a "game-ending" tutor is Finale of Devastation, "but even that's bracket 2 compliant." Another reply drew the line at graveyard tricks: that poster wouldn't call a deck running Entomb and Reanimate a Bracket 2 deck. We agree with both. Legal and fair aren't the same thing, which is why Entomb sits in our reanimator-only line above.

If you're checking a whole deck against the brackets, our Commander Brackets guide covers the other rules, and the saltiest cards in Commander list shows which other Game Changers your table is most likely to complain about.

How we checked this: on October 22, 2026 we pulled 37 tutors from Scryfall (card text, cost, Game Changer flag, price) and EDHREC (decks running each card out of the decks that could), and sorted them by share. The script and data are kept with our sources.

References

• Wizards of the Coast: Commander Brackets Beta Update, October 21, 2025
• Wizards of the Coast: Commander format and Game Changers
• Scryfall: Game Changers tagged as tutors
• EDHREC: Demonic Tutor
• The Command Zone 705: The New, NEW Commander Brackets