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Painter's Servant

Artifact Creature — Scarecrow

As this creature enters, choose a color.
All cards that aren't on the battlefield, spells, and permanents are the chosen color in addition to their other colors.

CMC
2
Mana cost
{2}
Color identity
C
Rarity
rare
Set
Shadowmoor
Price
$63.19
EDHREC rank
#7203
Buy on TCGplayer
Painter's Servant card art
Painter's Servant makes every card in every library, hand, and battlefield share a color — and that one line of text enables some of the most efficient two-card locks in the game, most famously the instant-mill kill with Grindstone. Teysa, Orzhov Scion decks run it because naming white turns every creature on the board into a trigger waiting to happen, but the real reason to play Painter's Servant is that it warps the game around a two-mana artifact the moment it lands.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

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

Painter's Servant is legal in Legacy, Modern, Vintage, and Commander, and banned in Oathbreaker — that ban reflects exactly how broken a two-card combo becomes when one piece is your always-available signature spell. In Legacy, it has historically enabled Grindstone combo and color-hosing with cards like Red Elemental Blast, making it a real competitive piece rather than a casual curiosity. Modern gives it a home in fringe combo builds, though the format's speed means the two-card package needs protection to land. Commander is where Painter's Servant is most comfortable: the singleton rule means you're never drawing multiples, and 40 life gives you the turns needed to set up the lock, so the power is real but not oppressive in the way it can be across a 60-card table.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Teysa, Orzhov Scion

Teysa, Orzhov Scion

26.1% of decks · synergy 0.26

Teysa, Orzhov Scion exiles a creature whenever three white creatures die, and Painter's Servant naming white means every creature token or utility piece on board suddenly qualifies — dramatically lowering the setup cost for Teysa's exile trigger and feeding recursive sacrifice loops.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Budget Alternatives

Cheaper options that do most of the same work

There is no true budget replacement for Painter's Servant — the effect of globally recoloring permanents and cards in all zones is unique, and nothing else enables the Grindstone kill or the color-hoser synergies it does. Celestial Dawn and Mycosynth Lattice touch adjacent territory but serve different functions entirely; if the goal is enabling color-specific payoffs rather than the Grindstone combo specifically, cards like Chromatic Orrery or Blind Seer approach the space at a fraction of the price, but neither replicates what Painter's Servant does with anything close to the same efficiency.

Price Context

Current price

$63.19 premium tier

At $63.19, Painter's Servant sits firmly in premium artifact territory — a price driven by a combination of combo demand, limited print runs, and the fact that it does something no other card does. It's a buy-once piece for a specific strategy rather than a staple you slot into every deck, so the cost is justified only if you're building around the Grindstone line or a color-hoser package.

Explore

Sources

Mentioned

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