Roiling Horror
Creature — Horror
Roiling Horror's power and toughness are each equal to your life total minus the life total of an opponent with the most life.
Suspend X—
. X can't be 0. (Rather than cast this card from your hand, you may pay and exile it with X time counters on it. At the beginning of your upkeep, remove a time counter. When the last is removed, you may cast it without paying its mana cost. It has haste.)
Whenever a time counter is removed from this card while it's exiled, target player loses 1 life and you gain 1 life.
- CMC
- 5
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Planar Chaos
- Price
- $0.35
- EDHREC rank
- #25821
Roiling Horror enters as a X/X where X is the difference between your life total and the lowest opponent's — in a Commander game where life totals swing wildly, that's routinely a 20-plus power creature for five mana. The suspend cost makes it free if you're patient, but the real sell is dropping it as an immediate threat when you're ahead on life.
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 |
Commander is where Roiling Horror does its best work: four opponents means life totals diverge fast, and the gap between your 40 and a beaten-down opponent's 12 turns this into an absurd finisher for five mana. In Legacy and Vintage it's legal but irrelevant — the format moves too fast for a five-mana creature with no enters-the-battlefield effect and no built-in protection. Modern is the same story: a vanilla-ish beater with conditional sizing has never been competitive there. Roiling Horror is a Commander card wearing cross-format legality as a costume.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.35 bulk tier
At $0.35, Roiling Horror sits firmly in bulk territory, which is appropriate for a card with a narrow home and zero constructed demand. Don't expect that to change — bulk rares with single-format appeal stay cheap, and this one is no exception.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.