There’s a specific sound a stack of commons makes when it lands in a bulk box, and I’ve made that sound with a foil Lonely Sandbar in it. I’m fairly sure, anyway. I can’t prove it. But I opened a lot of Onslaught in 2002, and I had a policy back then that lands without a picture of a dual-colored mana symbol went straight to the shoebox.

So are cycling lands worth anything? Mostly no. That’s the honest answer for the vast majority of the 50-odd lands with cycling that Scryfall lists, and it’s why they end up in bulk. But the exceptions are big enough, and weird enough, that it’s worth five minutes before you throw a pile of them out. Hipsters of the Coast ran a nice piece this week on the history of the cards we cycle away for lands, and it got me pulling up prices on all of them. Some of what came back surprised me.

Lonely Sandbar from Onslaught, a common cycling land

The Onslaught foils are the whole story

Here’s the Onslaught cycle as it stands today, non-foil and then foil, original 2002 printing:

That’s a 100x gap on the Sandbar. Same card, same art, same year. One copy is a quarter-ish and the other is a nice dinner.

Why the Sandbar specifically? I don’t actually know. My guess is some mix of blue being the most-played color in the older formats where cycling decks live, plus Pauper, plus the fact that 2002 foils were opened at a much lower rate than modern ones and a lot of them got played to death. But I’ve never seen anyone do the work of explaining why Sandbar outruns Barren Moor by $13, and I’m not going to pretend I can.

And the reprint that should’ve killed it didn’t touch it. Modern Horizons reprinted all five in 2019 (Noah Bradley’s original paintings for three of them sold on eBay that year for between $3,020 and $4,050 each, which is its own rabbit hole). The Modern Horizons Lonely Sandbar foil is $4.87 today. People who want the foil Sandbar want the old border, apparently, and they’re paying seven times as much for it.

I wrote a while back that the foil premium is basically gone for most modern cards, and I stand by that. This is the counterexample. Old-border foils from before roughly 2003 never got the flood of supply that drove the premium down on everything printed since, and the Onslaught cyclers are one of the cleanest examples I can find. Same thing happened with Lorwyn’s commons, a few years later.

The rest of the old cyclers: pretty much bulk

The Urza’s Saga cycle (Drifting Meadow, Polluted Mire, Remote Isle, Slippery Karst, Smoldering Crater) were printed before foils existed, so there’s no foil lottery to win. They sit around 28 to 46 cents. Blasted Landscape, the colorless uncommon from the same set, is the outlier at $1.48, which is still not a lot of money but is a real buylist number at some stores.

Amonkhet’s cycling duals are the ones that genuinely disappoint me. Irrigated Farmland and the other four are rares, they were real Standard cards, they’re good in Commander, and they’re 26 to 37 cents. The foils top out at about a dollar (Canyon Slough is $1.05). They’ve been reprinted in so many Commander decks now that there’s simply no scarcity left.

Hour of Devastation’s Deserts are commons at a dime or two. The foil Desert of the True is $2.39, which is the best of them and I’d still struggle to call it worth pulling unless you’re already sorting foils anyway.

The Modern Horizons 3 Landscapes, Bountiful Landscape and friends, are 22 to 27 cents. Bulk.

So yeah, honestly. I sat there scrolling through the list waiting for something else to jump out and it just. Didn’t. You’ve got the Onslaught foils, and then you’ve got the triomes, and then you’ve got a very long tail of stuff that’s playable and cheap and that’s fine, cheap lands are good, that’s what you want if you’re building a deck. It’s just not what you want if you’re hoping your bulk box is secretly a savings account.

One weird one: the Secret Lair foil Ash Barrens is $8.30. It’s basic landcycling rather than plain cycling, which arguably isn’t the same category, but if you’ve got one sitting in a box from a Secret Lair you bought for something else, don’t bulk it.

Triomes are where the real money is

Showcase Zagoth Triome from Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths

The ten triomes are the only cycling lands where even the plain non-foil version is real money. Ikoria’s five and Streets of New Capenna’s five are three-color lands with basic land types, which makes them fetchable, which makes them Commander staples, and they’re all sitting between roughly $9 and $20 regular.

Zagoth Triome leads the Ikoria cycle at $20.14. On the New Capenna side, the regular Jetmir’s Garden is $17.03 and Ziatora’s Proving Ground brings up the rear at $9.14. If you cracked any amount of either set, you probably have several of these, and the odds are decent they’re in a binder already because they’re rares that look like rares.

The thing worth checking is which version. Each triome comes in a handful of treatments, and the spread inside a single card’s printings is wider than the spread between the cards:

  • The showcase Zagoth Triome (the one in the image above) is $23.59 non-foil and $42.23 foil, versus $25.70 for a regular foil
  • The borderless Jetmir’s Garden foil is $49.34, almost triple the regular foil
  • The prerelease date-stamped Zagoth Triome foil is $39.56

There’s an argument here that I should be telling you to sell these now. Eight of the ten have never been reprinted at all (Ketria Triome and Jetmir’s Garden got a single List printing each), they’re exactly the kind of card Wizards drops into a Commander precon when it wants the decklist to look generous, and the reprint trap has eaten bigger staples than these. I went back and forth on it while I was writing this. But the Ikoria ones are six years old and still sit between $14 and $20 without a real reprint, and I’m not convinced one precon copy would sink a card every three-color Commander deck wants. I’d hold the showcase and borderless foils and wouldn’t lose sleep over the regular ones either way.

The two-minute check

If you’ve got a pile of cycling lands in front of you right now, here’s all I’d actually do. Pull anything with the Onslaught set symbol and check whether it’s foil. Pull every triome, and set the showcase, borderless, and stamped ones apart from the regular frames. The Secret Lair Ash Barrens if you’ve got it. Everything else goes back in the box with a clear conscience.

The foil check is the one people skip, because old foils don’t look like modern foils. The 2002 foiling is duller and the cards often have a slight curl from two decades of humidity, and in a dim room a foil Barren Moor can pass for a non-foil one if you’re moving fast. When I log old stacks in Eldwyn I mark the foils as I go, so the collection total counts the foil price for those copies, and that 100x difference is exactly the mistake I’d make if I eyeballed the whole pile as non-foil. The same thing applies to basic lands, which are an even bigger version of this problem.

I still think about that shoebox. Not enough to go dig it out of my parents’ garage, but I think about it.