The Most Popular Spells in 2024 5e

I'm very nearly lying on the homepage of 5e Spellbook Builder when I say you're not being tracked.

Your data does live on your device, and not on some server. There's no Google Analytics, no Facebook Pixel, I do not know your email address. That's all true. You are not being tracked.

But the spells you are adding to your spellbooks are.

I believe in good web experiences, and in building this experience, I realized one thing that could make it even better: spell popularity.

So while I don't know anything about you I do want to know what spells you add to your spellbooks.

I keep a simple count. For each spell, how many times its been added to spellbooks is being recorded. As the data accumulates and more people build out their spellbooks, it becomes a very accurate representation of the game's most popular spells.

The results

So let's dive into the 5e's 10 most popular spells — the spells that have been added to player's spellbooks more than any others.

The top 10 most popular spells in 5e (as of April 2026)

These are aboslutely the spells you see in the game the most.

They're all spells available to multiple classes, which increases their popularity, and unsurprisingly, the list is comprised of cantrips and level 1 spells — the spells any casting character immediately has access to when starting a new character.

Lower level spells will always be more frequently added, on average, than higher level spells, so it makes sense the most desirable cantrips and level 1 spells are the games most popular spells of all time.

See for yourself all 410 spells ranked by how often they're picked.

It's neat data to look at, but it will always favour the lowest level spells with the highest class availability.

Once you dig deeper though, you start seeing some interesting things — for example Misty Step is the eleventh most picked spell, and it's a Level 2 spell, picked far and above over most cantrips and level 1 spells in the game. It stands out.

So wouldn't that be a more interesting list? The spells that are most picked for their spell level? Yes, but it needs a bit more refinement than that. That list will still favour spells that are available to many classes over those available to few. Counterspell and Fireball are killer Level 3 spells. Counterspell is more popular than Fireball in the popularity rankings. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Counterspell is available to Sorcerers, Warlocks and Wizards, but Fireball is exclusive to just Sorcerers and Wizards. So it's not surprising Counterspell is more popular — fewer players have access to Fireball.

What if the ranking took that into account, and listed the spells that are most chosen for their spell level, divided by the number of players that have access to that spell? We could answer if Counterspell is chosen by Wizards and Sorcerers more than Fireball.

Well I did some math, which we'll get into later, and came up with that list. I'm calling it Appeal, and it's a measure of how coveted a spell is, regardless of its level or class availability. See all 410 spells ranked by appeal.

The top 10 most appealing spells in 5e (as of April 2026)

Now we're seeing some deeper level favourites, and some iconic class-specific spells that those players almost always grab, like Eldritch Blast. Oh and hey, now we know Fireball is a more popular choice than Counterspell when players get the chance, and Counterspell's only more popular because Warlocks also access it.

This list no longer shows the spells you see most in the game, but the spell the people want most.

But you will notice there are still no spells higher than level 3 in the top 10 as of April 2026. There's a couple reasons for that - one is that at the higher spell levels, spell choices start to become a lot more varied and personal, where the lower levels feature more "must-have" spells for players, the second reason I'll explain later.

The new features

So here are the new features on 5e Spellbook Builder for all to enjoy:

You can now sort spells by Popularity
You can now sort spells by Appeal
You can see a more detailed ranking of a spell's Popularity and Appeal on its detail page

It's super fun to look through.

You can affirm that Resistance really is a lousy spell, as it is proven to be one of the least chosen cantrips in the game.

It's really interesting to do things like find out the most popular level 4 damage spell in the game (it's Blight, as of the time of this writing).

Some data limitations

So we know this data is useful, but the simplicity of the data also has its flaws, and I want you to be aware of them and how the opinionated decisions I made to mitigate those flaws affect the results you're seeing.

Higher-level spell data reliability

The data gets orders of magnitude less frequent as you go higher in spell level. If an average cantrip is added to spellbooks 100 times, by the time you get to level 9, that number drops to just 2.

So many people are adding lower level spells to their spellbooks that the data really smooths out and shows the broad trends of D&D players very reliably. I think most players would agree that there are few surprises among the most popular spells shown on the site.

But at higher levels, individuals' unique choices have more sway on the data.

It took nearly 5000 spells being added to spellbooks before the first player took Wish. Based on numbers I'm seeing, you're likely to see at least 100 different characters rocking Cure Wounds before you ever see one with Wish.

And that tracks. I've played D&D for over 6 years and I've still only had one character get powerful enough to access Level 7 spells, never mind 8 and 9. It kills me.

Because of these small sample sizes, an uptick of players taking, say, Astral Projection may create a large swing on that spell's standing in the rankings and may not really reflect what players truly value.

So to find the right balance between small sample swinginess and legitmacy, I've applied some math to smooth out the data for spells with much smaller samples. This smoothing doesn't really impact lower level spells that have large samples, but by level 4 and up, the data is getting more smoothed into an averaged value for that spell level. This is a big reason why the top appealing spells in the game are still limited to more lower level spells.

But if you poke around on the list of top appealing spells, it doesn't take too long before you see some big boys like Bigby's Hand, Animal Shapes, and Wish appearing. I'm happy with the balance.

Class popularity

This is where I'm a little less certain about the math I used, and forever will be.

The Appeal ranking attempts to strip class popularity out of a spell's popularity so that we identify the true likelihood of a player to choose a spell.

Let's go back to the Counterspell and Fireball example. If Counterspell has been added 400 times to spellbooks, and Fireball has been added 300 times, Counterspell is definitively more popular. But 3 classes get Counterspell and 2 get Fireball, so:

Fireball: 300 / 2 = 150
Counterspell: 400 / 3 = 133.33

Fireball has fewer total takes, but it has more takes per class than Counterspell.

Looks great at first, but do you see the flaw?

That math is only true if all classes are equal in popularity — for every 1 Wizard, there is exactly 1 Warlock and 1 Sorcerer. That's of course not true.

And unfortunately I don't know what classes your spellbooks are using to know exactly how popular the classes are. The site doesn't ask you for it, so I can't capture it.

However, there are some fingerprints in the data. Every class has at least a few spells only available to it. To grab those spells you have to be the class (okay, there are exceptions to that thanks to some feats, but still). Analyzing the popularity of those class-specific spells relative to all spells and each other can allow me to make an informed guess as to the popularity of each class.

It's not perfect and it never will be. It's an approximation, one I'll likely keep tinkering with.

So while the Popularity rankings are objective fact on how the 5e Spellbook Builder community adds spells, Appeal is an educated, data-driven approximation on how desirable those spells are, not authoritatively true fact.

Popularity helps spell discovery

The popularity data is just one more way you can use this tool to discover spells that you might not otherwise know about. I know I'm excited to build my next character around the most underrated spells in the game — spells that aren't being taken as much but still have seriously powerful effects. Jump, I'm looking at you.

As 5e Spellbook Builder continues to be used the data will only be more useful for players.

I hope you enjoy!