Cream of the Crop
Enchantment
Whenever a creature you control enters, you may look at the top X cards of your library, where X is that creature's power. If you do, put one of those cards on top of your library and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- G
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Morningtide
- Price
- $18.76
- EDHREC rank
- #6450
Cream of the Crop turns every creature ETB into a free top-deck filter, and in token-flooding or big-creature commanders it fires multiple times a turn. At two mana, it's one of the cheapest ongoing library-manipulation effects in green — Ashling, the Limitless alone runs it in over 40% of builds.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Ashling, the Limitless
Ashling, the Limitless produces arbitrarily large creatures, meaning Cream of the Crop lets you look at a huge portion of your library with each ETB trigger — effectively turning Ashling's growth engine into a draw-filter engine simultaneously.
Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire
Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire flips permanents off the top of every player's library on each attack, so Cream of the Crop lets you pre-stack your own reveals for maximum value — you choose what lands face-up for you before Vaevictis ever swings.
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 |
Cream of the Crop is legal in Commander, Legacy, Modern, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but in practice it's almost exclusively a Commander card. Legacy and Modern have faster, more redundant library manipulation — Brainstorm, Sensei's Divining Top — that makes a creature-dependent enchantment too slow to compete. Commander is where Cream of the Crop earns its slot: long games, creature-heavy strategies, and repeated ETB triggers mean the filter effect compounds turn after turn. Oathbreaker is the only other format where it's worth considering, specifically in planeswalker shells that generate creature tokens.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Budget Alternatives
Cheaper options that do most of the same work
Conduit of Worlds and Mosswort Bridge offer incidental top-deck interaction but don't replicate the continuous filtering Cream of the Crop provides. The closest true budget substitute is Lifecrafter's Bestiary at roughly $1 — it requires paying one mana per scry trigger and draws on creature cast rather than ETB, which is a meaningful step down in token-flooding decks but close enough in value-creature builds to justify the swap.
Price Context
Current price
$18.76 mid tier
At $18.76, Cream of the Crop sits in the mid tier — expensive enough to feel like a deliberate inclusion but not a format staple with broad cross-deck demand. Its price is propped up almost entirely by Commander demand from creature-flood strategies, so if your deck doesn't trigger it multiple times per turn, the cost is hard to justify.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Ashling, the Limitless
- Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.