Ruthless Waterbender
Creature — Human Soldier Ally
Waterbend 
: This creature gets +1/+1 until end of turn. Activate only during your turn. (While paying a waterbend cost, you can tap your artifacts and creatures to help. Each one pays for 
.)
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Avatar: The Last Airbender Eternal
- Price
- $0.15
- EDHREC rank
- #18594
Ruthless Waterbender steals any creature with power less than or equal to your blue devotion — no mana cost, just the devotion check — and keeps it until end of turn as a haste attacker or sacrifice fodder. The ceiling is enormous in a blue-heavy deck; the floor is zero if your devotion is low when you need it most.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Commander is the natural home for Ruthless Waterbender — blue devotion scales up reliably in mono-blue or heavy-blue lists, and the free-steal effect is exactly the kind of tempo swing that matters in multiplayer games where a single threat can dominate a board state. Legacy and Vintage are legal but offer no real home: those formats don't support devotion payoff strategies, and a one-shot haste attack rarely compensates for a card slot. Ruthless Waterbender simply does nothing in Standard, Pioneer, or Pauper, so the Commander table is where every copy should be headed.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.15 bulk tier
At $0.15, Ruthless Waterbender sits firmly in bulk territory, which makes it a zero-friction pickup for any blue devotion build. Bulk rares with narrow conditions rarely climb unless a new commander pushes the archetype hard, so treat this as a functional role-player at a throwaway price rather than a spec.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.