Sandbar Serpent
Creature — Serpent
Cycling 
(, Discard this card: Draw a card.)
- CMC
- 5
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Urza's Saga
- Price
- $0.22
- EDHREC rank
- #28423
Sandbar Serpent is a five-mana 3/4 with islandwalk — a stat line that wouldn't excite in 1997, let alone now. The cycling ability is the only reason to acknowledge it exists, and even that is outclassed by nearly every blue cantrip printed in the last decade.
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 |
Sandbar Serpent is legal in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but legality and playability are different things. In Commander, a 3/4 islandwalker for five mana competes against format-defining threats and utility creatures that do far more for the same cost or less. Legacy and Vintage have no interest in a vanilla-adjacent sea creature when those formats are defined by efficiency at one and two mana. Sandbar Serpent's cycling makes it marginally less embarrassing to draw late, but that floor is the whole argument for including it.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.22 bulk tier
At $0.22, Sandbar Serpent is deep bulk — the kind of card that fills a common box and rarely leaves it. The price is accurate to its power level, and there's no pressure driving it upward.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.