MTG Overload Explained: All 27 Cards, Rules and the Best Commander Deck

Overload is the rare Magic keyword that does not add an ability to a spell — it takes one away. Pay the overload cost and the spell stops targeting entirely, which turns a one-mana cantrip into a one-sided sweeper and, in the process, walks straight past hexproof. There are exactly 27 overload cards in paper Magic, every one of them an instant or a sorcery, and the whole mechanic costs $83.17 to buy outright.

This guide covers what overload actually does, the rules interaction that makes it uniquely good in Commander, all 27 cards with both of their costs, how much the mechanic really charges you for the upgrade, format legality, and a 100-card Mizzix of the Izmagnus deck built to make those overload costs collapse.

What overload actually does

Overload is an alternative cost. Every overload card carries the same reminder text, word for word:

Overload {cost} (You may cast this spell for its overload cost. If you do, change “target” in its text to “each”.)

That is the entire mechanic. Electrickery normally reads “Electrickery deals 1 damage to target creature you don’t control.” Cast it for its overload cost of {1}{R} and it reads “Electrickery deals 1 damage to each creature you don’t control.” One extra mana converts a ping into a one-sided sweeper that leaves your own board untouched.

Three details matter and are routinely misremembered:

• Overload is an alternative cost, not an additional one. You pay the overload cost instead of the mana cost, never on top of it.
• The mana value never changes. Scryfall and the rules agree: paying an alternative cost does not alter the spell’s mana value. An overloaded Cyclonic Rift is still a mana value 2 spell on the stack, no matter that you paid seven.
• Only the word “target” changes. Every restriction attached to that target survives. Vandalblast overloaded destroys each artifact you don’t control — the qualifier stays; only the targeting goes.

The rule that makes overload unique: it stops targeting altogether

This is the part worth internalising, and it is stated explicitly in the official rulings on every overload card:

“If you don’t pay the overload cost of a spell with overload, that spell will have a single target. If you pay the overload cost, the spell won’t have any targets.”

Not “targets everything” — no targets at all. And the rulings spell out the consequence directly:

“Because a spell with overload doesn’t target when its overload cost is paid, it may affect permanents with hexproof or with protection from the appropriate color.”

So the answer to the question people actually search for is: no, hexproof does not stop an overloaded Cyclonic Rift. Hexproof only says “can’t be the target of spells your opponents control.” An overloaded spell has no targets, so there is nothing for hexproof to object to. The same is true of shroud, of ward (ward triggers on being targeted, and nothing was targeted), and of the “can’t be targeted” half of protection. If you want the full picture of what those keywords do and don’t cover, we broke each of them down in our guide to hexproof in MTG.

The one thing overload does not beat: protection from damage

Here is the nuance that catches people, and it comes straight from the rulings on Electrickery:

“Note that if the spell with overload is dealing damage, protection from that spell’s color will still prevent that damage.”

Protection is a bundle of four separate shields — damage prevention, enchant/equip, blocking, and targeting. Overload defeats exactly one of them. An overloaded Electrickery or Street Spasm will happily “hit” a creature with protection from red, and then that damage is prevented anyway. Against a bounce or exile effect like Cyclonic Rift or Winds of Abandon, protection does nothing, because neither one deals damage or targets. Our protection in MTG guide works through all four shields in detail.

All 27 overload cards in Magic

Every overload card ever printed in paper, sorted by the date it first appeared. Both costs are listed so you can see the premium at a glance. Prices are Scryfall’s current market price for the default printing.

The type line is the first surprise. All 27 are instants or sorceries — overload has never once been printed on a permanent in the thirteen years since it debuted. Eldritch Immunity is the only card that even bends the pattern, arriving as a Kindred Instant — Eldrazi rather than a plain instant.

What overload actually charges you: +3.15 mana on average

Because every overload card prints both of its costs on the same piece of cardboard, the upgrade fee is measurable rather than arguable. Across the 26 cards with a fixed mana overload cost (Street Spasm is excluded — its cost scales with X):

The mode is +4, at eleven cards — 42.3% of the mechanic. That is the real design tax: most of the time, going from “one thing” to “every thing” costs you four extra mana, and the mean lands at +3.15.

Two cards break the curve in opposite directions.

Mind Rake is the only card in Magic that is cheaper to overload than to cast

Mind Rake costs {2}{B} to cast for “Target player discards two cards.” Its overload cost is {1}{B} — one mana less — and it makes each player discard two cards. There is no other overload card with a negative premium. Wizards priced it that way because symmetrical discard hurts you too: you are also a player, and you also discard two. Cast normally it is a targeted Mind Rot; overloaded it is a cheaper, symmetrical Bottomless Pit effect that you would only fire off with an empty hand.

