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Mairsil, the Pretender

Legendary Creature — Human Wizard

When Mairsil enters, you may exile an artifact or creature card from your hand or graveyard and put a cage counter on it.
Mairsil has all activated abilities of all cards you own in exile with cage counters on them. You may activate each of those abilities only once each turn.

CMC
4
Mana cost
{1}{U}{B}{R}
Color identity
BRU
Rarity
mythic
Set
Commander 2017
Price
—
EDHREC rank
#18120
Buy on TCGplayer
Mairsil, the Pretender card art
Mairsil, the Pretender enters the battlefield and immediately becomes whatever activated ability you've been stockpiling in exile — Aetherling's untargetability, a Nevinyrral's Disk on a body, a Quicksilver Elemental loop engine — all at once. The cost is real: the cage counter restriction means you need to build the entire deck around it, and the first time someone bounces or exiles Mairsil, you feel it.

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 the only format where Mairsil, the Pretender is worth building around. The card is legal in Legacy and Vintage but sees no meaningful play there — its power is entirely dependent on a curated exile pile, which takes a full deck's worth of setup that those formats won't give you. In Commander, the combination of a 100-card singleton shell, a command zone that guarantees access, and the deep pool of broken activated abilities makes Mairsil genuinely threatening: a single untap after a Morphling cage counter and the board state collapses. Oathbreaker is technically legal but the 20-life total and faster pace leave too little time to build the cage.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

unknown tier

Price data isn't available at the moment, so check Scryfall or TCGPlayer for a current number. Mairsil, the Pretender has historically sat in the $3–6 range — high enough to reflect real demand from Commander players, low enough that it's never been a finance target.

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Sources

Mentioned

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