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The Wise Mothman

Legendary Creature — Insect Mutant

Flying
Whenever The Wise Mothman enters or attacks, each player gets a rad counter.
Whenever one or more nonland cards are milled, put a +1/+1 counter on each of up to X target creatures, where X is the number of nonland cards milled this way.

CMC
4
Mana cost
{1}{B}{G}{U}
Color identity
BGU
Rarity
mythic
Set
Secret Lair Drop
Price
$8.46
EDHREC rank
#3535
Buy on TCGplayer
The Wise Mothman card art
The Wise Mothman puts a +1/+1 counter on every creature you control whenever you draw your second card in a turn — a passive engine that turns cantrips into a board-wide anthem. The catch is a five-mana price tag and a fragile 2/2 body, so if you're not pairing it with consistent draw engines like Benthic Biomancer or protecting it under something like The Master, Transcendent, you're paying premium for a creature that dies to a stiff breeze before it pays off.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
The Master, Transcendent

The Master, Transcendent

63.8% of decks · synergy 0.61

The Master, Transcendent proliferates whenever you draw your second card each turn, which is the exact trigger The Wise Mothman watches — the two cards effectively share an activation condition, stacking counter growth and proliferate spread on the same draw step. Running The Wise Mothman in that deck means every cantrip does double duty: counters on the board and proliferate across all your permanents.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

FormatVerdict
commander legal
legacy legal
modern not legal
pioneer not legal
standard not legal
vintage legal
pauper not legal
oathbreaker legal

The Wise Mothman is a Commander card through and through — its payoff scales with the longer game, multiple opponents, and the draw-heavy piles that 100-card decks tend to run. In competitive Legacy or Vintage, a five-mana creature that doesn't immediately affect the board and requires a second-card-drawn trigger each turn is far too slow to matter; those formats kill before you untap. Commander is where it lives, specifically in decks built around proliferate, +1/+1 counters, or draw-twice engines, where it generates persistent value across multiple turns. Oathbreaker is technically legal but shares Commander's slower pace, so the same logic applies at a smaller table.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Budget Alternatives

Cheaper options that do most of the same work

If the $8 price tag is the problem, Benthic Biomancer covers the mutation-into-counters angle at a fraction of the cost, though it operates on a much smaller scale and won't anthem your whole board. There's no true budget replacement for the global counter distribution The Wise Mothman provides — most cheaper options either target a single creature or require more setup — so if that board-wide effect is the reason you want it, the card is essentially its own category.

Price Context

Current price

$8.46 mid tier

At $8.46, The Wise Mothman sits in the mid tier — not a snap-include, but not a budget-breaking ask for a card that's doing real work in the right shell. Inclusion in over 60% of The Master, Transcendent decks gives it a stable demand floor, so this price is unlikely to crater unless a reprint hits wide print runs.

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Sources

Mentioned

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Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.