All 12 Badgers in Magic Ranked

Last updated on November 14, 2025

Hugs, Grisly Guardian | Illustration by Steve Prescott

Wizards of the Coast pulled the ol’ bait and switch on us when they revealed Hugs, Grisly Guardian as part of the Bloomburrow spoilers, teasing us with a possible new suite of badger creatures. Sadly, it appears the Gruul-aligned creature type from this cute MTG set is actually raccoon, leaving us with just a single badger to lead our mammalian Commander decks.

With so few badgers available, building an entire deck around this neglected creature type is daunting – are they even worth playing? Pop open your copy of Redwall and lets see which of these badgers could hold its own!

What Are Badgers in MTG?

Charging Badger | Illustration by Raoul Vitale

Badger is a creature type in Magic, usually associated with filler world-building creatures, but lacking a unified theme. The first badger creature was Rysorian Badger, printed all the way back in Homelands, shortly followed by the HarperPrism Book Promo version of Giant Badger.

They’re mostly green creatures, with two red badgers and one Gruul-aligned legendary badger, plus one green badger with a black kicker ability. Their abilities are mostly useful during the combat phase, like most red and green creatures, but the advantage they generate varies from card to card. Because of this, I rank the badger creatures by their general utility rather than how well they’d fit into a Hugs, Grisly Guardian deck.

#12. Rock Badger

A 3/3 with a conditional unblockable ability for 5 mana is… fine. Rock Badger is a common with mountainwalk, making it useful versus other red decks, but an overcosted Hill Giant in all other aspects.

#11. Rysorian Badger

The first badger printed in Magic was Rysorian Badger. This Homelands badger has a proto-graveyard hate ability to exile creatures from your opponents’ graveyards and gain you some life to boot.

Sadly, this sort of “attacks and isn’t blocked” triggered ability has fallen by the wayside, as it’s too unpredictable and inconsistent to be a regular source of graveyard removal. A 2/2 for 3 mana with any effect was a great rate in the ‘90s, back when creatures resoundingly sucked, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a reason to run this over Scavenging Ooze.

#10. Bog Badger

A one-time menace anthem for your board ain’t nothing, but it’s not much for 4 mana.

Bog Badger is the only badger creature from Dominaria United and is the only one with black in its color identity. It’s either a plain ol’ 3/3 for 3 (on-rate in a Limited environment!) or a 3/3 for 4 that gets your other creatures in for damage that turn.

Four mana makes this effect comparable to, say, Drey Keeper’s squirrel-based menace anthem, but its one-time use means it struggles to hold its own in a Constructed environment.

#9. Charging Badger

Charging Badger is a 1/1 for with trample. A creature with 1 power won’t ever trample additional damage over its blocker, but with some modification, Charging Badger can be one of the easiest ways to get a trample creature on the board.

Compared to a similar common like Almighty Brushwagg, though, our Charging Badger’s lack of any innate way to buff itself makes it a fairly weak 1-drop. Especially when we have the option to give almost any creature trample (and a power buff!) for 1 mana with Rancor or Audacity.

#8. Giant Badger

Giant Badger is a classic design for a common creature from Magic’s mid-years. A 2/2 for 3 that becomes a 4/4 whenever it blocks helps you set the tempo in combat in Limited environments. There will often come a time when you’ve lost the roll-off and an opponent has stuck their turn-two 3/1 before you. Luckily, Giant Badger makes an excellent defender in the early game, but its value falls off as the game progresses and larger and larger creatures begin to hit the field. However, that doesn’t mean it's useless. Giant Badger can both deter early attackers in a low-power environment and trade up with something larger later on.

#7. Colossal Badger

This big boy has an adventure built in that lets you self-mill cards for counters on a creature you control. Then, when you cast it for 6 mana, it becomes a 6/5 and gives you 3 life to boot.

Colossal Badger seems like it has a lot of value – and indeed it does compared to some of the other badgers – but it’s still too underpowered to really be worth it. Two mana to mill four cards is about average when we compare it to cards like Drown in Filth or Gray Slaad, but its lack of any graveyard-specific synergy makes it a dead card after the fact.

Worse, it's adventure doesn’t even guarantee we’ll get any +1/+1 counters on the targeted creature, meaning we run the risk of completely whiffing.

#6. Badgermole

Badgermole is a noble creature in Avatar: The Last Airbender and one of the original earthbending masters. The solid bodies along with the +1/+1 counters to enable trample make this a very solid card overall.

