Is Halo-Charged Skaab good in Commander?

Halo-Charged Skaab

Creature — Zombie

When this creature enters, each player mills two cards. Then you may put an instant, sorcery, or battle card from your graveyard on top of your library. (To mill two cards, a player puts the top two cards of their library into their graveyard.)

CMC: 5
Mana cost
Color identity: U
Rarity: common
Set: March of the Machine
Price: $0.11
EDHREC rank: #20282

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Halo-Charged Skaab lets you cash in a graveyard full of creatures for extra turns, trading card advantage for raw time — the same effect as Temporal Manipulation stapled to a recursive threat. The ask is steep: five mana for the body, then exiling eight-plus power worth of your own graveyard to untap lands and take another turn.

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

Halo-Charged Skaab is a Commander card through and through — the graveyard-filling setup and the value of extra turns scale directly with the longer game length and larger creature counts that 100-card pods produce. In Pauper it's technically legal but extra turns are banned in that format's spirit, and the graveyard infrastructure required isn't reliably available at common density. Modern and Pioneer have faster, cleaner extra-turn spells that don't require an eight-power graveyard threshold, so Halo-Charged Skaab doesn't compete there. Legacy and Vintage have the same problem compounded: the format speed makes a five-mana 3/4 with conditions a non-starter.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

4 decks