Basic lands are the foundation of Magic: the Gathering. Here at Cardboard by the Numbers, we’re committed to bringing you, our kind readers, the most thorough and compelling basic land coverage in the world as a lens through which we can better understand a game that means so much to so many of us.

In 2023, we investigated the basic lands that took down the World Championship and those that won various Pro Tours. We figured out which real-world countries had the most representation in basic lands. We even explored the best-selling basic lands of 2023 as of August! But today, we’re going a few steps further – we’re going to figure out which of the year’s basic lands were the best. 

To start, we’re going to dig into the state of basic lands coming into 2024. Using that as a foundation, we’ll bring in various rankings and metrics for 2023’s 133 new pieces of art to start to piece together a formula. From that, you will know, definitively, proven by a bevy of quantitate measures, which basic lands truly won the year. 

The State of Basic Lands

In our recap of the best-selling basic lands (so far) of 2023, we discussed how we’re currently in the golden era of basic lands. With Project Booster Fun requiring a new suite of full-art basics with each premiere expansion, novel card and art styles in Secret Lair drops, favorite arts of years past receiving reprints with classic frames, and Universes Beyond opening up new worlds for use on Plains, Islands, Swamps, Mountains, and Forests, it’s never been easier to customize your lands to represent your personal tastes, to aesthetically match your commander, or to tilt your opponents with a set of mis-matched white bordered beauties.

We’re no longer at “Peak Basic” — that can only be claimed by the anomalous year of 2022, with nearly 40 more new lands printed than any other — the 133 unique pieces of art from 2023 is absurd in its own right. With the equivalent of two-and-a-half new basic lands printed each week, even those who cheer on the WotC printing presses for ever-increasing customization are frequently finding undiscovered pieces they’ve missed in the shuffle. It can be overwhelming! Last year even surpassed 2020’s 116 new basics, a year bolstered by 40 unique cards included in the inaugural Jumpstart expansion. With near-monthly product releases, Universes Beyond, and at least one Secret Lair for every week of the year, the volume of basics is not threatening to narrow in 2024.

This year’s lands also the cutting edge of experimentation at WotC: our first (unnecessary) double-sided basics roared their way into the Jurassic Park mini-set found within The Lost Caverns of Ixalan and a set of 10 Mountains curated by John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats marks the first time a basic land got the (also unnecessary) extended art treatment. 

Full-Art Land Dominance 

Beyond 2023/2024 being the “best” era of basic lands in terms of variety, the notion of “if everything is special then nothing is” has become ever more relevant. With full-art options in nearly every product release, many have failed to maintain the interest or prices of the full-arts of years past. We’ll discuss that specifically later on, but to this point: 55% of all basic lands printed with new art in 2023 had a full-art treatment — the highest in Magic’s history.

Full art lands are preferred by most players: even at the highest levels of play, it’s rare to see a mana symbol take up half the card. The three best-selling lands of each type we discussed before are wholly full-art as well, even if those numbers don’t capture many of the basic land transactions that take place in the Magic ecosystem. Full-art lands’ ubiquity is staggering nonetheless, and the uniqueness of each style is worth a closer examination on its own.

One reason I like this overview of the lands is it allows a bevy of interesting take-aways that can be learned with just a glance. Phyreixa: All Will Be One is the first and only expansion to have more full-art basics than standard ones (even the Zendikar sets had equal ratios), and that holds true if you don’t factor in the Compleat Edition bundle exclusive cycle of oil slick foils. There are only two cycles of “normal” full-art lands out of the twelve, with expansions like The Lord of the Rings: Tales from Middle-earth and Wilds of Eldraine opting for unique styles not before found on Magic cards. Basic lands are one of the easiest and most accepted places to experiment with new styles, modes, and formats. For the best example, look no further than the cycle of unnecessarily double-sided Jurassic Park lands, a format being reused in the recently-revealed reversible Raining Cats & Dogs Secret Lair deck. 

Not included here is the now-incomplete cycle of Judge foil full-art lands adorned with owls — the remaining two, a Plains and a Forest, will be released early this year. 

Full-art lands found in booster packs used to carry a significant premium over the stock basics. While this is certainly still true in especially sought-after cycles like those from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty or during the pre-order period, after an expansion has been released into the wild, they tend to settle at around 2x the $0.25 base price for a particular in-print basic found on outlets like TCGPlayer. Finding the exceptions to this is always worthwhile, revealing part of the demand function that determines price. The Phyrexianized cycle averages 4 times the cost of its booster pack peer of the Panorama cycle, and Meditations on Nature has a $3 premium per card on average compared to the rest of the Secret Lair basics. This brings us to:

The Financial Element

As we’ll be discussing in an upcoming article, Islands tend to fetch the highest price within any given cycle of basics, something understood intuitively by most players of the game. For most of its history, blue has been the color of Magic, making fancy Islands the most desirable for the players with the longest relationship with the cards or the most excess funds to dedicate to the game. The remaining Sultai colors are priced a small peg above the Boros duo of Plains and Mountains, which typically are the cheapest lands of the five. For context, in 2023, the average “Island Premium” was over double the average of the other four.

