Highest performing land runs just 31 cents
Published 2026-08-04
The highest-performing land in a 448-deck Commander sample costs 31 cents.
Source: Grim.Cards Simulation Case Study, August 1, 2026
The sample: 448 player-submitted Commander decks across 8,969 AI-piloted games against a fixed field of five meta opponents. The win rate below is the aggregate win rate of every deck containing that land — a property of the decks, not a measured contribution from the card — and the price column is that card’s TCGplayer market price for its cheapest widely available printing on 4 August 2026. The Commander-wide baseline is 43.2%.
| Land | Decks (n) | Games | Win rate | Vs. 43.2% | Market price | Pts per $1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Path of Ancestry | 117 | 2,218 | 49.1% | +5.9 | $0.31 | 19.0 |
| Evolving Wilds | 107 | 2,177 | 44.1% | +0.9 | $0.08 | 11.2 |
| Exotic Orchard | 167 | 3,404 | 43.9% | +0.7 | $0.21 | 3.3 |
| Rogue's Passage | 80 | 1,579 | 43.9% | +0.7 | $0.28 | 2.5 |
| Command Tower | 321 | 6,448 | 42.0% | −1.2 | $0.26 | — |
| Reliquary Tower | 124 | 2,406 | 39.6% | −3.6 | $2.16 | — |
Path of Ancestry does two jobs at once for the kind of deck that runs it: it fixes any color in your commander’s identity and it scries whenever that mana casts a creature sharing a type with your commander, which smooths draws in exactly the tribal creature decks that fill this cohort. The tapped-land cost is close to free in a format averaging 10.3 turns per game. The confounder worth stating plainly: this is a containing-deck figure, so what you are seeing may be the decks rather than the land — typed creature decks that want this card also tend to have a clear game plan, and a clear game plan wins games regardless of which land taps for it.
Open your list and look at your colorless utility lands. If you are running one that has not changed a game in a month — the hand-size land, the third rummage land, the pet land you have never actually activated — that is your slot. In a typed deck, swapping it for a thirty-cent fixing land costs you nothing but a tapped land in the early turns and buys you a scry on most of your creature casts.
Buy the cheap end. Path of Ancestry ($0.31), Evolving Wilds ($0.08), Exotic Orchard ($0.21), Rogue’s Passage ($0.28) and Command Tower ($0.26) together cost $1.14 — the entire top of this list is a sub-two-dollar purchase. The most expensive land in the group runs $2.16, about seven times the price of the highest-performing one, and the decks running it landed 3.6 points below the field average, so this is a clear case of the extra dollars not buying win rate in this dataset. If it is already in your deck and it is doing work for you, keep it — just do not make it your next purchase ahead of the thirty-cent options.
Containing-deck win rates are correlational and cannot separate the card from the deck it lives in, these are AI-piloted simulations against one fixed opponent field rather than human games, and every dollar figure here is a 4 August 2026 snapshot that will drift with reprints and demand.
The best land in the sample costs less than the sleeve you will put it in.
Pricing snapshot: TCGplayer market prices for the cheapest widely available nonfoil printing of each card, retrieved 4 August 2026. Singles prices move weekly and vary by printing and condition — re-check before you buy. Simulation figures are from the 1 August 2026 snapshot (dataset v2.4, CC BY 4.0).