Street Spasm is the only overload cost that scales

Street Spasm is {X}{R} to deal X damage to one non-flying creature you don’t control, and its overload cost is {X}{X}{R}{R}. The X is doubled rather than a flat surcharge, so the premium grows with the spell: X=2 costs 3 mana targeted and 6 overloaded; X=5 costs 6 targeted and 12 overloaded. It is also the reason our premium table says 26 rather than 27 — you cannot express a doubling as a fixed number of extra mana.

Damn is the only overload card that changes colour between modes

Damn is a genuine oddity. It costs {B}{B} to cast — “Destroy target creature. A creature destroyed this way can’t be regenerated” — a straight Doom Blade. Its overload cost is {2}{W}{W}, and overloaded it destroys each creature: a Doom Blade in one mode and a Damnation in the other, which is exactly the joke the name is making.

Mechanically that gives it an Orzhov (W/B) colour identity even though neither mode is two-coloured, and it is the reason Damn cannot go in the Izzet deck below despite being one of the strongest overload cards in the game. It is a legitimately excellent inclusion in any white-black Commander deck that wants both a spot removal spell and a board wipe in one slot — see our best board wipes in MTG for where it ranks against the rest.

Eldritch Immunity is the only colourless overload card

Eldritch Immunity costs {C} — one colourless mana, specifically — to give a creature you control protection from each colour until end of turn. Overloaded for {4}{C}, every creature you control gains protection from every colour. That is a five-mana blowout against essentially any coloured board wipe, targeted removal spell, or damage-based sweeper your opponents can present, and because its colour identity is empty it is legal in literally every Commander deck ever built. At $7.73 it is the third most expensive overload card, and it earns the number.

Where overload comes from, and why it nearly disappeared

Overload is a Ravnica mechanic: Return to Ravnica alone accounts for 11 of the 27, and with Dragon’s Maze the original block contributed 13. Then it fell off a cliff. Between 2013 and 2019 exactly one new overload card was printed (Blustersquall, in Commander 2015), and Modern Horizons revived it in 2019 with four at once.

The mechanic’s debut beat its own set by 28 days

The first overload card in paper was not printed in Return to Ravnica. Street Spasm shipped in Duel Decks: Izzet vs. Golgari on 2012-09-07, four weeks before Return to Ravnica’s 2012-10-05 release — a preview product carrying the set’s headline mechanic before the set arrived. It is a useful reminder that a card’s default printing is not the same thing as its debut: Cyclonic Rift‘s default printing on Scryfall today is Ravnica Remastered (2024), twelve years after the card actually came out.

Nothing new since June 2024

The most recent overload cards are Eldritch Immunity and Fangs of Kalonia, both from the Modern Horizons 3 wave on 2024-06-14. Overload has had no new printings in over two years, which is roughly its historical rhythm — long silences broken by a Horizons set.

Overload legality by format

Two numbers here are worth reading properly.

Standard is zero of 27. No overload card is Standard-legal, and none has been for years — the mechanic lives entirely in eternal formats, Commander products and Horizons sets now.

Pioneer is 14 of 27, and the split is almost perfectly clean. Pioneer begins at Return to Ravnica, which is the set that introduced overload, so every overload card printed in a Standard-legal Ravnica set is Pioneer-legal — and everything since has arrived in a Modern Horizons set, a Commander deck or a supplemental product, none of which are Pioneer-legal. The format boundary and the mechanic’s history line up almost exactly.

The nine Pauper overload cards — and the one that only just qualified

Nine overload cards are Pauper-legal, and this is where a shortcut that usually works quietly breaks. Only eight of the 27 overload cards are common at their default printing — the ninth Pauper-legal card is Vandalblast, which is uncommon in Return to Ravnica and uncommon in seventeen of its twenty paper printings.

What makes it Pauper-legal is that its three printings in The Zeta Set (2026-09-02) are common. Pauper legality follows a card’s rarity in any printing, not its current default one, so Vandalblast became a legal Pauper card roughly a week before this article was written. If you have been playing Pauper for years without it, that is why. At $1.32 it is also the most expensive card on that list by a factor of four.

What the whole mechanic costs

All 27 overload cards together cost $83.17. That number is almost entirely one card:

• Cyclonic Rift alone is $39.37 — 47.3% of the entire mechanic’s value.
• Corporeal Projection ($11.08), Eldritch Immunity ($7.73) and Mizzix’s Mastery ($7.65) are the next three.
• Those four cards are $65.83 of the $83.17 — 79.1%.
• Eighteen of the 27 are under a dollar, and together they cost $4.60.

