Grimclaw Bats
Creature — Bat
Flying
, Pay 1 life: This creature gets +1/+1 until end of turn.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- Darksteel
- Price
- $0.09
- EDHREC rank
- #18219
Grimclaw Bats offers a repeatable, mana-sink pump effect stapled to flying and intimidate, which adds up fast once you have spare black mana. The cost is real — you're pouring resources into a 1/1 base that dies to nearly any removal — but Zoraline, Cosmos Caller turns that mana sink into a genuine late-game threat.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Zoraline, Cosmos Caller
Zoraline, Cosmos Caller rewards stacking devotion to black and converting mana into pressure, and Grimclaw Bats plugs directly into that engine — evasion plus an on-demand pump means it can close out games that Zoraline's ritual effects bankroll.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
In Commander, Grimclaw Bats is a fringe inclusion that earns its slot only in decks that specifically want a mana sink with evasion — black devotion builds or aristocrats shells that generate excess mana late. Pauper is the format where it has the most plausible case: flying and intimidate are real keywords at common, and the pump scales if games go long. In Legacy and Vintage it doesn't register; the power floor is simply too low for those formats' threat density. Oathbreaker mirrors the Commander read — playable in a narrow list, irrelevant everywhere else.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.09 bulk tier
At $0.09, Grimclaw Bats sits squarely in bulk territory — pick it out of a common box and don't think twice about the price. Bulk commons rarely move up, so treat this as a zero-cost slot filler rather than anything with financial upside.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.