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Hua Tuo, Honored Physician

Legendary Creature — Human

{T}: Put target creature card from your graveyard on top of your library. Activate only during your turn, before attackers are declared.

CMC
3
Mana cost
{1}{G}{G}
Color identity
G
Rarity
rare
Set
Portal Three Kingdoms
Price
$51.23
EDHREC rank
#13793
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Hua Tuo, Honored Physician card art
Hua Tuo, Honored Physician turns your library's top card into a recursion engine — every creature you want back costs just one tap, no mana required. That zero-mana activation is what makes it genuinely broken in sacrifice loops: pair it with Verdant Succession or slot it under Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire and the engine basically runs itself.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire

Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire

38.8% of decks · synergy 0.38

Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire sacrifices permanents on every attack, and Hua Tuo, Honored Physician answers the immediate question of where those creatures go — tap before combat to top the library, swing, and watch Vaevictis flip them back onto the battlefield for free.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

FormatVerdict
commander legal
legacy legal
modern not legal
pioneer not legal
standard not legal
vintage legal
pauper not legal
oathbreaker legal

Commander is where Hua Tuo, Honored Physician actually lives — the singleton format rewards its unique niche of free, repeatable topdeck recursion, and the slower pace of the format gives you time to untap and exploit the ability multiple times per rotation. Legacy and Vintage legality is technically real, but the ability triggers at sorcery speed and demands you untap, which is a prohibitive ask in formats where the game ends before turn four. Outside of Commander and Oathbreaker, there's no competitive home for it.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Budget Alternatives

Cheaper options that do most of the same work

Mortuary Shelf and Postmortem Lunge cover some of the same graveyard-to-hand or graveyard-to-battlefield ground at a fraction of the price, though both are one-shot effects rather than repeatable engines. If you want the topdeck-placement specifically, Nyx Weaver and Buried Alive fill the graveyard instead of clearing it, which is a different axis entirely — Hua Tuo, Honored Physician's zero-mana repeatable loop has no true budget replacement.

Price Context

Current price

$51.23 premium tier

At $51.23, Hua Tuo, Honored Physician sits in premium territory driven almost entirely by its scarcity as a Portal Three Kingdoms-era card with no widely available reprint. The price is stable but steep — you're paying a collector tax on top of the card's real utility, and anyone building on a budget should weigh that honestly.

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Sources

Mentioned

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Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.