Thraben Watcher
Creature — Angel
Flying, vigilance
Other nontoken creatures you control get +1/+1 and have vigilance.
- CMC
- 4
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- W
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Jumpstart: Historic Horizons
- Price
- —
- EDHREC rank
- #4724
Thraben Watcher enters and immediately hands every Angel on your board a +1/+1 counter, no mana required — the payoff lands the turn you cast it. In Giada, Font of Hope decks especially, that burst of counters stacks on top of Giada's own trigger and turns a wide Angel board into a closing threat on the spot.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Giada, Font of Hope
Giada, Font of Hope already puts a counter on each Angel as it enters, so Thraben Watcher's mass-counter trigger on arrival means every creature you've accumulated gets suddenly bigger — one card doing the work of several pump spells.
Errant and Giada
Errant and Giada wants a wide, countered-up Angel board to push through combat damage, and Thraben Watcher delivers an immediate counter to every creature already in play the moment it resolves.
Kangee, Sky Warden
Kangee, Sky Warden rewards stacking counters on fliers, and Thraben Watcher fills the whole board at once rather than one creature at a time — efficient when you're running a deep flight roster.
Sephara, Sky's Blade
Sephara, Sky's Blade decks go wide with cheap fliers to reduce her cost, and Thraben Watcher rewards that strategy by converting board width directly into power across all of them simultaneously.
Sigarda, Font of Blessings
Sigarda, Font of Blessings cares about Angels and Humans and often runs both, and Thraben Watcher's enters-the-battlefield pump applies to every Angel in play regardless of how long they've been there.
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 |
Thraben Watcher is legal in Commander, Legacy, Modern, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but its home is firmly Commander. In a singleton format where you can't reliably draw it early and the game goes long enough to accumulate a wide board, the enters-the-battlefield mass-counter effect scales with every Angel you've deployed — it does more work the later it arrives. In Legacy and Vintage, three mana for a 2/3 with a one-shot static-style buff is not a competitive rate; those formats want permanent anthem effects or nothing at all. Oathbreaker is the one 60-card-adjacent format where it could see real play, specifically in Angel-tribal builds where the planeswalker commander is generating token fliers.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
unknown tier
Price data for Thraben Watcher isn't currently available in our feed, so check Scryfall or TCGPlayer for the live number. Given its narrow tribal niche and single-printing status, it tends to sit in the bulk-rare range — worth picking up if you're building Angels, but not a card you need to rush for.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Giada, Font of Hope
- Errant and Giada
- Kangee, Sky Warden
- Sephara, Sky's Blade
- Sigarda, Font of Blessings
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.