With the release of Bloomburrow imminent, the Magic: the Gathering/MTG finance community is looking to the future for what could possibly see play in Standard. The rotation occurring on August 2nd, 2024 sees Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, Innistrad: Crimson Vow, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, and Streets Of New Capenna rotate out of standard. The former largest standard format ever goes back down to a more manageable level.
While there are immensely powerful cards in those four sets that are rotating out, in particular from the Innistrad sets and Streets Of New Capenna are the lands that are rotating. The cycle of “Slowlands” and the tri-color lands are both leaving standard.
These three cycles of lands aren’t necessarily the backbone of standard mana bases currently, but they do make it so that control and midrange decks have powerful lands that they can slot in. After these rotate, standard players are left with painlands, fastlands, Restless lands, and Surveil lands.
Those lands being the backbone of standard means that aggressively slanted decks are much more likely to see play. However, there is one last set of lands; the surveil lands should see far more play in two and three-color decks. These lands also have the added benefit of seeing play in both EDH and Modern for different reasons.
Why Are Surveil Lands Spiking In Price In MTG?
Because they have dual land types, they have the added benefit of being searchable with cards that find lands with basic land types. If you’re taking a turn off, playing a surveil land and getting rid of a bad card on top of your deck might as well be like drawing a new card. These lands came out, and certain ones, like Undercity Sewers, were already somewhat expensive. Now if you’re looking at card prices from websites like MTGGoldfish, almost all 10 of these lands are pushing $10+.
We do have a precedent in modern Magic history with these lands with the old Scry lands, but those didn’t have basic land types, and surveil is a much better mechanic than scry. For the upper end of these lands like Elegant Parlor, Undercity Sewers, and Commercial District, there might be even more room to move. If you’re playing those colors in standard or modern, you need at least 1 of these lands in your deck.
Bloomburrow doesn’t look like it’ll have a cycle of competitive dual lands, so it seems like these are the options standard players will have for their two-, three-, four-, or five-color decks. That means that you’ll have real costs to playing a bunch of enter the battlefield tap lands like the Restless or surveil lands, and you’ll have to pay some life for those painlands. That makes for a wrinkle that players will definitely have to think about when building decks.
We’ll really have to see how the landscape of standard changes when Bloomburrow is fully spoiled from Wizards of the Coast.
What do you think about the dual lands that’ll be in standard?
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