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Archelos, Lagoon Mystic

Legendary Creature — Turtle Shaman

As long as Archelos is tapped, other permanents enter tapped.
As long as Archelos is untapped, other permanents enter untapped.

CMC
4
Mana cost
{1}{B}{G}{U}
Color identity
BGU
Rarity
rare
Set
Dominaria United Commander
Price
$0.36
EDHREC rank
#8092
Buy on TCGplayer
Archelos, Lagoon Mystic card art
Archelos, Lagoon Mystic flips the table on permanents entering the battlefield — face-down means everything enters tapped, face-up means nothing does, and swapping between those states is repeatable and instant-speed. It slots cleanly into commanders like Nine-Fingers Keene that want opponents stumbling through tapped lands, and Zimone, Quandrix Prodigy builds that pair land recursion with the stax effect to extend the lock.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Nine-Fingers Keene

Nine-Fingers Keene

49.8% of decks · synergy 0.48

Nine-Fingers Keene wants opponents slowed to a crawl while Keene cantrips through the maze, and Archelos, Lagoon Mystic delivers exactly that — keeping Archelos face-down locks every opponent's land drop into a tempo loss, turning Keene's mana advantage into an insurmountable gap.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

FormatVerdict
commander legal
legacy legal
modern not legal
pioneer not legal
standard not legal
vintage legal
pauper not legal
oathbreaker legal

Archelos, Lagoon Mystic is a Commander card through and through — the political and stax dimensions of its tap-everything effect only matter in a multiplayer game where three opponents missing a land drop compounds each turn. In Legacy and Vintage it's technically legal but there's no competitive shell that wants a five-mana legendary turtle when one-mana lock pieces already exist. Oathbreaker is the one other format where it could pull weight, since the face-down stax state hits every opponent simultaneously and five mana is reachable.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

$0.36 bulk tier

At $0.36, Archelos, Lagoon Mystic is deep bulk despite being a mythic rare with a genuine build-around identity. That price is unlikely to move much without a reprint into a high-profile precon, but at this floor there's no reason not to pick up copies immediately if the gameplan calls for it.

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Sources

Mentioned

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Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.