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Colossal Grave-Reaver

Creature — Dragon

Flying
Whenever this creature enters or attacks, mill three cards.
Whenever one or more creature cards are put into your graveyard from your library, put one of them onto the battlefield.

CMC
8
Mana cost
{6}{B}{G}
Color identity
BG
Rarity
rare
Set
Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander
Price
$9.33
EDHREC rank
#2096
Buy on TCGplayer
Colossal Grave-Reaver card art
Colossal Grave-Reaver enters swinging — a massive beater that mills your opponents and triggers on every creature hitting any graveyard, turning self-mill payoffs into a board-wide tax. The cost is real: six mana is a significant ask, but pair it with Altar of Dementia or slot it into Teval, the Balanced Scale and the value compounds fast enough to justify it.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Teval, the Balanced Scale

Teval, the Balanced Scale

79.7% of decks · synergy 0.62

Teval, the Balanced Scale runs Colossal Grave-Reaver in nearly 80% of its decks because the Reaver's mill-on-attack feeds Teval's graveyard triggers directly, creating a self-sustaining loop where attacking also fuels your commander's engine.

02

Grist, Voracious Larva

37.3% of decks · synergy 0.34

Grist, Voracious Larva wants creatures flooding graveyards from every angle, and Colossal Grave-Reaver delivers that at scale — milling opponents on attack while Grist converts the dead into board presence.

03
Winter, Cynical Opportunist

Winter, Cynical Opportunist

33.4% of decks · synergy 0.30

Winter, Cynical Opportunist profits from opponents losing resources, and Colossal Grave-Reaver forces exactly that by milling libraries on attack, letting Winter capitalize on the chaos as opponents' best cards end up in the wrong zone.

04
Teval, Arbiter of Virtue

Teval, Arbiter of Virtue

45.1% of decks · synergy 0.27

Teval, Arbiter of Virtue shares the same graveyard-matters architecture as its sibling, and Colossal Grave-Reaver slots in as a high-power mill engine that keeps triggering every time any creature dies at the table.

05
Coram, the Undertaker

Coram, the Undertaker

23.3% of decks · synergy 0.20

Coram, the Undertaker cares about casting spells from graveyards, and Colossal Grave-Reaver does the work of filling them — attacking mills opponents while also threatening a body that demands an immediate answer.

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

Commander is where Colossal Grave-Reaver actually lives. Four opponents means four libraries getting milled on every attack, and the graveyard-trigger upside scales with the sheer volume of creatures dying across the table at any given moment. Legacy and Vintage allow it, but a six-mana creature with no immediate protection and no enter-the-battlefield effect is too slow against those formats' answer density — it will never see serious play there. Oathbreaker is the one fringe case where it might show up in a dedicated mill or self-mill shell, but Commander is the clear home and the only context where the design actually fires on all cylinders.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Budget Alternatives

Cheaper options that do most of the same work

If Colossal Grave-Reaver is out of range, Stitcher's Supplier and Mesmeric Orb can handle the mill function for under a dollar combined, though neither brings the must-answer board presence or the triggered upside. Consuming Aberration is the closest single-card alternative — it mills on any spell and grows into a threat — but it lacks the attack trigger and costs less both in mana and money, making it a reasonable placeholder rather than a true replacement.

Price Context

Current price

$9.33 mid tier

At $9.33, Colossal Grave-Reaver sits in the mid tier — expensive enough to feel in a budget build, cheap enough to justify in any deck genuinely built around graveyard synergies. It's a recent card with a clear home in a popular archetype, so the price is unlikely to crater, but it's also not the kind of card that spikes into exclusivity.

Explore

Sources

Mentioned

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