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Tidewater Minion

Creature — Elemental Minion

Defender (This creature can't attack.)
{4}: This creature loses defender until end of turn.
{T}: Untap target permanent.

CMC
5
Mana cost
{3}{U}{U}
Color identity
U
Rarity
common
Set
Ravnica: City of Guilds
Price
$0.12
EDHREC rank
#19319
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Tidewater Minion card art
Tidewater Minion taps to untap any permanent you control — that's the whole engine, and it goes infinite the moment you pair it with Ioreth of the Healing House or any cost-reducer that makes the tap free. Five mana for a 3/3 is the price of admission, and in the right shell you pay it without hesitation.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

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

Tidewater Minion is a Commander card through and through — the formats where it's legal elsewhere (Legacy, Vintage, Pauper, Modern) have no interest in a five-mana 3/3 whose payoff requires additional setup. In Commander, the 100-card singleton environment and abundance of untap synergies give Tidewater Minion exactly the context it needs: one copy, one combo piece, and a table that can't always see it coming. Pauper is the one competitive outlier worth noting — common-legal infinite-untap pieces are scarce enough that Tidewater Minion occasionally shows up in fringe brews, though it hasn't cracked established lists.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

$0.12 bulk tier

At $0.12, Tidewater Minion sits squarely in bulk territory — you're paying for cardboard, not scarcity. Combo pieces at this price floor tend to stay cheap until a deck or format breakout puts them on a buylist, so pick up copies now if you need them and don't expect the price to move on its own.

Explore

Sources

Mentioned

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