However, the above overview of the full-art cycles misses two key exceptions to this rule. First, the oil-slick foil Swamp exclusive to the aptly-named “Compleat Bundle” as part of the Phyrexia: All Will Be One product line is the most expensive of its cycle, and the most expensive Swamp of the year overall. Phyrexian-themed Swamps seem to maintain a sizable premium for their Vorthos equity, as seen in the once-expensive Jumpstart Swamp, for example.

Like many other goods, the price of a Magic card is mostly dictated by supply and demand. While there have not been the economic investigations into the specific pressures of different elements into the price of specific Magic cards using a robust regression model — a 2024 resolution for this blog — one can still learn a lot about demand when the supply is identical across a cycle. Comparing cycles to one another, however, is the key challenge. 

The most expensive basics of the year, though, can fairly be attributed more to the supply side than anything else. The three judge foils are given out exclusively to judges, a rather small subset of Magic players. The bundle-exclusive oil-slicked lands are simply printed less than those that come in every booster of Magic cards — they’re even more rare than other full-art lands within their own bundles. Working backwards from publicly revealed sales numbers for charity and validated by somewhat-credible leaks, even the most desirable Secret Lair basic sets are selling in the tens of thousands, making them rarer than basic lands from Alpha. 

A generic basic land has zero demand and, for most purposes, can be considered to have zero value: it’s why they’re listed at $0.00 in deck lists on Magic finance-related sites like MTGGoldfish and are often given away for free at local game stores. In a way, they are the most compelling window into player interest from an economics point-of-view, as any premium associated with a given basic land is wholly representative of that specific artwork’s premium. A Guru land functions identically to the WOE basics that Wizards of the Coast provides to local game stores for free to support drafting, but the former has a cost tens of thousands of times higher than the latter.

So we’ve just spent time discussing what we don’t know — or rather, that we can’t credibly calculate the demand for each individual basic land given our lack of specificity on the supply side of the equation, nor can we even begin to factor in the “normal” basic lands that are given out by stores for free more often than not. So how would we, a quantitatively-focused blog about cardboard, reasonably determine the best basic lands of 2023?

The Best Basic Lands of 2023

At the end of the year, we conducted a survey for Limited players to help us understand the landscape of one of the best ways to play Magic in 2023. Our results were interesting and matched with community sentiment, even with a fairly small sample size of just over 200 players. However, besides limited questions, we asked players a series of five bonus questions: what do you think was the best basic land of each type printed in 2023? We linked each question with a Scryfall query to display the 25-36 new art pieces per land type released in the calendar year, and this was what we found:

Using a statistically-minded approach, this was the best we could do, but we think this is a solid list. And the results were all over the place! The highest-performer was the Storybook Island from Wilds of Eldraine, with 23% of respondents selecting it as their favorite. Like with the best-selling lands of the year, full-art lands dominated the rankings, but happily, one “normal” basic made it through the top three of its land type: the Misty Mountains from Tales from Middle-earth, with the Fellowship barely in view trying to brave the storms exacerbated by Saruman. My favorite land cycle of the year, the Paradise Frost set by ELK64, even gets some representation with a third-place finish from among nearly 50 forests.

Is this methodology perfect? No — even though it’s not necessarily the case, Limited players may or may not have wholly representative preferences for basic lands across the whole of the Magic-playing audience. Additionally, by only reaching out to an admittedly enfranchised group for their opinion, we’ve certainly biased our sample to some extent. That said, like with the Limited results, I find this is acceptably representative of what I’ve seen floating around in decks at local game stores in three different countries and similar to the relative positivity I’ve noticed on message boards, Facebook groups, and the like online as well. You can help make it better in the future by signing up for our mailing list to get notified of future surveys! 

What do you think of the list? What were your favorite basics released in the last year? 

Thanks so much for reading. We have basic land coverage on the regular as well as new Magic: the Gathering infographics and analysis every week, so if you’ve enjoyed this article, sign up for our newsletter and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Threads!!

Miles Atherton is the editor-in-chief of “Cardboard by the Numbers” and has been playing Magic since 2006. Since studying Agricultural Economics at UC Davis, he’s built a career as an award-winning marketing executive in the entertainment industry with a love of data journalism. He’s also written for Anime Buscience and Crunchyroll News, serving as Executive Editor of the latter from 2016 to 2021.