Sphinxes are cool.  Mysterious, yet vicious and deceptively powerful.  They may not always win in a head-to-head fight with a dragon, but odds are they’ll help get rid of that pesky drake in a more indirect manner.  Or they’ll just rip it to shreds.  There are those sphinxes, too.

I went combing through the Gatherer archives to find only the very best examples of my favorite tribe, picked ten of them, and put them here for your enjoyment.  Each one of these cards is a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield and an extremely potent addition to any EDH deck.  So read on, maybe pick a few up, and show some love to Magic’s newest iconic tribe.

#10 – Ambassador Sphinx

She may look like a Na’vi with a boob job, but the Ambassador is also a repeatable [card]Bribery[/card] on a stick.  Granted, you not only have to land a hit on your opponent for the ability to go off, you have to play a little guessing game, but overall the ability is too powerful to ignore.

#9 – Sphinx of Lost Truths

Put aside the fact that this sphinx looks like some kind of cross between Bob Marley and a head from Easter Island.  Drawing three cards and getting a decent flier is pretty snazzy for seven mana, but the real attraction here is for decks that want to throw all sorts of delicious brokenness into their graveyards.  Back in the day I had a standard deck that used this guy to dump a ton of [card]Filigree Angel[/card]s into the graveyard before casting [card]Open the Vaults[/card] and gaining insane amounts of life.  That’s only the tip of the iceberg of what you can accomplish in EDH.

#8 – Sphinx of the Steel Wind

Akroma, eat your heart out.  When it comes to bringing the beatdowns, few can do it as well as the [card]Sphinx of the Steel Wind[/card].  Not only does it pass the titan-test and have every ability under the sun, it’s immune to every go-to non-white spot removal spell I can think of.  [card]Doom Blade[/card]?  Nope, it’s black.  [card]Go for the Throat[/card]?  Artifact.  [card]Terminate[/card]?  Pro-red.  [card]Beast Within[/card]?  Pro-Green.  Unless your opponents have an [card]Oblivion Ring[/card] or sweeper handy, this sphinx is going to dominate the battlefield like few other cards can.

#7 – Sphinx of Magosi

What’s better than a gigantic flier that gets bigger as time goes on?  One that draws you card after card while doing so.  Sure, it’s vulnerable to just about everything under the sun, but if you untap with this bad boy…that’s some serious beats, right there.  I have fond memories of having this and [card]Training Grounds[/card] in one of my Rise of the Eldrazi sealed pools, and I heartily recommend you try out the same synergy in EDH.  Nothing like drawing a card for just one blue mana.

#6 – Magister Sphinx

Easily the most hated sphinx on this list, the Magister Sphinx is often bandied about as a potential candidate for the banhammer.  Its ability is nice, but not particularly strong in a two-player 20 life game, but when introduced into the multiplayer 40 life world of EDH it gets downright brutal.  With all the fatties running around, it’s not difficult to engineer a situation where you drop the sphinx on the table to get someone into the red zone, then alpha-strike them to finish them off.  Just watch out for [card]Bribery[/card] and [card]Acquire[/card] – there’s no feeling quite as sweet as nugging someone with their own sphinx.

#5 – Sphinx Summoner

Tutors are powerful in EDH.  Tutors attached to creatures that can be bounced, reanimated, recast, and recurred?  That’s EDH gold right there.  There’s certainly no shortage of powerful artifact creatures in EDH for the sphinx to find for you.  [card]Magister Sphinx[/card], for one.  [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card], [card]Scarecrone[/card], the list goes on.  What’s more, it’s evasive and big enough to take down an unwary planeswalker, so it’s not entirely irrelevant on the board.  Just solid value all around.

#4 – Sphinx of Uthuun

The new sphinx on the block from M12.  While M11 just had the above-the-curve-but-still-disappointing [card]Conundrum Sphinx[/card], this one should see plenty of play.  Not only does it have a relevant body (not one that can tangle with titans, but oh well), it has [card]Fact or Fiction[/card] as an ETB effect.  [card]Fact or Fiction[/card] is one of the most powerful and widely played draw spells in Magic, so it should come as no surprise that a bounceable, reanimateable, tutorable creature version should be the absolute stones in EDH.

#3 – Sharuum the Hegemon

Sharuum is a fantastic general for artifact decks.  Not only does she generate value every time she hits the table, she’s also part of a number of disgustingly broken infinite combos.  The reliability and resilience of having your general as a piece of a combo makes decks built around those sorts of combos extremely difficult to disrupt in the long game.  The fact that I can think of three different (easily tutorable!) artifacts that combo with her right off the top of my head means that people playing against a Sharuum deck need to be constantly vigilant to prevent the Sharuum deck from just winning on the spot.

#2 – Chancellor of the Spires

[card]Tooth and Nail[/card].  [card]Rite of Replication[/card].  [card]Plague Wind[/card].  [card]Insurrection[/card].  [card]Recurring Insight[/card].  [card]Austere Command[/card].  [card]Blatant Thievery[/card].  [card]Acquire[/card].  [card]Demonic Tutor[/card].  [card]Identity Crisis[/card].  Feel like giving your opponents a little payback?  The Chancellor is there for you.  Also, it’s worth noting that if your opponents have a [card]Time Warp[/card]-style effect in their graveyard, and you have a way to trigger the sphinx each turn, you can take infinite turns.  So let that be a lesson to you: don’t run extra turn sorceries.

#1 – Consecrated Sphinx

It’s not the biggest or most intimidating of bodies, but I hear that drawing two cards for each opponent’s one is a key ingredient in assembling unstoppable engine of destruction.  Just make sure to have [card]Venser’s Journal[/card] or [card]Reliquary Tower[/card] handy.

Honorable Mention – Isperia, the Inscrutable

The grandam of Magic’s current sphinx revolution, Isperia has a pretty neat ability.  Generals with an attached tutor effect make for some extremely consistent EDH decks.  Sadly, Isperia needs to hit an opponent in order for you to start getting value out of her, which severely cuts down on her utility.  Opponents will often just repeatedly kill her until her cost becomes too prohibitive for you to cast profitably.  That said, the art’s gorgeous, and I can definitely see her commanding a fun sphinx-themed EDH deck.  Fill it to the brim with cards that force your opponents to make difficult choices for maximum flavor.

Honorable Mention – Serra Sphinx

I don’t know whether it’s the timeshifted card frame or the hint of sphinxy sideboob, but I just really love this card.  It’s also notable for being Wizards’ first foray into making sphinxes the “iconic creature” for blue in the same way that angels, demons, and dragons are for white, black, and red.