#5. Stubborn Burrowfiend

Outlaws of Thunder Junction introduced one new badger that, as a mount, we can saddle up and ride into combat.

As a 2/2 for 2, Stubborn Burrowfiend’s already a fair rate in a Limited environment, and its triggered saddle effect gets progressively stronger each time you activate it – milling more and more creatures into your graveyard results in a bigger buff for the Burrowfiend. It only mills two at a time on its own, but by building around it a little, you should see a Stubborn Burrowfiend swinging in for 5 or more damage after a turn or two.

#4. Surly Badgersaur

Surly Badgersaur came along in Commander 2020 in the cycling-themed Timeless Wisdom Commander precon. This dinosaur badger has three effects that trigger depending on the type of cards you discard.

The first and third effects work well together, buffing the Badgersaur before using it to fight opponents’ creatures. Its second effect generates Treasure tokens whenever you discard lands – an amazing payoff for 1-mana landcyclers like Forgotten Cave, and even better with looting spells like Faithless Salvaging.

Surly Badgersaur is a sleeper red ramp card in discard decks that should probably see more play!

#3. Brightcap Badger

The Bloomburrow Commander creature Brightcap Badger comes with a built-in adventure that creates two 1/1 Saprolings for 3 mana – a worse rate than normal if we compare it to Saproling Migration or Dragon Fodder.

However, the Saprolings (and any Fungi we control!) become mana dorks once we cast our Brightcap Badger, and it creates another Saproling during our end steps.

It’s slower than Jaheira, Friend of the Forest, but creating a few Saprolings first could give this badger a role in “go wide” populate decks. It’s a little worse than I’d like to see, but by far one of Magic's more useful badgers.

#2. Hugs, Grisly Guardian

Hugs, Grisly Guardian is the newest badger on the block and the only legendary badger. Hugs' base cost is , plus however much you’d like to dump into X as you cast it.

Hugs exiles X cards from the top of your library when it enters, and lets you play them until the end of your next turn. Hugs also allows you one additional land drop per turn, helping you play the lands from the exiled pile of cards while ramping you to cast those spells.

Honestly? I don’t think Hugs makes a great Gruul commander. Legendary creatures with “enters” abilities need access to blink and Cloudshift effects, and Gruul doesn’t really have those available. Hugs’ ability can generate a ton of advantage for you if you exile just the spell you’re looking for, but you’ll most likely be waiting until your following turn to cast it if you tapped out to dump mana into its X-cost.

This means your opponents get a full turn cycle to prepare for your face-up threats, be that Negate for your Overrun or holding up protection to stop your Delayed Blast Fireball from destroying their board.

#1. Badgermole Cub

Badgermole Cub is not only an airbending and flicker target, the little 2-drop is darn-near a dork-specific mana doubler. The rate of acceleration for green ramp is phenomonal. Dare I say that every deck that wants Llanowar Elves and Birds of Paradise will want this Cub, and that's nearly every green deck.

Best Badger Payoffs

Badgers are not a popular creature type, mostly because there are so few of them. Building a deck around badgers is tricky, but there are some staples you can use to make it easier on yourself.

Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer has a great triggered ability that adds badgers to your battlefield, but is limited to just one card, so if you feel like there aren’t enough badgers to justify a deck (there aren’t…), I suggest running Maskwood Nexus to make everything you control into a badger. I’d recommend Conspiracy and Arcane Adaptation, but without access to blue or black, we’ll have to make do.

Cost-reduction effects might seem like the way to go, but we don’t really need an Urza's Incubator when seven out of nine of our badgers already cost 4 or less mana. Instead, run Coat of Arms and Door of Destinies to make sure your Charging Badger has the best possible statline before it barrels into your opponents.

Wrap Up

Colossal Badger | Illustrationn by Leonardo Santanna

With so few badger creatures available in Magic, it might seem ridiculous to rank all of them, especially with the majority being unplayable by today’s standards. But I’d posit that no matter what, there’ll always be a deck-builder out there hell-bent on building around every creature type they can think of. Even you could be our next badger-enthusiast!

Are there enough badgers to warrant building a deck around them? Is Hugs, Grisly Guardian as good as the commanders get? And what are your favorite buffs for Charging Badger? Let me know in the comments, or over on Draftsim's Twitter/X!

Thank you for reading!