Grim Feast
Enchantment
At the beginning of your upkeep, this enchantment deals 1 damage to you.
Whenever a creature is put into an opponent's graveyard from the battlefield, you gain life equal to its toughness.
- CMC
- 3
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- BG
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Mirage
- Price
- $7.20
- EDHREC rank
- #17039
Grim Feast turns every creature that dies under any opponent's control into a life payment directly to you — at three mana for an enchantment that sits and accumulates, that rate is strong in any multiplayer game where boards trade constantly. It won't close games on its own, but it keeps you alive through the attrition that kills other decks.
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 Grim Feast actually earns its slot — three opponents means three times the creature deaths, and a three-mana enchantment that passively accumulates life over a long game fits exactly the environment it was designed for. In Vintage and Legacy it's technically legal but sees no meaningful play; the formats are too fast and too creature-light for a slow enchantment that does nothing the turn it enters. Grim Feast is a Commander card through and through, and evaluating it anywhere else is academic.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Budget Alternatives
Cheaper options that do most of the same work
Exquisite Blood does something adjacent — converting life loss to life gain at a higher ceiling — but costs significantly more and plays a different role. For a direct budget substitute, Sanguine Bond pairs with life gain rather than harvesting creature deaths, so it's not a clean swap; the honest answer is that Grim Feast occupies a fairly unique niche, and the closest cheap replacement is simply leaning on incidental lifegain staples like Soul Warden or Essence Warden, which trigger on enters-the-battlefield rather than death and lose the cross-table reach that makes Grim Feast worthwhile.
Price Context
Current price
$7.20 mid tier
At $7.20, Grim Feast sits in mid-tier pricing for a card that appears in a narrow slice of Commander decks — it's not a staple, so demand stays low, but the Reserved List status means the supply ceiling is fixed and price erosion is unlikely. Pay the $7 if you're building a dedicated lifegain commander shell; otherwise the price-to-impact ratio doesn't justify it in a general goodstuff list.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.