Cogwork Grinder
Artifact Creature — Construct
Draft this card face up.
As you draft a card, you may remove it from the draft face down. (Those cards aren't in your card pool.)
This creature enters with X +1/+1 counters on it, where X is the number of cards you removed from the draft with cards named Cogwork Grinder.
- CMC
- 6
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- C
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Conspiracy
- Price
- $0.26
- EDHREC rank
- #30977
Cogwork Grinder enters as a 0/0 and gets one +1/+1 counter for each card exiled to cast it — so the floor is a vanilla 1/1 for seven mana, and the ceiling is a massive beater if you're drafting it with a full exile pool. It's a card built for Conspiracy draft formats, and in constructed it almost never clears the bar.
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 | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Cogwork Grinder is legal in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but its design is native to Conspiracy draft — a format where you accumulate an exile pool naturally over the course of a pick. In Commander, the mechanic requires you to have already exiled a pile of cards before Cogwork Grinder hits the table, which means it only fits in dedicated graveyard-exile shells, and even there a seven-mana creature with no abilities beyond its size is easy to cut. Legacy and Vintage have no interest in it; those formats want efficiency, not a conditional beater. Oathbreaker shares Commander's casual DNA but the same structural problem applies — the payoff doesn't justify the setup cost outside a purpose-built shell.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.26 bulk tier
At $0.26, Cogwork Grinder is deep bulk — the price reflects its narrow application and low constructed demand. It's unlikely to appreciate unless a future Commander precon builds around the draft-matters or exile-matters axis in a way that makes a seven-mana vanilla-ish creature suddenly relevant.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.