Is Gyruda, Doom of Depths good in Commander?

Gyruda, Doom of Depths

Legendary Creature — Demon Kraken

Companion — Your starting deck contains only cards with even mana values. (If this card is your chosen companion, you may put it into your hand from outside the game for as a sorcery.)
When Gyruda enters, each player mills four cards. Put a creature card with an even mana value from among the milled cards onto the battlefield under your control.

CMC: 6
Mana cost
Color identity: BU
Rarity: rare
Set: Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Promos
Price: —
EDHREC rank: #4245

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Gyruda, Doom of Depths mills four cards from every player and drops a copy of the best even-mana creature it finds — on a six-mana body that can loop indefinitely if the right pieces hit the graveyard. The cost is real: you're locked into even-mana permanents across your entire deck, which means Mortuary and every other setup piece has to earn its slot in a constrained cardpool, but when the engine runs, Runo Stromkirk decks and dedicated Gyruda shells can close games in a single trigger chain.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

Runo Stromkirk

77.0% of decks · synergy 0.73

Runo Stromkirk appears in over 77% of decks running Gyruda, Doom of Depths because the two cards form the core of a self-feeding loop — Gyruda mills creatures into the graveyard that Runo can leverage, while Runo's transformation into Krothuss lets you copy Gyruda's enters-the-battlefield trigger and mill even deeper.

Be'lakor, the Dark Master

37.6% of decks · synergy 0.36

Be'lakor, the Dark Master runs Gyruda, Doom of Depths as a high-value demon body that also happens to mill opponents and generate board presence, feeding Be'lakor's damage trigger every time a new creature enters from the cascade of copied ETBs.

Araumi of the Dead Tide

31.3% of decks · synergy 0.27

Araumi of the Dead Tide uses Gyruda, Doom of Depths as a prime encore target — exiling Gyruda from the graveyard to create three tapped copies means three separate mill-and-reanimate triggers, generating a board out of a single card in the bin.

Sedris, the Traitor King

28.2% of decks · synergy 0.26

Sedris, the Traitor King reanimates Gyruda, Doom of Depths cheaply via unearth, getting a second mill trigger at the cost of exiling it at end of turn — a clean rate when Gyruda has already done its work once.

Marvo, Deep Operative

25.5% of decks · synergy 0.22

Marvo, Deep Operative treats Gyruda, Doom of Depths as a cascade payoff: Gyruda's six-mana cost sits in the right range for Marvo to cascade into, and the mill trigger immediately fuels whatever graveyard synergies the rest of the 99 supports.

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	not legal
oathbreaker	legal

Commander is where Gyruda, Doom of Depths is most dangerous — three opponents means twelve cards milled per cast, and a loop with a clone effect can end the game before anyone untaps. In Legacy and Vintage, it sees niche play as a combo piece in reanimator or self-mill strategies, though the six-mana cost is steep in formats where three mana wins games. Modern and Pioneer support it in fringe even-mana tribal or self-mill builds, but it's too slow and too build-around to compete at the top tables in either format. Oathbreaker offers a middle ground where the even-mana restriction is easier to engineer around and the mill trigger hits the 60-card library more meaningfully.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

815 decks