Root Maze
Enchantment
Artifacts and lands enter tapped.
- CMC
- 1
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- G
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Tenth Edition
- Price
- $4.84
- EDHREC rank
- #10310
Root Maze enters and immediately taxes every artifact and land your opponents play — they come in tapped, you pay nothing extra for the effect. At one green mana for a permanent lock piece, it's one of the most efficient stax cards in the format; Yisan, the Wanderer Bard decks run it precisely because they don't care about their own enters-tapped downside when they're tutoring at instant speed anyway.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Yisan, the Wanderer Bard
Yisan, the Wanderer Bard activates at instant speed and searches by creature type rather than ramping through artifacts, so Root Maze punishes opponents' mana development without slowing the Yisan engine down — it's a one-sided lock in everything but name.
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, Root Maze is a pillar of green stax strategies — one mana to slow Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, and every fetchland your opponents crack on turn one is an extraordinary rate. Legacy sees fringe play in prison shells that want redundant copies of the effect alongside Manabond and land-tax effects, though it rarely headlines. Modern and Vintage are legal territory but Root Maze is too slow for those formats' combo and tempo demands, and decks that want this kind of disruption have faster options. Oathbreaker is the same story as Commander: stax pilots who can leverage the asymmetry will reach for it.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$4.84 cheap tier
At $4.84, Root Maze sits at the high end of the cheap tier but is still an easy include for the effect it delivers — there's no functional reprint at a lower price point, and demand from both Commander stax builds and Legacy curiousity keeps the floor stable.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Yisan, the Wanderer Bard
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.