Skill Borrower
Artifact Creature — Human Wizard
Play with the top card of your library revealed.
As long as the top card of your library is an artifact or creature card, this creature has all activated abilities of that card. (If any of the abilities use that card's name, use this creature's name instead.)
- CMC
- 3
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Shards of Alara
- Price
- $0.34
- EDHREC rank
- #24026
Skill Borrower turns the top card of your library into a free activated ability — and in decks that can control what sits there, that's a repeatable engine on a three-mana body. The payoff scales entirely with what you put on top, which makes it a build-around rather than a good-stuff include.
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 |
Skill Borrower is a Commander card through and through — the singleton format's density of powerful activated abilities and the slower pace to assemble top-deck manipulation make it viable in a way other formats don't support. In Legacy and Vintage it's technically legal but entirely unplayed; three mana for a conditional ability that requires setup is nowhere near the power bar those formats demand. Modern has the same problem: the card asks too much and delivers too little without a deck built around it, and no such deck exists competitively. Commander is where Skill Borrower finds its niche, specifically in decks running Sensei's Divining Top, Scroll Rack, or similar — stack a Blightsteel Colossus or a Grim Monolith on top and the ability becomes immediately backbreaking.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.34 bulk tier
At $0.34, Skill Borrower is firmly bulk — easy to pick up in any trade binder or bulk bin without a second thought. It's a narrow enough build-around that demand stays low, so don't expect the price to move unless a new commander pushes top-deck synergies into the mainstream.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.