There’s a page of filter lands in the back of my trade binder that has survived four binder migrations across eighteen years and has never once made it into a deck. Every time I reorganize I look at that page, think “those are probably worth something,” and then move on to the next page without checking.
Last week I actually checked. The answer split almost exactly down the middle of the cycle, which is not what I expected.
The lands Commander quietly stopped playing
EDHREC ran a piece a couple of days ago asking which lands aren’t worth running anymore, and the short version is that filter lands, bounce lands, and Temple of the False God still show up in enormous numbers of decklists despite modern land design having lapped them years ago.
I don’t really have an argument against that. Temple of the False God does nothing on turn four and everything on turn ten, and I stopped sleeving it up sometime around 2022. The karoos are fine in slow decks and a liability in everything else. As a deckbuilding recommendation, fine, I’m on board.
The price data doesn’t follow the play data though, and the gap between the two is where it gets useful if you’ve got a bulk box.
Here’s the split. The Shadowmoor five (Mystic Gate, Sunken Ruins, Graven Cairns, Fire-Lit Thicket, Wooded Bastion) sit somewhere between $4 and $17 depending on which one and which printing. The Eventide five (Fetid Heath, Cascade Bluffs, Twilight Mire, Rugged Prairie, Flooded Grove) are 30 to 80 cents.
Same cycle, same mechanic, printed three months apart in 2008, functionally identical. One half is real money and the other half is draft chaff.
Reprints did this, not power level
Rugged Prairie has been printed twelve times. Secrets of Strixhaven Commander, Edge of Eternities Commander, Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander, Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander, Commander Masters, New Capenna Commander, Bloomburrow Commander, Final Fantasy Commander, and that isn’t the complete list. Wizards has jammed it into precon after precon for years. It’s 29 cents in the Strixhaven Commander printing and it is never coming back from that.
Mystic Gate has five printings total. Shadowmoor, Double Masters, Commander Masters, Modern Horizons 3 Commander, and a Zendikar Expedition. That’s the whole history, eighteen years deep. The Shadowmoor copy is $7.88.
Wooded Bastion is the loudest version of this. Original Shadowmoor copy is $17.19, the Double Masters reprint is $17.39, and the cheapest way in is a 2024 List printing at $13.35. There’s no bargain-bin precon copy of Wooded Bastion floating around, because Wizards has never once put it in a precon.
Why the enemy-color half of the cycle got reprinted into the dirt and the ally-color half didn’t, I don’t actually know. I’ve seen people claim precons skew toward enemy pairs, which doesn’t match the precons sitting on my shelf. It might just be fifteen years of scheduling noise compounding. Whatever the reason, the effect is a 50x price gap across ten cards that do the same thing.
Graven Cairns is the odd one out, incidentally. It was previewed in Future Sight a year before the cycle proper, and that Future Sight copy is $7.39, a bit above its own Shadowmoor printing at $5.60. It also picked up a Final Fantasy Commander printing last year that dropped to $1.91. So even inside a single “expensive” filter land there’s a four times spread.
The karoos really are bulk, though
I should be fair to the EDHREC read, because I’ve spent three paragraphs building toward “these are secretly valuable” and that’s only true for five specific cards.
The bounce lands are worth nothing and there’s no hidden printing that rescues them. Dimir Aqueduct tops out around 41 cents in the Duskmourn Commander printing and bottoms out at 27 cents in Ravnica: Clue Edition. The whole cycle has been in a dozen-plus products. Temple of the False God is identical: 28 to 40 cents in Commander Masters, in Murders at Karlov Manor Commander, in Lost Caverns of Ixalan Commander, in essentially every precon shipped since 2021.
So yeah. Karoos. If that’s what you were about to go dig out of the bulk box after reading the EDHREC piece, don’t. They’re bulk, they’ve been bulk for a decade, they’ll be bulk next year. Not worth the sleeve, honestly. Move on.
The set code is doing all the work here
I sold a Sunken Ruins across the counter at my LGS maybe three years ago. Six bucks, felt fine about it, walked out. Found out later that week I’d handed over the Shadowmoor original rather than the Double Masters copy I’d assumed was the one in my binder. It wasn’t a catastrophe, we’re talking a few dollars. But the guy behind the counter absolutely knew which printing he was holding and I absolutely did not, and that’s the bit that still irritates me.
Sunken Ruins today: $12.36 in Shadowmoor, $8.33 in Double Masters, $3.21 in Final Fantasy Commander. One card name, three printings, four times the range.
This is the whole practical takeaway and it isn’t a new one on this blog. If your collection is logged by card name, your filter land numbers are wrong, possibly by a factor of twenty. The set code at the bottom of the card is the only thing separating a $17 Wooded Bastion from a $13 one, and for the Eventide half it separates a five dollar card from a thirty cent one.
When I scan a stack of these into Eldwyn, the printing comes through with the card, so the total is right without me thinking about it. That’s genuinely most of the value for a category like this, where the name tells you almost nothing and the little three-letter code tells you everything. Same problem I ran into with basic lands that are actually worth money, where the name is the least informative thing on the card.
The foils are a separate conversation
Something that surprised me while I was pulling these numbers. The Eventide non-foils are worthless, sure. The Eventide foils are not.
Cascade Bluffs is 43 cents in the Strixhaven Commander printing and 33 cents in Tarkir. The Eventide foil is $30.91. Twilight Mire foil out of Eventide is $30.94 against a 78 cent Strixhaven copy. Fetid Heath foil is $29.68.
Old foils from a 2008 small set with a print run nobody was speculating on, essentially. There aren’t many of them and they don’t get replaced, because most of those precon printings don’t ship a foil version at all. A 2025 precon copy can’t dilute a 2008 foil it never competes with.
And then the Zendikar Expeditions versions sit above all of it. Sunken Ruins Expedition is $61.49, Mystic Gate is $48.07, Cascade Bluffs is $47.61, Fetid Heath $46.19. Those have basically nothing to do with whether anyone plays the card. That’s a 2016 masterpiece series doing masterpiece things.
I keep going back and forth on whether the Shadowmoor five are actually safe, or whether I’m just watching a reprint that hasn’t happened yet. Wooded Bastion at $17 with no precon printing in eighteen years looks stable right up until the moment it lands in some 2027 Commander deck and drops 80% in a week, which is exactly what happens to Commander staples when they get reprinted. The Eventide five are already at the floor, so at least they can’t disappoint me further. There’s a version of this article that argues you should be selling the Shadowmoor half right now while the reprint gap is still open.
I’m not going to sell mine. They’ve been in that binder for eighteen years and at this point moving them out would feel weird. But if you’ve got a playset of Wooded Bastion sitting in a box doing nothing, the case for turning them into something is stronger than the case for the karoos next to them, and it’s been stronger for a while now.
Go check the set codes before you do anything, though.