After playing green in Magic: The Gathering for a long time, it’s pretty clear that green may be the color that is affected the most by when board wipes are cast. However, having board wipes that clear the board for your massive green beasts or synergistic elves can create a strong lead in any game, but there are only a few green board wipe cards available in Magic The Gathering.

On average, the best green board wipes are Wave of Vitriol and Squall Line. Green board wipes are conditional often affecting flying creatures, artifacts, or enchantments. Green board wipes are predominantly played in less competitive formats such as Commander.

Green decks have very few choices for board wipes, and they are not as wide as the ones in white or black. But what makes up for their lack of coverage is their strong synergy to green. Green board wipes fill the gaps in defenses and support the deck’s strengths in many strategies.

Here are some of the best green sweepers that I recommend for players to use in their decks.

1. Windstorm

Recommended Formats:	Commander

Windstorm deals X damage to each creature with flying.

Windstorm has the general structure of green board wipes.

This sweeper deals X damage to creatures with flying. Assuming you have enough mana, you can damage all creatures with Flying on the battlefield.

It’s an incomplete board wipe, sure, but green creatures are usually the biggest creatures on the board and often don’t have Flying.

Think of Windstorm as protecting green’s weak spot when other anti-flying options aren’t available to deal with your opponent’s board.

The positive with this limitation is that there are likely to be very few green flying creatures on your side of the board. This board wipe spell, when used in green-dominant decks, can be one-sided. You can use it as early as turn two, which is good against early fragile flying creatures trying to swarm the board.   

2. Hurricane

Recommended Formats:	Commander, Penny Dreadful

Hurricane deals X damage to each creature with flying and each player.

If you need a board wipe to push your opponents in being defensive, then Hurricane is a great choice.

You deal X damage to all flying creatures and all players as early as turn two. Again, flying creatures are damaged, but this time, player’s life totals are so getting hit.

Dealing direct damage and taking out enough key creatures on your opponent’s side of the board can push them to be more defensive, thus allowing you to gain control of the game.

For example, If you’re dealing with a UW deck, they tend to cast flying creatures early and in mid-game, controlling the board first and annoying you with evasive attackers.

Casting Hurricane lets you wipe out flying creatures and deal face damage to your opponent. As a result:

• You still have your creatures to control the board
• Your opponents at a lower life total
• Fewer enemy creatures to deal with.

Giving you the chance to fight back and dictate how the game goes.

ALSO READ: Best MTG Green Counterspells [Guide To Green]

3. Whirlwind

Recommended Formats:	Commander

Destroy all creatures with flying.

You notice by now that green represents nature and the caring of life forms… except if you fly, then green feels compelled to destroy you!

Whirlwind is a sweeper that destroys all flying creatures on the battlefield for only four mana.

This is great against flying themed decks like Angels and Dragons, as they usually have high toughness that may get around other green sweepers.

This board wipe spell is excellent during the late game when flyers are possibly tanky and challenging to deal with using direct damage.

Regarding anti-flying board wipes, I prefer to use Whirlwind because it is effective in the mid and late games for a consistent mana cost. It’s a sound insurance card against dragons and flying threats that are as big, and sometimes bigger, than your green creatures in play.  

4. Squall Line

Recommended Formats:	Commander

Squall Line deals X damage to each creature with flying and each player.

What’s faster than a hurricane, a whirlwind, and a windstorm? It’s Squall Line.

This board wipe spell is Hurricane in instant form. You can cast the same effect of X damage to flying creatures and to players during any time an instant can normally be cast.

Being an instant spell makes Squall Line more reliable defensively.

You can cast the spell when you can’t block a swarm of attacking flyers to mitigate damage during combat. This can also be an effective surprise attack since you can also cast this board wipe during your attack phase.

For example, suppose you have a valuable creature that needs saving from multiple flying blockers during your combat phase. In that case, you can cast Squall Line to prevent damage taken from enemy flyers by destroying them before they can do damage.

As a result, you can save your creature and eliminate your opponent’s. Then there’s the additional face damage from the spell that’ll significantly chip away at your opponent’s life points.

5. Silklash Spider

Recommended Formats:	Commander

Silklash Spider deals X damage to each creature with flying.

Silklash Spider is a green board wipe with eight legs ready to wipe out flying creatures every turn.

This 2/7 creature has an ability that deals x damage to all flyers on the board.

This card can potentially take out massive flyers in the late game, as X can be scaled up or down for flyers that can easily be picked off with less or more mana in the mid-game.

The X is limited by the amount of mana you have, but if you are playing green, you’ll typically have an abundance of mana in the mid to late game.

Since the board wipe is a creature ability that doesn’t tap, you can use this several times on any turn as long as Silklash Spider is alive.

You can use it two turns in a row as an offensive weapon to eliminate flying blockers and then defensively against attacking flying creatures.

All flights are canceled until your opponent deals with your crawling sweeper.

6. Bane of Progress

Recommended Formats:	Commander

When Bane of Progress enters the battlefield, destroy all artifacts and enchantments.

Bane of Progress is another green sweeper in a creature card.

You can destroy all artifacts and enchantments for six mana and bring on the board a creature whose power and toughness are 2 plus the total artifacts and enchantments destroyed.

As its name implies, Bane of Progress prevents your opponents from moving forward for a win by destroying likely valuable pieces of your opponent’s deck, then punish them with a massive creature present on the board.

