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Casey Jones, Back Alley Brute

Legendary Creature — Human Berserker

Menace
Whenever Casey Jones attacks, put a +1/+1 counter on target attacking creature.
Whenever you put one or more +1/+1 counters on a creature you control, Casey Jones deals that much damage to target opponent.

CMC
4
Mana cost
{3}{R}
Color identity
R
Rarity
rare
Set
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Eternal
Price
$0.36
EDHREC rank
#9526
Buy on TCGplayer
Casey Jones, Back Alley Brute card art
Casey Jones, Back Alley Brute deals damage in exact 1-damage increments — the kind of precision that turns Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin's trigger into a repeatable draw-and-ping engine and Leonardo, the Balance // Michelangelo, the Heart's counters-matter synergies into a consistent threat. The rate is real and the ceiling is high enough that any deck built around opponents losing exactly 1 life should want it.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Leonardo, the BalanceMichelangelo, the Heart

Leonardo, the Balance // Michelangelo, the Heart

59.6% of decks · synergy 0.55

Leonardo, the Balance // Michelangelo, the Heart is the deck most hungry for Casey Jones, Back Alley Brute — showing up in nearly 60% of lists — because the consistent 1-damage pings feed counter-generation and board-wide buffs that Leonardo rewards on every combat step.

02
Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin

Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin

45.6% of decks · synergy 0.44

Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin triggers whenever an opponent loses exactly 1 life, so Casey Jones, Back Alley Brute's controlled ping turns every attack into a free card and a free damage source stacked on top.

03

Miles Morales

18.6% of decks · synergy 0.18

Miles Morales rewards dealing damage in small, repeated bursts, and Casey Jones, Back Alley Brute slots in as a reliable source of that steady trickle across multiple turns.

04
Shalai and Hallar

Shalai and Hallar

17.9% of decks · synergy 0.17

Shalai and Hallar cares about distributing +1/+1 counters and punishing opponents for accumulating them, and Casey Jones, Back Alley Brute provides the incremental damage triggers that keep the engine ticking without requiring extra setup.

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

Casey Jones, Back Alley Brute is legal in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but Commander is where it actually lives — the multiplayer format gives the 1-damage ping meaningful reach across three opponents and makes every trigger geometrically more valuable. In Legacy and Vintage it's not seeing competitive play; the card is too slow and too creature-dependent for those formats' pace. Oathbreaker is the one other format worth mentioning: planeswalker-adjacent combo decks that care about life-loss triggers can extract similar value to Commander, just in a faster game state.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

$0.36 bulk tier

At $0.36, Casey Jones, Back Alley Brute is firmly bulk — easy to pick up in any order or trade binder without a second thought. Given its inclusion rate in high-synergy commanders, that price is likely a floor rather than a ceiling, but buy it for the effect, not the speculation.

Explore

Sources

Mentioned

← All cards

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