All 3 Lobster Cards in Magic Ranked

Rock Lobster | Illustration by Heather Hudson

In the deep past of Magic’s design, many creature types were introduced but never came back. Some have been bundled into others, some have been renamed, and others have disappeared entirely, like lords.

Sea creatures in particular have had very interesting journeys. Some sharks have been fish, octopuses have been cephalids, but today, our main course is lobsters. Their homarid counterparts still don’t count as lobsters, at least not in our humble card game, so there’s only two lobsters you can run in sanctioned play. But that’s bound to change.

While we await our first underwater set, I’ve got your apéritif stuffed full of the lobsters we have so far!

What Are Lobsters in MTG?

Ragost, Deft Gastronaut | Illustration by Zack Stella

Lobster is a creature type in Magic that represents creatures inspired by the crustaceans we know from Earth. Bunch of legs, two specialized claws. There’s a whole restaurant chain named after ‘em.

Previous cards that depict lobsters use the homarid creature type, but there has been no errata as of August 2026 to make them lobsters.

#3. Rock Lobster

Pass the tanning butter. (Ricky Wilson riff intensifies.)

Rock Lobster is part of a cycle of sorts in Unglued with Paper Tiger and Scissors Lizard. I hope I don’t need to explain it further. We usually slap silver-border cards into an honorable mention, but since Rock Lobster’s ability should be easy to Rule-0 into a Commander game and I don’t have enough lobsters to talk about, I’ll invoke “My List” rules and give this one an official slot. For now.

I’d find the flavor text more amusing if I hadn’t heard Ms. Frizzle make a similar joke in a Magic School Bus computer game when I was growing up.

#2. Rikala, Homarid King

I’ll go on record to say that the Vorthos in me loves the theming everywhere in Mystery Booster Commander Edition. If you’re gonna make a new commander, it should do something fun or interesting, even if you’re going over well-tread territory.

And thank you to Ms. Frizzle once again, this time for teaching me about tides and the biodiversity found in tide pools. Rikala, Homarid King’s abilities all tie into the number of tide counters it has, and Simic () has lots of proliferation and other counter manipulation to add to the mix. I could see a deck that adds a tide counter on the upkeep, spends a first main phase proliferating to pump up your creatures, then attacks with a few creatures and holds some back as a wall of defenders. Heck, runs walls, or defenders! Then when your upkeep returns, the tide snaps back out. Makes for a thematic Bracket 1 to 2 deck if you go that route, but I bet it also makes an okay lieutenant for defender commanders or proliferate commanders.

#1. Ragost, Deft Gastronaut

In space, the lobster cooks you.

Ragost, Deft Gastronaut turns all your artifacts into food, which you can sacrifice to burn everyone else. Each end step, you can untap Ragost if you gained life, which could be as simple as cracking a Food that turn, playing a gain land… or you could just give Ragost lifelink so that every activation sets you up to untap. The burn ability also pressures the table, even when the board is stalled and nobody wants to attack.

Artifact recursion or reanimation is important here for your nontoken sac fodder, but utility tokens help a bunch too. Then there’s the likes of Weftstalker Ardent for burn when your artifacts enter.

Outside of the command zone, this lobster finds its way into Rocco, Street Chef decks as an outlet for the commander’s food tokens.

Best Lobster Payoffs

Homer, the Hermit is the only explicit payoff for lobsters as of MBC, and it only works with Rikala in EDH since Ragost is in opposite colors. But once homarids are errata’d into lobsters, Homer will have lots of them to recruit.

With so few lobsters and true payoffs, but also an underwater set on the horizon, the best we can do is handicap what might become lobster payoffs in Nauctis. Rikala and Homer make me wonder about Simic land payoffs, but Rikala is a character from Dominaria. Still, land-matters and +1/+1 counters are standard Simic Draft archetypes, and that would support stuff like earthbending in Standard. It’s not confirmed where Homer is from, so the plane of Nauctis is a possibility. I have no clue how likely it is, but I’d like to see more underwater typal batching as we do with KLOS (kraken, leviathan, octopus, and serpent) payoffs.

Are Homarids Lobsters?

No, or at least, not as of The Hobbit and Mystery Booster Commander Edition. On his blog, Mark Rosewater has answered a few questions in 2023 and 2024 on the topic, and he believes that the change will take place when Wizards puts lobsters in a main set. Watch this space: Nauctis: The Sunken Realm is on the docket for early 2027.

Wrap Up

Dargo, the Shipwrecker | Illustration by Zoltan Boros

Lobsters are kind of in a hurry-up-and-wait mode; the old homarids will likely join them when Nauctis releases, unless Magic makes the switch with either Reality Fracture or Star Trek. Regardless, I’d love for a lobster to have abilities that reflect the asymmetrical, specialized grabbing and crushing claws they have. Something to stun or freeze a creature, then another ability that deals damage to tapped creatures, perhaps?

Let me know what you want to see from future lobsters in the comments below or over on the Draftsim Discord. For all things Magic, including Nauctis news as we have it, subscribe to our newsletter, the Daily Upkeep.

Until next time, safe swimming!