Undertow
Enchantment
Creatures with islandwalk can be blocked as though they didn't have islandwalk.
- CMC
- 3
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Legends
- Price
- $1.65
- EDHREC rank
- #30724
Undertow taps down all creatures with a target basic land type in their text boxes at the start of each opponent's untap step, effectively locking out mono-color or heavily basic-reliant creature decks for the entire game. The cost is relevance — against three-color decks running fetchable basics it can still hit key creatures, but against greedy mana bases it whiffs entirely.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Commander is where Undertow has any realistic home, and even there it's a niche pick — best in dedicated stax shells that want to grind games to a halt rather than close them out. Legacy and Vintage are legal formats but Undertow sees no meaningful play there; the threat density and pace of those formats leave a three-mana enchantment that conditionally taps creatures embarrassingly slow. In Commander, the payoff scales with how basic-heavy your pod is, which makes it a reasonable call in metas built around landfall commanders or mono-color decks, and a complete blank against four- and five-color goodstuff piles.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$1.65 cheap tier
At $1.65, Undertow sits in the cheap tier — low enough that picking it up for a dedicated stax build is painless. It's an old card with a narrow use case, so demand stays flat and that price is unlikely to move in either direction.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.