Battletide Alchemist
Creature — Kithkin Cleric
If a source would deal damage to a player, you may prevent X of that damage, where X is the number of Clerics you control.
- CMC
- 5
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- W
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Morningtide
- Price
- $4.13
- EDHREC rank
- #15913
Battletide Alchemist shuts off all non-Cleric damage sources as long as you can keep three Clerics on board — a blanket protection effect that punishes creature-combat and burn-heavy pods alike. The five-mana cost is real, but in a Cleric shell like Orah, Skyclave Hierophant that's recovering board state every turn, that threshold is trivially maintained.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Orah, Skyclave Hierophant
Orah, Skyclave Hierophant naturally floods the board with Clerics through its death-trigger recursion engine, which means Battletide Alchemist almost always has the three-Cleric threshold covered — and when opponents try to crack through the lock with removal, Orah just reloads the table.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Battletide Alchemist is legal in Commander, Legacy, Modern, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but its home is clearly Commander. In a 100-card Cleric tribal shell it functions as a repeatable soft-lock that demands an answer, and multiplayer tables full of creatures swinging for combat damage make the effect punishing from the moment it lands. In Legacy or Vintage it's far too slow and narrow — five mana for a conditional damage prevention shield doesn't compete in those formats. Modern is similarly hostile; the effect isn't efficient enough and Cleric tribal lacks the redundancy there to sustain the threshold reliably.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$4.13 cheap tier
At $4.13, Battletide Alchemist sits at the low end of niche tribal staples — cheap enough that there's no real barrier to picking it up if you're building Clerics. It's a casual Commander card with limited cross-format demand, so don't expect significant price movement in either direction.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.