Ellie and Alan, Paleontologists
Legendary Creature — Human Scientist
, Exile a creature card from your graveyard: Discover X, where X is the mana value of the exiled card. Activate only as a sorcery. (Exile cards from the top of your library until you exile a nonland card with that mana value or less. Cast it without paying its mana cost or put it into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom in a random order.)
- CMC
- 5
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- GUW
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Jurassic World Collection
- Price
- $3.10
- EDHREC rank
- #13989
Ellie and Alan, Paleontologists puts a repeatable Dinosaur-or-land payoff on the board for four mana — each creature spell with the right type tag digs you toward more gas or fixes your mana. The cost is that they do nothing the turn they arrive and demand a critical mass of Dinosaurs to justify the slot.
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 |
Commander is where Ellie and Alan, Paleontologists belong — a 60-card format rarely tolerates four-mana value engines that need tribal support to fire, but in a 100-card Dinosaur shell the density is there and the long game rewards the setup. Legacy and Vintage are legal but irrelevant; the effect is too slow and the payoff too conditional for those formats. Oathbreaker is theoretically legal, but 60-card construction makes the tribal threshold harder to hit consistently.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$3.10 cheap tier
At $3.10, Ellie and Alan, Paleontologists sit in comfortable budget territory for a legendary creature with a build-around upside. The price is likely a ceiling rather than a floor given the narrow tribal requirement, but the low buy-in makes testing them easy.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.