Excavation Elephant
Creature — Elephant
Kicker 
(You may pay an additional as you cast this spell.)
When this creature enters, if it was kicked, return target artifact card from your graveyard to your hand.
- CMC
- 5
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- W
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- The List
- Price
- $0.18
- EDHREC rank
- #27910
Excavation Elephant puts a land from your graveyard into your hand when it enters — relevant recursion stapled to a 3/4 body for five mana. The rate is too slow for most competitive tables, but in graveyard-centric or landfall strategies it pulls its weight as a budget role-player.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
In Commander, Excavation Elephant occupies a narrow lane: graveyard and landfall decks that want redundant land recursion without spending real money. Pauper is where Excavation Elephant is most credible — the commons card pool thins out quickly, and a 3/4 that recovers a land is a genuine stabilizer in slower games. In Modern, Pioneer, Legacy, and Vintage the card is simply outclassed; no competitive shell at any of those power levels needs a five-mana creature to get a land back. Oathbreaker follows the same logic as Commander — playable in the right build, irrelevant everywhere else.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.18 bulk tier
At $0.18, Excavation Elephant is deep bulk — the kind of card you pull from a common box rather than order individually. That price is stable by definition; there's no demand spike coming, but there's also no reason it gets cheaper.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.