It all starts with Twisted Abomination.
Technically, it all starts with Noble Templar or Shoreline Ranger, as they’re earlier in the set, but Twisted Abomination was the common landcycling card you most wanted to see in your pack of Scourge, to the extent that it was brought back in Time Spiral’s Timeshifted bonus sheet.
In a block with Dripping Dead and Zombie Brute, Twisted Abomination was an acceptable top-end body as a Regenerating 5/3. It ate Morphs and could block and Regenerate from even the most threatening creatures in Onslaught Block. It was good on turn two, good on turn six, and great on turn seven and has been reprinted a dozen times, including half a dozen times for Limited formats. You can’t say the same for Shoreline Ranger.
The best landcycling card wasn’t Twisted Abomination, of course, but Eternal Dragon, a control card reminiscent of Thawing Glaciers in its implacable and grinding advantage. Control decks, like Julien Nuijten’s World Championship 2004 Astral Slide deck, would cycle it early and then return it to their hand in the mid-game, repeating this loop until they had all the mana they needed to return and cast Eternal Dragon.
Landcycling has evolved beyond Scourge’s land-specific cycling to the now-standard Basic landcycling, which was introduced in Conflux through underpowered cards like Absorb Vis and Sylvan Bounty before becoming standard with Murders at Karlov Manor. The power of the creatures has increased—compare Vinelasher Adept to Pale Recluse—as the cost of the landcycling has dropped to a generic two.
That generic two, which mirrors Cycling as first printed in Urza’s Saga, is subtle but crucial. Basic landcycling is so potent because it allows you to fix your mana, while past cyclers like Gleam of Resistance required you to already have mana of a certain type. Apex Witchstalker can find any basic land and can thus fit in any X-Black deck, and is a much easier card to include in your average deck than an expensive Soul Feast.
Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth brought a new cycle of Landcyclers to more mixed results. Like Ikoria attempting to reset the cost of Cycling at one generic mana (Flourishing Fox, Go for Blood), LotR tried to set the cost of land-specific landcycling at one generic mana in the cycle of Eagles of the North and friends, of which the best were Lorien Revealed and Troll of Khazad-Dum. As in Cycling for Ikoria Limited, this was a mistake. Troll ended up banned in Legacy, of all things, and Lorien Revealed sees significant play in Pauper and rarity-limited formats and even flirts with Modern playability.
Landcyclers are easy to come by in Limited, as they tend to be at the common rarity and go relatively late, and the recent trend of including a full cycle in most sets means we have a broad swath of designs. No one would be excited about running Horta or Kree Sentinel in their Limited deck were they just creatures, but as mana fixers that can be relevant bodies when drawn late, they’re an easy inclusion. Recent landcyclers like Savage Land Dinosaur, Kulrath Zealot, and Sojourner’s Companion overperform in my lower-power Cubes, where they fuel greedy splashes, provide attractive but not overpowered Exhume targets, and are serviceable creatures in a pinch.
Basic landcycling may have peaked with Reality Fracture. The cycle of landcyclers—three creatures in Undulating Witness, Apex Witchstalker, and Vinelasher Adept and two sorceries in Hexhaven Battalion and Awaken the Inferno—are all quite a bit better than past iterations of landcyclers. Undulating Witness trades with Sphinxes, Hexhaven Battalion makes four pieces of cardboard for six mana, and Apex Witchstalker will likely trade with two blockers and gain you an infusion of four life. Awaken the Inferno kills almost every creature or planeswalker in the format and even pumps a creature while doing so, while Vinelasher Adept, perhaps the least appealing of the cycle, is still a Giant Spider that can bolster itself or any other creature with three +1/+1 counters.
While these are better cards than past landcyclers, the beauty of the Reality Fracture cycle is in the tension their power presents. Part of the fun of landcycling is the loss of a potential creature and the pleasant friction that engenders in a game, the sacrifice of future opportunity for the chance of stability today. It is much more difficult to basic landcycle away an Undulating Witness in the early game knowing that it can take down a Jace all by itself later. Likewise, those of us who played with Imperial Oath four years ago will perhaps overvalue Hexhaven Battalion–there’s another kind of tension in that, a test of skill for even expert drafters. Of course, sometimes you just Basic landcycle an Apex Witchstalker so you can reanimate it with Rewrite Regrets on turn four.
Magic’s mana system is its greatest source of internal tension and arguably its greatest innovation. After over three decades of Magic, it remains essential to the game’s function, and every new competitor has to try to either ignore it or innovate upon it, which is more difficult than it initially appears to tyro game designers.
Hearthstone automatically generates a land equivalent for you each turn, Sorcery: Contested Realm lets you draw from a separate “Atlas” of land equivalents, but Magic requires you to calculate the appropriate number of lands for your deck and then mulligan until you have the right mix in your hand. Some players push back against this and the number of non-games it produces, but there’s a beauty to it, too. Wizards can innovate with double-faced modal cards like Witch Enchanter, landcyclers like Topiary Panther, or set-specific mechanics like Lander tokens, but there is a fundamental resource choke point in Magic.
Limited is the purest distillation of Magic. There is no Extended Perfect Storm in traditional Limited, no Oops All Lands, no Four-Thousand-Dollar Solution (outside of Cube, of course). Limited games are almost universally based around deploying creatures and removal and combat; periodically, there’s a mill deck or a cycling deck, but those are correctives to the usual pace of Limited.
Landcyclers are one of the finest tools Wizards has developed to make Limited flow well and prioritize in-game decisions, as they force players to choose between streamlined mana or just-below-the-curve but relevant creatures. They’re a skill-tester for newer players, who will often hold onto the promise of a large creature until they learn that creatures stuck in your hand are useless and that it’s better to cycle away your Balamb T-Rexuar in favor of a missing Forest. Tracking the evolution of landcycling from the humble but powerful A-bom to the multi-use Apex Witchstalker is tracking the history of Magic in microcosm. We may never play Exalted Dragon ever again, but we certainly won’t forget her.
Rob Bockman (he/him) is a native of South Carolina who has been playing Magic: the Gathering since Tempest block. A writer of fiction and stage plays, he loves the emergent comedy of Magic and the drama of high-level play. He’s been a Golgari player since before that had an official name and is never happier than when he’s able to say “Overgrown Tomb into Thoughtseize,” no matter the format.