Hedron Crab
Creature — Crab
Landfall — Whenever a land you control enters, target player mills three cards. (They put the top three cards of their library into their graveyard.)
- CMC
- 1
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander
- Price
- $2.63
- EDHREC rank
- #1555
Hedron Crab mills three cards per land drop — one mana, one body, and a landfall trigger that scales with every fetch, bounce land, and extra-land effect in the deck. The cost is almost zero; the payoff is real, and Teval, the Balanced Scale makes every milled card a potential resource.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Teval, the Balanced Scale
Teval, the Balanced Scale mills to build a graveyard full of fodder, and Hedron Crab is one of the cheapest ways to fill it — every land drop during Teval's setup turns is a free three cards into the yard.
Bruvac the Grandiloquent
Bruvac the Grandiloquent doubles each mill trigger, so Hedron Crab's three-per-land becomes six — a one-drop that warps the math of the entire strategy.
Charix, the Raging Isle
Charix, the Raging Isle is an Island-matters commander, and Hedron Crab shares the creature type and the color; it slots in as both a tribal piece and an incidental mill engine that keeps pressure on opponents throughout the game.
The Mindskinner
The Mindskinner wants to dump cards into opponents' graveyards as fast as possible, and Hedron Crab converts every land drop into three more cards milled — low cost, high throughput, exactly what the strategy needs.
Teval, Arbiter of Virtue
Teval, Arbiter of Virtue fills the graveyard to enable threshold and reanimation effects, and Hedron Crab provides that filling on the cheap, turning routine land drops into meaningful progress toward the deck's conditions.
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 | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
In Commander, Hedron Crab is a staple in any deck that cares about filling graveyards — its value scales directly with how many land drops the deck makes, which means fetch lands, Wrenn and Six effects, and bounce lands all multiply its output. In Legacy, it anchors dedicated mill strategies alongside Reanimate payoffs, where the cheap body and free triggers fit a tempo-conscious shell. Modern mill leans on it as a one-drop pillar — paired with fetch lands, a single Hedron Crab can mill nine or more cards in the first two turns. Vintage sees it occasionally in mill-adjacent shells, though the format's speed means it rarely gets more than a trigger or two before the game ends. It's not legal in Pioneer, Standard, or Pauper, so Commander and the older eternal formats are where it lives.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$2.63 cheap tier
At $2.63, Hedron Crab sits at the low end of the staple tier — cheap enough to include without budget deliberation, but priced above bulk because it's a genuine role-player in multiple formats. It's a safe pickup: demand from Commander mill decks keeps a floor under it.
Explore
Sources
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.