In other words, you can own two thirds of every overload card ever printed for less than the price of a booster pack. You can check any of these against live market data on our MTG card price tool.

The best overload cards, ranked

1. Cyclonic Rift

The most-played blue card in Commander, and the reason most players know the keyword at all. {1}{U} bounces one nonland permanent you don’t control; {6}{U} at instant speed returns every nonland permanent you don’t control to its owner’s hand. It is not symmetrical, it does not target, it ignores hexproof, and it is castable on the end step before your turn. Seven mana is a lot; it also usually ends the game.

2. Vandalblast

{R} destroys one artifact you don’t control. {4}{R} destroys each artifact you don’t control — a one-sided Vandalblast effect that leaves your own Sol Ring and signets standing. In a format where every deck runs eight to twelve artifacts, five mana for a one-sided artifact wrath is a bargain. It is also now Pauper-legal.

3. Mizzium Mortars

{1}{R} deals 4 damage to a creature you don’t control; {3}{R}{R}{R} deals 4 damage to each creature you don’t control. Six mana for a one-sided sweeper that kills most of the format, and it is 43 cents.

4. Winds of Abandon

{1}{W} exiles one creature you don’t control; {4}{W}{W} exiles each creature you don’t control, with each of those players searching out a basic land as compensation. Exile-based, one-sided, and it dodges every regeneration and death trigger in the format. The land compensation is real but rarely matters at six mana.

5. Mizzix’s Mastery

{3}{R} exiles one instant or sorcery from your graveyard and casts a copy free. Overloaded at {5}{R}{R}{R}, it does that to every instant and sorcery in your graveyard at once. In a spellslinger deck with a stocked yard this is a genuine game-ender, and the rulings confirm the copies are cast during resolution, so you cannot hold them for later.

6. Counterflux

{U}{U}{R} counters a spell and can’t be countered itself. Overloaded at {1}{U}{U}{R} — a premium of just one mana, the second-cheapest upgrade in the mechanic — it counters each spell your opponents control on the stack. It answers a storm turn or a copied-spell chain for four mana. See where it lands among the best counterspells in Magic.

The best Commander deck for overload: Mizzix of the Izmagnus

Overload is an Izzet mechanic in practice as well as in flavour: 20 of the 27 overload cards fit inside a single Izzet colour identity (six blue, eight red, five Izzet, plus the colourless Eldritch Immunity). No other pair of colours comes close.

And Mizzix of the Izmagnus is not just a colour-matching commander — it is mechanically the best possible partner for the keyword. Mizzix reads:

“Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell with mana value greater than the number of experience counters you have, you get an experience counter. Instant and sorcery spells you cast cost {1} less to cast for each experience counter you have.”

The official overload rulings explain exactly why those two cards fit together:

“To determine the total cost of a spell, start with the mana cost or alternative cost you’re paying (such as an overload cost), add any cost increases, then apply any cost reductions.”

Cost reductions apply to the overload cost. Mizzix’s discount is not restricted to the printed mana cost — it reduces whatever you are actually paying. At six experience counters, an overloaded Cyclonic Rift costs a single blue mana. That is the deck.

Two things keep it honest. Mizzix reduces generic mana only, so coloured pips are a floor: Mizzium Mortars never gets cheaper than {R}{R}{R} and Corporeal Projection bottoms out at {U}{U}{R}{R}. And experience counters only accrue when you cast a spell whose mana value exceeds your current count — and per the ruling above, an overloaded spell’s mana value is unchanged. Overloading a Cyclonic Rift for seven mana is still casting a mana-value-2 spell, so it will not grow your counters past 2. You build the counters with genuinely expensive spells, then spend them on overload costs.

The overload package (20 cards)

What each overload cost collapses to at six experience counters. Prices are the cheapest paper printing.

The full 100-card decklist

Total build cost $178.05, of which Cyclonic Rift is $39.37. Swap it for more basics if that is out of budget — the deck functions without it.

How the deck plays

Turns one through three are ramp and cantrips: Sol Ring, the signets, Ponder and Preordain. Mizzix lands on turn four and immediately starts collecting counters off any instant or sorcery bigger than the count — which early on means almost everything.

From five counters onward the deck stops paying real costs. Jace’s Sanctum stacks with Mizzix for another generic reduction on top. The spellslinger shell — Young Pyromancer, Third Path Iconoclast, Talrand, Sky Summoner, Murmuring Mystic — turns every cheap overload spell into a body, and Storm-Kiln Artist turns them into Treasure. Archmage Emeritus makes each one draw a card.

