I have a page in an old binder that’s nothing but Lord of Atlantis. Four copies, three different printings, one of them a beat-up Fourth Edition with a corner ding I’ve been ignoring since about 2014. I built a Modern Merfolk deck once, went 2-3 at an FNM at a shop that doesn’t exist anymore, and then never touched the deck again. The cards just sort of stayed. Islandwalking into the void at the back of a binder. And then Wizards announced Nauctis last week and I remembered the page existed.
Nauctis: The Sunken Realm is the first set of 2027, out February 5, and it’s Magic’s first fully underwater plane. Merfolk, seals, homarids, deities that boss the ocean currents around, two undersea kingdoms at war, and a handful of humans who apparently wandered down there in diving suits. Wizards revealed it at MagicCon Amsterdam alongside Kamigawa: Titanbreach and Zhalfir, the three in-universe sets for the year.
The collector reflex when a tribal plane gets announced is automatic. Merfolk plane means merfolk cards, merfolk cards means demand, demand means go buy the lords before everyone else figures it out. I felt it. I looked at that binder page and thought, huh, maybe I sit on those for a while.
Then I actually checked the prices.
The merfolk back catalog is already cheap
Lord of Atlantis, the card, the original merfolk lord that’s been in the game since Alpha, is about $3.79 right now. Not the Alpha one, obviously. I mean a normal playable copy. It’s that cheap because it got reprinted in the Marvel Super Heroes bonus sheet last month. Old core-set copies from Fourth through Seventh Edition run five to seven bucks. That’s the whole ceiling on the most famous merfolk in Magic.
Go down the list and it keeps getting cheaper. Master of the Pearl Trident, which is a functional reprint of Lord of Atlantis under a different name, is 44 cents. Merrow Reejerey, the three-mana lord that untaps a land every time you cast a merfolk, is 23 cents. Silvergill Adept, one of the best two-drops the tribe has ever had, 19 cents. Master of Waves, which was north of twenty bucks at the height of Theros mono-blue devotion, is a buck and change now.
The reason is Ixalan. Magic spent two whole set blocks on Ixalan, a plane crawling with merfolk, and then went back for The Lost Caverns of Ixalan in 2023 with a dedicated Merfolk Commander deck. Between the original block and Lost Caverns, the entire tribe got reprinted, some of it twice. Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca, the go-to merfolk commander, is 34 cents. Svyelun of Sea and Sky, another one people love, 44 cents. When a tribe gets its own Commander precon, the floor drops out from under the whole thing.
This is the inverse of the situation I wrote about with Zhalfir, where the old cards from the plane are almost all bulk because there were barely any to begin with and nobody ever built the world out. Merfolk cards are cheap for the other reason. There are hundreds of them, they see real play, and Wizards keeps printing more. Cheap because loved, not cheap because forgotten.
The money in Merfolk was never the merfolk
Here’s the part that always gets me. If you actually assemble competitive Modern Merfolk, the expensive cards in the deck aren’t merfolk at all. They’re Aether Vial and Mutavault. The Vial’s around $3.45 now after being reprinted in roughly every Masters set ever made, but it spent years as a $40-plus card, and Mutavault is a $3.76 manland that isn’t even a fish. The lords, the actual tribe, the thing the deck is named after, are the cheap part.
Which, fine, three and a half bucks isn’t a mortgage payment either. Reprints got to Vial too. The point is more that even the closest thing Merfolk has to a chase card has been beaten flat by the reprint machine, and that machine is about to fire up again pointed straight at this tribe.
And look, I’ll waffle for a second, because there’s a version of the spec that isn’t insane. Old-border stuff has a floor that reprints don’t fully touch. A clean Revised Lord of Atlantis, a nice old foil, the Special Guests printing sitting around fifteen bucks, those are collector objects as much as playables, and a big tribal moment can genuinely nudge the desirable printings. If you love the card as an object, this announcement is a perfectly good excuse to finally track down the version you actually want to own. I’m not going to tell you the pretty copy is a bad buy. That’s just a different motivation from “this is gonna spike, I’ll flip it in March.”
Nauctis is going to reprint these anyway
A tribal set comes with a tribal Commander deck, and a tribal Commander deck is a reprint delivery vehicle. When Nauctis lands in February there’s going to be a merfolk precon, and it’s going to be stuffed with exactly the cards you’d be tempted to speculate on today. Lords, mana sinks, tribal payoffs, the works. That’s the reprint trap at its purest: the cards that spike on a set announcement are frequently the same cards that set turns around and reprints six months later.
There’s also a decent chance the set leans on merfolk less than the word “merfolk” in every headline suggests. Wizards’ creative team has already said the plan is five colors underwater, shark folk and squid folk and humans in diving suits, the whole ocean, rather than a wall of blue counterspells with fins. One recap even claimed it’s the first Magic set with no Flying keyword, which, we’ll see, but it tells you they’re treating “underwater” as a real design constraint and not just a coat of blue paint. If merfolk end up as one tribe among several down there, the tribal-payoff spec gets shakier still. We saw how the last merfolk-heavy plane aged in the Lost Caverns two-year retrospective, and it wasn’t the tribal cards that carried the set.
What I’d actually do
Nothing dramatic. Boring advice, I know.
If you’ve got merfolk sitting around like I do, this is a good moment to just know what you’ve got. I ran that binder page and a loose stack of Ixalan commons through a scan a couple nights ago, mostly out of curiosity, and the whole merfolk situation came back at something like eleven dollars, dinged lords included. Eleven dollars, for a tribe I’d been mentally filing under “probably worth something someday.” Now there’s a number attached to it. So when previews start rolling in this winter and somebody on Reddit swears Lord of Atlantis is about to moon, I can look at my own baseline instead of guessing against a memory.
The dumbest version of not knowing your baseline: I once bought a playset of Silvergill Adept off TCGplayer for a deck, completely forgot I’d already pulled three of them out of a Rivals of Ixalan draft, and found the draft copies six months later in a deck box labeled “sideboard cards???” in my own handwriting. Rebought cards I already owned because I couldn’t see what I owned. That’s the real failure mode here, way more than missing some spec window that probably won’t open anyway.
So yeah. Merfolk. A whole plane of them, finally, after people have been begging Rosewater for a water world for what feels like a decade. It’s cool. I’m genuinely excited to draft it. The binder page just isn’t a lottery ticket. It’s a fun pile of two-dollar fish that’s about to get a bunch of new friends, and it’d be nice to have them counted before then.
February’s a long way off, and we haven’t seen a single card yet, just a name and some concept art of a very angry-looking sea god. Plenty of time to figure out what’s actually in the binder before it matters. Or to keep ignoring that corner ding for another decade. Could go either way.