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Archivist

Creature — Human Wizard

{T}: Draw a card.

CMC
4
Mana cost
{2}{U}{U}
Color identity
U
Rarity
rare
Set
Ninth Edition
Price
—
EDHREC rank
#14453
Buy on TCGplayer
Archivist card art
Archivist turns any untap effect into a fresh card, and paired with Mind Over Matter that loop becomes effectively unbounded draw. The cost is real — four mana for a 1/1 that requires a full turn of setup before it does anything — but in the right shell that fragility is a footnote.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Merieke Ri Berit

Merieke Ri Berit

13.6% of decks · synergy 0.13

Merieke Ri Berit's ability requires tapping and untapping to steal and kill creatures repeatedly, and Archivist plugs directly into that same untap infrastructure — every activation that resets Merieke also draws a card, turning the control engine into an incidental draw engine with no extra pieces required.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

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

Commander is where Archivist lives. The singleton format's longer games give it time to recoup the tempo cost, and the abundance of untap synergies — from Seedborn Muse to Opposition to Mind Over Matter — means Archivist rarely sits as a vanilla 1/1 for long. In Legacy and Vintage it's technically legal but essentially invisible; four mana for a slow draw engine can't compete with Brainstorm and Ponder at instant speed for one. Oathbreaker follows the same logic as Commander — playable in dedicated untap builds, irrelevant everywhere else.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

unknown tier

Pricing data isn't currently available for Archivist, so check Scryfall or TCGPlayer for a current figure before buying. Given its narrow application — it's almost exclusively a Commander card in untap-combo builds — demand stays low and copies tend to be cheap when they surface.

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Sources

Mentioned

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