Using sales data from TCGPlayer, monthly captures of the “most popular” on Card Kingdom, and eBay sales data, we’ve compiled the most popular Plains of the year using the most purchases online as the proxy for popularity. These have been calculated on a relative basis, so EOE #262 has sold about half as many as FIN #294 based on a popularity score of 52. You can see the Top 20 here:

Final Fantasy is the clear winner here. Just as the expansion broke records for pre-sales on day 1 and then continued to grow the active player base of the game more than any other set since we’ve been tracking metrics, the basic lands were incredibly popular, showing off iconic vistas from the game’s 16 expansions. Though one of the least-represented and least-popular games of the franchise, the Plains from Final Fantasy XII is visually iconic and emblematic of the aesethic of the franchise at large, so it’s no wonder it became the most popular of the year.

It’s pretty rare to see anything but full-art lands on these kinds of lists, but Theros’ representation from Jumpstart 25 was a huge seller, and Innistrad Remaster‘s retro border versions did well too. I credit this largely to how ubiquitous Jumpstart lands are for those opening booster boxes. Normally, stores and sellers don’t have hundreds of the same basic available, but opening up just one box of J25 could lead to a small seller having over 100 of the same art, making it easier to sell in bulk.

One would normally expect this year’s new lands to take up the bulk of the list as players rush to collect the new hotness. And each new set is present, but perhaps not in the quantity we’ve seen in previous years. I think the reasons behind this are pretty specific to each individual set. For example, Aetherdrift was aesthetically nearly as bad as Spider-Man, a huge disappointment for fans of the 2-set block era of Magic. But more importantly, there were only two full-art lands, which players strongly prefer. Of those, one was a race car interior that feels more UB than most UB sets and the other had excellent art but was exclusively available with what has generously been called a “piss border”. That said, race car POV did indeed make the list despite the questionable taste.

Perhaps the most notable exclusion here is Secret Lair. Looking at the TCGPlayer sales data, it’s not hard to understand why: the volume is simply very, very low. It’s clear that I am in the minority of Secret Lair purchasers, as I pretty much only get the basic bundles, but this is actually representative of Secret Lair as a whole.

A key thing to understand with Secret Lair is just how small of a percentage of the player base engages with it. According to data from SimilarWeb, in the last 16 months, the Secret Lair website has only had around 530,000 unique visitors across all its international versions. That’s less than individual card shops like Card Kingdom. It’s less than 20% of the Magic-specific user base on CardMarket and 10% of that on TCGPlayer. While I wouldn’t be surprised if the Secret Lair site has dramatically higher conversion rates than the typical e-commerce site, we’re still only talking about generously 100-200k people who have actually purchased Secret Lairs in the last year. And really, it’s only the scalpers here who will be quick to put many of them for sale. There’s simply not enough quantity of SLD basics that exist for them to have a chance to make the list here, even if, by revenue, the Spongebob land above is our estimate as the second biggest money-generator on TCGPlayer, behind only the Dragon Eye from Dragonstorm.

My biggest surprise is the lack of the Foundations full-art lands, which came out only at the end of last year. I found those to have a great balance between showing a story and displaying a lovely landscape (and they did great in our survey of all the best basics from last year), but the highest performing one was the Ajani land at rank 21.

What are your favorite lands of the bunch? Who do you think is the style winner of PT EOE? Let us know in the comments or on our social channels, and thanks so much for reading! If you’ve enjoyed this article, sign up for our newsletter and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!!

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 and now consulting for White Box Entertainment. He’s also written for Anime Trending, Anime Buscience, Anime News Network, and Crunchyroll News, serving as Executive Editor of the latter from 2016 to 2021.