Brilliant Ultimatum
- Mana cost
- {W}{W}{U}{U}{U}{B}{B}
- Type
- Sorcery
- Set
- Shards of Alara #159 (rare)
- Price
- $1.20 USD
Exile the top five cards of your library. An opponent separates those cards into two piles. You may play lands and cast spells from one of those piles. If you cast a spell this way, you cast it without paying its mana cost.
Brilliant Ultimatum has 1 printing, first in Shards of Alara (2008). EDHREC ranks it #12,667 among Commander cards. It appears most in The Celestial Toymaker decks (2,418 on EDHREC). It has 6 official rulings.
Legality
- commander: legal
- legacy: legal
- vintage: legal
- pauper: not legal
- modern: legal
- pioneer: not legal
- standard: not legal
- brawl: not legal
Commanders that run Brilliant Ultimatum most
Deck counts from EDHREC.
- The Celestial Toymaker: 2,418 decks
- Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign: 1,927 decks
- Jodah, Archmage Eternal: 948 decks
Often played with Brilliant Ultimatum
Cards that show up in the same decks on EDHREC.
Rulings
- : The cards are exiled face up.
- : The cards in the pile that wasn’t chosen remain exiled. Likewise, any cards in the chosen pile that you can’t play or you choose not to play remain exiled.
- : If you cast a card “without paying its mana cost,” you can’t pay any alternative costs. You can pay additional costs, such as conspire costs and kicker costs.
- : You can play a land card from the chosen pile only if it’s your turn (which it probably is, since Brilliant Ultimatum is a sorcery) and you haven’t yet played a land this turn. That means that if there are two lands in the chosen pile, you’ll be able to play a maximum of one of them.
- : You play cards from the chosen pile as part of the resolution of Brilliant Ultimatum. You may play them in any order. Timing restrictions based on the card’s type (such as creature or sorcery) are ignored. Other play restrictions are not (such as “Cast [this card] only during combat”). You play all of the cards you like, putting land onto the battlefield and spells on the stack, then Brilliant Ultimatum finishes resolving and is put into your graveyard. The spells you cast this way will then resolve as normal, one at a time, in the opposite order that they were put on the stack.
- : One of the piles may have zero cards in it if the opponent wishes.