With 2025 drawing to a close, I'm once again taking some time and looking back at the best cards of the year! This past year was full of some truly outstanding releases, and even the duds had some real heat in places. As a result, there's no shortage of awesome cards to talk about that have impacted everything from Standard to Vintage to Commander and beyond.

Last time, I covered the top five White cards of the year. Today, I'm going to be continuing in order by talking about the best five Blue cards of 2025. There's plenty to cover and discuss, so let's not waste any time and dive right into it!

5. Marang River Regent

Let's kick things off with an interesting one. Marang River Regent was a huge hit this year, largely thanks to its play in various control decks in Standard. It makes for an excellent finisher, as it provides a huge threat as well as removing two other cards off the battlefield. The real power, though, came from the flexibility of casting this creature or as a card filtration spell in the earlier parts of the game. Better still, if you cast the creature side, you could often get additional boons from the likes of Roiling Dragonstorm.

While it's been a clear winner for all manner of control decks, though, the real winner with this card was the various Omniscience decks. Earlier in the year, Azorius Omniscience decks would use Marang River Regent to loop two of them repeatedly with Omniscience on the board. From there, you could mill an opponent endlessly with Forging the Third Path. Now it continues to see play as a finisher in Simic Omniscience builds, with Scrabbling Skullcrab as one of the new potential finishing plays.

4. Wan Shi Tong, Librarian

We're still early into the season since Avatar: the Last Airbender released but it's pretty clear Wan Shi Tong, Librarian is among the best cards in the set. Anyone who played in the days of Sphinx's Revelation and Hydroid Krasis knows just how powerful an ability like this can be in Standard. Lo and behold, it's certainly making a splash in a handful of different Standard lists such as Simic Aggro and Dimir Midrange thanks to the ability to cast it on an opponent's end step and also ramp into it.

Where it's come to become a surprising standout, though, is in older formats like Modern and to a lesser extend Legacy and Vintage. It turns out that playing it in a format full of fetch lands makes it very easy to put counters on Wan Shi Tong and draw you extra cards in the process. Simply flash it into play in response to a fetch land activation and you're off to the races.

It's still too early for me to rate it higher than other cards on this list given the proven track records of the others, but make no mistake: Wan Shi Tong is the real deal.

3. Consult the Star Charts

Remember when Memory Deluge dominated Standard just a few years ago thanks to its unrivaled card selection on end steps? Well, it's back again but better... kind of anyways. Consult the Star Charts does an excellent job of emulating the core of what made Memory Deluge so good for a variety of decks when it was Standard legal. You get to go pretty deep into your deck and pull some cards to fight back against what your opponent does.

While Consult lacks the important flashback ability that let you cast Memory Deluge a second time, it makes up for it with its versatility. You can cast it for the full for mana to get two cards, or if you're squeezed on mana you can simply use it as a glorified Impulse - which is still good! Additionally, it scales for the number of lands you control, meaning the longer you go in a game, the better it gets. This has made it a standout not just in Standard but Pioneer and Modern as well, making it easily one of the better Blue cards of the year.

2. Stock Up

Now, if we're talking powerhouse card selection spells, we have to talk about Stock Up. This innocuous little uncommon from Aetherdrift took a number of players by surprise. It's not often a Divination makes Constructed play so this got overlooked for a bit, until players realized just how much better it was than Divination. Not only getting two cards but being able to choose from five made it an instant hit in multiple formats.

When it started seeing play in Vintage, players started to take notice and it became very clear, very fast just how good it could be. Soon it was showing up in Modern, Legacy, Pioneer, and - of course - Standard. It was red hot and helped push several decks from being good to great, making it easily one of the best cards of the year. In spite of that, there's still one Blue card that was better this year.

1. Quantum Riddler

Without a doubt, the best Blue card of the year has to be Quantum Riddler. The card reads rather innocuous the first time you see it, but as players started playing with it, it became clear just how powerful it could be. Not only was it an instant hit in Standard, fueling several decks - including the broken Vivi Cauldron deck - but it even made a solid showing in older formats as well.

The biggest impact from the card came in the form of Modern. Thanks to the interaction of warping it and then casting an Ephemerate to blink it back into play, it's become a staple of the format in several decks. As a result, decks like Esper Goryo's Vengeance and Jeskai Blink have become some of the best archetypes in the format since the release of Edge of Eternities. With such a monumental impact changing an entire format at the top levels of play, it really couldn't be anything else to come out on top of this list.

Paige Smith

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