Bane of Progress is initially a 2/2 creature. But, it gains a +1/+1 counter for every artifact and enchantment it has destroyed.

This is an excellent way of getting a tanky creature in play with additional upside.

I always make sure that casting Bane of Progress destroys, at the very least, 4 permanents total, so I get a 6/6 creature and a board wipe cost-efficiently for the 6 mana you will need to cast for this card.

7. Wave of Vitriol

Recommended Formats:	Commander

Each player sacrifices all artifacts, enchantments, and nonbasic lands they control.

Wave of Vitriol is a particular green board wipe that forces players to sacrifice:

• Enchantments
• Artifacts
• Nonbasic lands

Then it replaces sacrificed lands with basic ones, making it a strange form of land destruction.

There are only a few mass enchantment removal spells in MTG. Thus Wave of Vitriol is a great card to hold onto.

It’s perfect against aura and equipment decks composed of enchantments and artifacts that pump up initially weak creatures.

In commander, being able to free players from curses using Wave of Vitriol gives can give you leverage to make good deals and favors with other players sitting around the table.

Also, with Wave of Vitriol, your opponents can say goodbye to their dual lands and other nonbasic lands as this spell replaces these with basic lands.

Replacing a dual land to a basic can sometimes essentially be destroying an opponent’s land, especially if they aren’t playing any basics in their deck.

This, in turn, lowers your opponents’ mana pool and may disrupt casting multi-color spells. The spell also removes lands like Valakut, The Molten Pinnacle which can often be difficult to remove.

8. Tranquil Grove

Recommended Formats:	Commander

 Destroy all other enchantments.

The enchantment that hates other enchantments, Tranquil Grove.

This card doesn’t want any other enchantments around as it wipes out all other enchantments for 3 mana.

Tranquil Grove may be one of the best anti-enchantment cards in MTG as it gives you the ability to destroy all other kinds of enchantments and prevent new enchantments from sticking around for too long.

I love to use this card in commander because it’s absolutely devastating in a format where every deck has a handful of powerful enchantments. All the chaos typically brought about by enchantments, auras, and curse decks is shut down with a single card.

If you’re playing against any of those decks and you have Tranquil Grove, it will likely be the most peaceful game you’ve ever played.

9. Revenge of the Hunted

Recommended Formats:	Commander

…all creatures able to block it this turn do so.

Green has another creative way of mass creature removal, luring.

It uses its own array of powerful creatures in combat to clear enemy blockers off the battlefield.

Revenge of the Hunted is one of the best of those lure effects, pumping up a creature of your choice to +6/+6, and during combat, forces all capable enemy creatures to block it.

This is an unconventional way of taking out a mass of creatures, but it can be effective with the right creature, and green has many big creatures to choose from.

Another strategy is to choose creatures with Deathtouch. Green has a lot of those creatures that destroy any creature damaged by it. You only need to distribute 1 point of damage to each creature, and all blockers are gone.

Revenge of the Hunted also has Miracle. I use them automatically when I get the chance for a miracle. Even without blockers, I can deal massive face damage to my opponent. This card is more effective in modern since you only have one opponent with twenty starting life points.

The problem with this method, though, is that it’s dependent on your chosen creature, and if you have limited choices, you might not be able to take out essential enemy creatures from your opponent.

10. The Great Aurora

Recommended Formats:	Commander

… shuffles all cards from their hand and all permanents they own into their library…

The Great Aurora is the most potent green board wipe in MTG.

The spell reshuffles all permanents on the board and in players’ hands back to the library, and everyone draws the same number of reshuffled cards, putting on the board all the lands that are drawn.

It’s a unique reset that breaks your opponent’s momentum and potentially increases yours.

Imagine you have a great board state, a perfect amount of lands, creatures, and enchantments controlling the board, and a hand that can replace anything that would be destroyed. Nothing can stop you.

Then suddenly it’s all taken back to your library and replaced with a horrible hand! That’s what The Great Aurora often does to your opponents. It takes away all board advantages and replaces them randomly.

And if you’re not prepared for that, good luck trying to rebuild your momentum.

Green decks can build around this sweeper to maximize its effect in a positive way. For example, having ramp spells and mana fixing gives you a better chance of rerolling a great hand. You won’t have to worry about insufficient mana at all.

All that ensures you that in the next turn or two, you can deal massive blows to your opponent and create unrelenting momentum.

This sweeper is fun and exciting for green players. I can’t say the same for your non-green opponents, though.

Making Plays with Green Board Wipes

You may notice that green board wipes are conditional and rarely clear out the board on their own.

Because of this, you need to have an adaptive approach to using green board wipes. For example, if you’re using anti-flying board wipes for green, make sure you don’t have flyers in your deck to make it one-sided.

Use the board wipe sparingly and time the card well to get the best outcome.

I wouldn’t recommend relying on green board wipes to clear the board completely or win the game.

Green cards thrive when they live in an ecosystem with other powerful cards. The same goes for your sweepers.

Lure effects like Revenge of the Hunted can be a strong board wipe that synergizes well with almost any creature and can act as temporary growth for lethal damage. But this only works if you have efficient creatures in the first place.

Green is themed around nature, and nature is quite synergistic and cooperative. Take that into consideration when choosing your green board wipe.

Think of questions like “can this green sweeper help my other cards in more than one kind of situation?” or “does it makes good use of my strategies and abilities?”

With these in mind, you can definitely find the right green board wipe spell that fits your deck!