Arcane Investigator
Creature — Elf Wizard
Search the Room — 
: Roll a d20.
1—9 | Draw a card.
10—20 | Look at the top three cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- Adventures in the Forgotten Realms
- Price
- $0.18
- EDHREC rank
- #16393
Arcane Investigator turns surplus mana into cards, scrying 1 and drawing 1 each turn you spend four or more mana on instants and sorceries — a clean, repeatable value engine for spell-heavy blue decks. Wyll, Blade of Frontiers // Sword Coast Sailor decks are the natural home, but any deck casting multiple big spells per turn gets immediate returns.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Wyll, Blade of Frontiers // Sword Coast Sailor
Wyll, Blade of Frontiers // Sword Coast Sailor rewards casting instants and sorceries with dice-roll triggers, and Arcane Investigator converts that same spell density into card advantage — both engines feed off identical behavior, so the Investigator earns its slot without any additional setup.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Arcane Investigator is a Commander card through and through — the effect compounds over a long game and three mana plus a four-mana activation threshold is affordable in a 40-life format where players routinely cast multiple spells a turn. In Pauper it's legal but competes with more efficient common draw engines that don't require a mana sink. Modern, Legacy, and Vintage have no interest: those formats end before the Investigator generates more than one or two triggers, and three mana for a do-nothing-until-activated creature is simply too slow.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.18 bulk tier
At $0.18, Arcane Investigator is deep bulk — pick up as many as you need without a second thought. Bulk rares with narrow commander applications don't climb unless a new pushed commander pushes the synergy into the spotlight, so don't expect the price to move.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Wyll, Blade of Frontiers // Sword Coast Sailor
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.