The finish is usually an overloaded Cyclonic Rift on the end step before your turn, followed by an alpha strike into an empty board — or Mizzix’s Mastery overloaded, recasting the whole graveyard at once. If you would rather have an AI build a variant around a different Izzet commander, our public deck browser has thousands of community lists to start from.

Building around overload without Mizzix

Mizzix is the sharpest fit, but overload rewards any deck that cares about cost reduction or instant/sorcery density. Kess, Dissident Mage and Veyran, Voice of Duality are natural homes. Outside blue and red, the options thin out fast: Damn in Orzhov, Winds of Abandon and Stirring Address in white, Fangs of Kalonia and Scale Up in green counters decks, and Break the Ice and Mind Rake in black. Seven cards across four colours — against twenty in Izzet.

The general rule: an overload card is worth a slot when its overloaded mode is a one-sided sweeper and its normal mode is a playable removal spell. Vandalblast, Mizzium Mortars and Winds of Abandon all pass. Dynacharge and Weapon Surge only pass in a deck that is already going wide. Our best removal spells in MTG breakdown puts the overload options in context against the rest of the format’s removal.

Frequently asked questions about overload

Does hexproof stop an overloaded Cyclonic Rift?

No. The official ruling is explicit: a spell with overload doesn’t target when its overload cost is paid, so it may affect permanents with hexproof. Hexproof only prevents your opponents’ spells from targeting, and an overloaded spell has no targets at all.

Does ward stop an overloaded spell?

No. Ward triggers when a permanent becomes the target of a spell or ability an opponent controls. An overloaded spell targets nothing, so ward never triggers.

Does protection stop an overloaded spell?

Partly. Protection’s “can’t be targeted” clause does nothing against overload. But protection’s damage-prevention clause still works — the rulings note that if the overloaded spell deals damage, protection from that spell’s colour still prevents it. So an overloaded Electrickery won’t kill a creature with protection from red, while an overloaded Cyclonic Rift bounces it regardless.

Is overload an additional cost or an alternative cost?

An alternative cost. You pay the overload cost instead of the mana cost, never both.

Does overloading change a spell’s mana value?

No. The mana value stays whatever the printed mana cost says, regardless of what you actually paid. An overloaded Cyclonic Rift is a mana value 2 spell for Counterbalance, for Mizzix’s experience trigger, and for everything else.

Can I cast an overloaded spell “without paying its mana cost”?

No. The rulings state that if you are instructed to cast a spell with overload without paying its mana cost, you can’t choose to pay its overload cost instead. Free-cast effects always give you the normal, targeted version.

Do cost reducers like Mizzix reduce the overload cost?

Yes. Cost calculation starts from whichever cost you are paying — including an alternative cost like overload — and then applies reductions. Mizzix, Jace’s Sanctum and similar effects all shrink overload costs, though only the generic portion.

Does overload hit my own permanents?

Only if the original wording did. Overload changes “target” to “each” and nothing else, so a spell that read “target creature you don’t control” becomes “each creature you don’t control” — still one-sided. A spell that read “target creature” becomes “each creature”, which hits yours too.

How many overload cards are there?

27 in paper Magic, all instants or sorceries. There has never been an overload permanent.

What is the cheapest overload card?

Street Spasm at $0.07, followed by Chemister’s Trick and Weapon Surge at $0.08 each. Eighteen of the 27 cost under a dollar.

Is overload legal in Standard?

No. Zero of the 27 overload cards are Standard-legal. The mechanic currently lives in Commander, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, Pioneer and Pauper only.

Why is Vandalblast Pauper-legal if it’s an uncommon?

Because Pauper legality follows a card’s rarity in any printing. Vandalblast was uncommon in every printing until The Zeta Set (2026-09-02) printed it at common, which made it legal.

Which overload card is cheapest to overload relative to casting it?

Mind Rake — and it is the only one that costs less. It casts for {2}{B} and overloads for {1}{B}, a premium of −1. Every other overload card charges between one and five extra mana, with a mean of +3.15.

The short version

Overload converts a targeted spell into an untargeted one for extra mana — a mean of +3.15, most commonly +4. That untargeted status is not a side effect; it is the point, because it walks past hexproof, shroud, ward and protection’s targeting clause in one motion. There are 27 of them, all instants and sorceries, all Commander-legal, none Standard-legal, and the whole set costs less than a single dual land. Two thirds of them cost under a dollar.

If you play blue and red, Mizzix of the Izmagnus turns the mechanic’s one real drawback — the cost premium — into a rounding error. If you play anything else, take Cyclonic Rift, take Vandalblast if you are in red, and take Damn if you are in white and black.