Fleshless Gladiator
Creature — Phyrexian Skeleton
Corrupted — 
: Return this card from your graveyard to the battlefield tapped. You lose 1 life. Activate only if an opponent has three or more poison counters.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- Phyrexia: All Will Be One
- Price
- $0.08
- EDHREC rank
- #23866
Fleshless Gladiator is a recursive two-power threat that costs nothing to return from the graveyard as long as you're willing to discard — a genuine engine piece for decks that want bodies in the bin and on the board simultaneously. The discard cost is a feature, not a bug, in any shell that treats the graveyard as a second hand.
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, Fleshless Gladiator slots cleanly into Aristocrats and graveyard-value shells that need a repeatable discard outlet stapled to a recursive creature — it does real work without asking for mana each loop. Pauper is where it gets genuinely dangerous: the card is common, the discard synergies run deep, and a self-recurring threat at that rarity is rare enough to warp local metas. Modern and Pioneer both have the raw power to ignore it, but niche Hollow One or discard-matters builds can use the free recursion as a cheap engine piece. Legacy and Vintage have strictly better options at every axis, so it won't see play there outside of meme territory.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.08 bulk tier
At $0.08, Fleshless Gladiator is pure bulk — buy a playset for the price of a sleeve. Bulk commons with genuine recursive utility tend to stay flat or tick up slightly if a format breakout happens, but don't hold copies speculating; grab them because you need them.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.