Ruin Crab
Creature — Crab
Landfall — Whenever a land you control enters, each opponent mills three cards. (To mill a card, a player puts the top card of their library into their graveyard.)
- CMC
- 1
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate
- Price
- —
- EDHREC rank
- #1307
Ruin Crab mills three cards every time a land enters under your control — on a one-mana 0/3 body that blocks early aggression — and that rate is nearly unmatched at the cost. The Mindskinner and dedicated mill strategies want it as a turn-one play that scales with every fetchland, ramp spell, and land drop for the rest of the game.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
The Mindskinner
The Mindskinner is built around milling opponents and converting that into board presence, so Ruin Crab is a natural engine piece — every land drop fuels the mill count The Mindskinner wants to maximize.
Phenax, God of Deception
Phenax, God of Deception goes wide with high-toughness creatures and mills through tap activations, and Ruin Crab fills both roles: it contributes to the passive land-triggered mill while its 3 toughness is a real number for a Phenax tap.
Bruvac the Grandiloquent
Bruvac the Grandiloquent doubles mill triggers, so Ruin Crab's three-per-land becomes six — a fetchland or ramp spell suddenly mills a meaningful chunk of an opponent's library on its own.
The Wise Mothman
The Wise Mothman cares about opponents having counters placed on cards in every zone, and Ruin Crab feeds the graveyard consistently enough to keep The Wise Mothman's radiation triggers firing throughout the game.
Captain N'ghathrod
Captain N'ghathrod wants opponents' graveyards stocked to steal creatures, and Ruin Crab is one of the cheapest, most consistent ways to fill those graveyards from turn one.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
In Commander, Ruin Crab is the backbone of dedicated mill decks — it scales with the higher land counts and multiple opponents in the format, and every fetchland or Cultivate becomes a free mill-three. In Modern and Pioneer, it anchors the mill archetype alongside Fractured Sanity and Tasha's Hideous Laughter, providing a one-drop that pressures opponents passively while you deploy the rest of the engine. Legacy has faster, more broken things going on, but Ruin Crab sees play there too in dedicated mill shells where the redundancy matters. It's not legal in Standard or Pauper, so those audiences can stop here.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
unknown tier
Ruin Crab is widely available and typically sits in the budget-rare range — worth picking up a copy or two for any mill build without hesitation. Pricing data isn't currently loaded for this page, so check Scryfall or your preferred vendor for the current market rate.
Explore
Sources
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.