Skillful Lunge
Instant
Target creature gets +2/+0 and gains first strike until end of turn.
- CMC
- 2
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- W
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- Dark Ascension
- Price
- $0.06
- EDHREC rank
- #29622
Skillful Lunge gives a creature first strike and lifelink until end of turn — enough to win a combat trade and swing your life total, all for one white mana. It's a fine limited trick and an unplayable in any 100-card singleton format where one mana needs to do more than this.
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 | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Skillful Lunge is a combat trick, and combat tricks scale with how often games are decided in combat — which means it's most at home in Limited, where a two-for-one trade on a key blocker or a surprise lifelink swing can close a game. In Pauper it's legal but competes with a deep pool of more efficient tricks and burn spells, and rarely makes the cut. In Commander, 100-card singletons and four-opponent tables make one-shot combat modifiers close to dead weight — Skillful Lunge won't protect your board against wraths, won't advance your game plan, and the window where it matters is narrow.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.06 bulk tier
At $0.06, Skillful Lunge is deep bulk — the kind of card that fills out a trade binder or a draft cube without costing anything meaningful. Bulk commons don't appreciate, so there's no reason to stockpile copies.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.