Before Star Trek was even a blip on Wizards’ radar, Edge of Eternities marked Magic’s first step into the great expanse of space. This set was one of 2025’s most welcome surprises, packing a ton of fantastic cards for Commander and a bunch for constructed as well.
While Edge of Eternities notably had fewer legendary creatures than many recent MTG sets, the ones it had, like Xu-Ifit, Osteoharmonist, were largely bangers. By putting repeatable reanimation in the command zone, this spooky Wizard enables a ton of funky lines and brutal combos.
Xu-Ifit, Osteoharmonist MTG
Xu-Ifit can tap to reanimate any creature from your graveyard, with the curious caveat of turning it into a Skeleton with no abilities to balance things out. Right off the bat, this makes it ideal alongside huge creatures with big drawbacks, like Phyrexian Dreadnought and Death’s Shadow. With easy access to such high-power bombs, power-matters cards like Disciple of Bolas and Susur Secundi, Void Altar become absolute bangers in this deck.
While Xu-Ifit is decidedly less good with creatures that rely on their abilities to thrive, you can get around that with some sneaky plays. Reanimate something like Ravenous Chupacabra or Gray Merchant of Asphodel, for example, and you can then blink it with Conjurer’s Closet to reap the benefits. You can also use cheap spells like Not Dead After All to net a considerable overall discount on reanimating ‘full’ creatures.
Whatever you’re reanimating with Xu-Ifit, you’ll want to make sure you run plenty of ways to stock your graveyard with bodies. Self-mill like Stitcher’s Supplier and Ripples of Undeath is a great place to start, and generic options like Mesmeric Orb help a lot too. Cards that tutor directly to your graveyard, like Buried Alive and Lively Dirge, are even better, letting you pick and choose the best targets in each case.
Clattering Combo Corner
While Xu-Ifit is a fun and dynamic deck when played fair, it can take things even further with its infinite combo lines. These all revolve around Thornbite Staff and a free sacrifice outlet like Altar of Dementia. With Staff equipped to Xu-Ifit, you can tap it to reanimate a creature, then sacrifice the creature to untap Xu-Ifit.
On its own, Altar of Dementia can mill out all of your opponents for a clean win; however, there’s plenty of extra redundancy available. Using Ashnod’s or Phyrexian Altar, for instance, you can get infinite mana for a Walking Ballista win. Alternatively, any Blood Artist effect and free sacrifice effect will let you close the game out through indirect damage.
Despite its unique playstyle and powerful combos, Xu-Ifit, Osteoharmonist isn’t massively popular as an MTG Commander. According to EDHREC data, in fact, just 4,611 players run it in the command zone, which feels low for such a great Mono-Black option. It fares better in the 99, showing up in around 25,000 decks there, but even that isn’t quite what you’d expect for a card of this caliber.
On the plus side, this lack of popularity ensures that Xu-Ifit is an affordable card to pick up. You can grab near-mint copies on TCGplayer right now for just $0.15, and the fancy borderless version isn’t much more at $1.35. At these prices, the card is an ideal pickup as a budget Mono-Black Commander, or even just an addition to the 99 of other Reanimator brews.
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