Barbed Sextant
Artifact
, 
, Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color. Draw a card at the beginning of the next turn's upkeep.
- CMC
- 1
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- C
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- Fifth Edition
- Price
- $0.17
- EDHREC rank
- #18194
Barbed Sextant costs one mana to cast, taps for one mana of any color, and replaces itself with a card draw when it leaves play — the catch is you lose 1 life to activate the mana and another 1 life when you sacrifice it for the draw. It's a fixed-rate tax that most Commander decks won't want to pay when better one-mana rocks exist, but life-payment synergy and "artifact leaves the battlefield" payoffs can make that cost the point rather than the drawback.
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 | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
In Commander, Barbed Sextant fills a very narrow lane: decks that actively want artifacts entering or leaving the battlefield, or that reward paying life repeatedly, can treat the sacrifice trigger as a resource rather than a penalty. Competitive formats that allow it — Legacy, Vintage, Pauper — have no realistic reason to run it; the formats that could theoretically support it have better one-mana cantrip artifacts available at every rarity. Pauper is the one environment where Barbed Sextant occasionally sees discussion, since the card pool is tighter and color-fixing at common is genuinely scarce, but even there it rarely makes the cut over alternatives. The net result is that Barbed Sextant is a Commander-only conversation, and only for specific synergy builds.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.17 bulk tier
At $0.17, Barbed Sextant is deep bulk — the kind of card you pull from a common box rather than order intentionally. There's no price floor to speak of, and nothing about its demand profile suggests that changes.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.