Arcane Savant
Creature — Human Wizard
Before you shuffle your deck to start the game, you may reveal this card from your deck and exile an instant or sorcery card you drafted that isn't in your deck.
When this creature enters, copy a card you exiled with cards named Arcane Savant. You may cast the copy without paying its mana cost.
- CMC
- 5
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Conspiracy: Take the Crown
- Price
- $0.17
- EDHREC rank
- #30124
Arcane Savant enters the battlefield and immediately casts any instant or sorcery from outside the game for free — a enters-the-battlefield trigger stapled to a 3/3 body for five mana. The catch is the exile clause and the draft-context origin, which limits its competitive ceiling, but in formats where you can tutor or select the free spell deliberately, the payoff is real.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Arcane Savant is legal in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but its home is Commander by a wide margin. In Commander, the singleton format rewards toolbox creatures, blink packages, and Wizard tribal payoffs — all contexts where Arcane Savant's free cast on an ETB becomes genuinely powerful with the right setup. Legacy and Vintage have access to it on paper, but a five-mana 3/3 with a conditional ETB competes against a format density it can't clear; it doesn't see play in either. Oathbreaker is the one non-Commander format where it could theoretically matter, since the smaller game size compresses windows for big ETB plays, but the card still belongs in Commander first.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.17 bulk tier
At $0.17, Arcane Savant is deep bulk — you're picking it out of a dollar bin or ordering a playset for under a dollar. Given its narrow but real niche in Wizard-tribal and blink Commander builds, that price is unlikely to move unless a high-profile commander pushes Wizard ETB synergies into the spotlight.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.