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Crypt Ghast

Creature — Spirit

Extort (Whenever you cast a spell, you may pay {W/B}. If you do, each opponent loses 1 life and you gain that much life.)
Whenever you tap a Swamp for mana, add an additional {B}.

CMC
4
Mana cost
{3}{B}
Color identity
B
Rarity
rare
Set
Ravnica Remastered
Price
$15.86
EDHREC rank
#525
Buy on TCGplayer
Crypt Ghast card art
Crypt Ghast doubles your Swamp output the turn it lands, which in mono-black is often a four-to-eight mana swing before you've done anything else — that kind of on-board impact at four mana is hard to argue with. The Extort rider is gravy; the doubling effect is why it slots alongside Magus of the Candelabra as one of the most efficient mana-multipliers in the game. King of the Oathbreakers and its rogue-tribal token swarms make particularly brutal use of the sudden mana surplus.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
King of the Oathbreakers

King of the Oathbreakers

50.6% of decks · synergy 0.44

King of the Oathbreakers generates a token every time a rogue deals combat damage, and Crypt Ghast converts all those Swamps into the kind of mana surplus that lets you deploy your entire hand in one turn — the doubling effect turns rogue-tribal's wide board into explosive late-game threat density.

02

Sorin of House Markov

44.7% of decks · synergy 0.38

Sorin of House Markov rewards you heavily for keeping mana open across multiple turns, and Crypt Ghast's doubling effect means Sorin's costly activated abilities become far easier to chain — most vampire lists lean into black-heavy mana bases that maximize what Crypt Ghast returns.

03
Phage the Untouchable

Phage the Untouchable

81.6% of decks · synergy 0.34

Phage the Untouchable's seven-mana commander tax bites hard on recast, and Crypt Ghast is one of the fastest ways to rebuild the mana base after she dies — over 80% of Phage decks include it precisely because the doubling effect compresses the turns lost to recursion costs.

04
Valgavoth, Terror Eater

Valgavoth, Terror Eater

80.2% of decks · synergy 0.33

Valgavoth, Terror Eater wants to force opponents to spend life and then capitalize on the window, and Crypt Ghast supplies the black mana to keep interaction and threats flowing through that window — it shows up in over 80% of Valgavoth lists because the mana advantage is the deck's primary axis.

05
Toshiro Umezawa

Toshiro Umezawa

78.1% of decks · synergy 0.31

Toshiro Umezawa fires spells from the graveyard whenever a creature dies, which burns through mana faster than almost any other commander, and Crypt Ghast is the card that keeps the engine from stalling — the doubling effect directly translates to more free flashback triggers per combat.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

FormatVerdict
commander legal
legacy legal
modern legal
pioneer legal
standard not legal
vintage legal
pauper not legal
oathbreaker legal

Crypt Ghast is a Commander card first and foremost — the doubling effect scales with land count in a way that 60-card formats rarely let you exploit, and five mana (four plus the extort trigger cost) is simply too slow for Legacy or Vintage, where it sees no meaningful play despite being legal. Modern and Pioneer offer equally little — black mana doublers don't fit in formats that care about efficient threats and interaction on the first three turns. In Commander, Crypt Ghast is a legitimate engine piece in any mono-black or heavily black-skewed deck, turning mid-game land counts of eight or nine Swamps into sixteen-plus available mana and enabling the kind of single-turn game-ending plays that define the format's most threatening decks.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Budget Alternatives

Cheaper options that do most of the same work

Nirkana Revenant does the same Swamp-doubling job on a bigger body but costs significantly more and requires seven mana to land, so it's an upgrade rather than a substitute. For players who want the doubling effect cheaper, Magus of the Candelabra fills a mana-multiplier role in green-black shells, though it operates differently — the closest true budget replacement is simply accepting that Crypt Ghast has no direct analog under five dollars, and leaning on cheaper individual ramp pieces like Charcoal Diamond or Leaden Myr to approximate the mana acceleration without the doubling ceiling.

Price Context

Current price

$15.86 mid tier

At $15.86, Crypt Ghast sits in the mid tier — expensive enough to feel like a deliberate purchase, cheap enough that it belongs in any mono-black Commander deck that can use it. It has reprints holding the price at a reasonable floor, so you're paying for a proven engine piece rather than scarcity.

Explore

Sources

Mentioned

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