Alchemist's Assistant
Creature — Monkey
Lifelink
Renew — 
, Exile this card from your graveyard: Put a lifelink counter on target creature. Activate only as a sorcery.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Tarkir: Dragonstorm
- Price
- $0.10
- EDHREC rank
- #14936
Alchemist's Assistant puts a +1/+1 counter on your commander when it enters and again whenever you cycle a card — that's a repeatable counter engine stapled to a one-mana body. The cost is the body itself: a 1/1 with no evasion is irrelevant in combat, so you're running this purely for the counter triggers, which means it only earns its slot in decks that want counters badly enough to run a 99th-percentile filler creature.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Skullbriar, the Walking Grave
Skullbriar, the Walking Grave wants as many cheap counter sources as possible, and Alchemist's Assistant delivers two — one on entry, one per cycle — while costing a single black mana to deploy. Every cycling land or looting spell you run doubles as a Skullbriar growth event, which is exactly the density this commander needs to threaten lethal commander damage fast.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
In Commander, Alchemist's Assistant is a niche role-player: it only pulls its weight in dedicated counter-on-commander strategies, and even there it competes with more impactful one-drops. Outside Commander, the card has no competitive presence — cycling synergies in Modern and Pioneer lean on payoffs with far higher ceilings, and Alchemist's Assistant doesn't crack those lists. Legacy and Vintage have no interest. Oathbreaker is the one fringe case where a low-cost repeatable counter trigger could matter if the planeswalker and signature spell align, but that's a narrow window.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.10 bulk tier
At $0.10, Alchemist's Assistant is pure bulk — it costs less than a sleeve and carries no realistic demand outside the Skullbriar niche. That price has a floor near zero and no meaningful ceiling, so there's no financial angle here beyond grabbing a copy if a counter-synergy deck calls for it.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.