Nourishing Shoal
Instant — Arcane
You may exile a green card with mana value X from your hand rather than pay this spell's mana cost.
You gain X life.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- G
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Betrayers of Kamigawa
- Price
- $0.90
- EDHREC rank
- #22043
Nourishing Shoal gives you life equal to the exiled green card's mana value — and you can pitch a fatty to cast it for free, making it a zero-mana life swing of 5, 7, or more in the right deck. It does nothing else: no card advantage, no board impact, just a life total number.
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, Nourishing Shoal is a niche include in decks that care about life total as a resource — Oloro, Ageless Ascetic, Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim, or any commander that converts life into draws or damage. Modern sees it primarily in Goryo's Vengeance and Griselbrand reanimator shells, where pitching a large green creature to gain 7+ life off a free spell keeps you alive through the combo turn. Legacy allows it but the format's speed rarely demands this kind of life padding. It's unplayable in Pioneer and Standard, and Pauper bans it by rarity. Nourishing Shoal is a highly format-specific card — if your deck isn't actively spending or leveraging life as a resource, there's nothing here.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.90 bulk tier
At $0.90, Nourishing Shoal sits in bulk territory despite genuine competitive play in Modern reanimator. The price reflects narrow demand — it's only a four-of in one or two fringe archetypes — so expect it to stay flat unless those strategies break through.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.