Kaldheim has an Unusual Number of Lands

[wildfire393]

Kaldheim's spoiler season is in full swing, and looking at the cards and the number crunch has led me to an interesting observation: Excluding the MDFCs in Zendikar Rising with a spell on the front and a land on the back, Kaldheim has more non-basic lands in it than any other set. (If we include ZNR's MDFC spell-lands, Kaldheim is #2.)

Not only does it have more lands than every previous set, but it does so by a considerable margin. Per the Number Crunch, which has both the earliest and latest number lands known and bracketed, it has 28 nonbasic lands. The runner-up? Battle for Zendikar with 22. That means it has more than 5 lands more than the runner up, *a set with lands as a central theme*.

So maybe it's just a function of having Snow on top of other themes? Except we can compare to Amonkhet, a set that had a Desert theme, and only came in at 21 lands (and ten of those were common duals not available in booster packs).

It's also worth noting that unlike several previous sets with a full set of ten common duals, like Dragon's Maze or Khans of Tarkir, the common duals do not show up in the basic slot, and the basic slot is instead relegated to the mechanically-relevant snow basics. One could even argue that these snow basics are enough different from a regular basic land that they should also count in the land count for the set, which would bring it up to a staggering 33.

So how did we get here? Well, a full cycle of ten common snow duals is a big chunk. Then there's ten uncommon "Realm" lands that tap for one color and have a two-colored sac ability with a spell-like effect. Then there's four Pathways finishing the cycle from Zendikar Rising. And on top of that, there are four additional nonbasics, two of which are known to be The World Tree and the snow creature land. It remains to be seen what the last two are, they could be common fixing like Terramorphic Expanse or Shimmering Grotto, or they could be additional resonant rares.

And what does this mean? This is a crazy amount of lands for a set without Lands as a significant theme, though Snow does push the bounds of that a bit. With Zendikar Rising's MDFC lands, we're looking at a Standard with more nonbasic lands in it than any previous time. It's rather curious, and it's not entirely clear what the rationale behind it is.

[void_nothing]

Two reasons:

1) Inter-set synergy with ZNR. It behooves any set coming after a Zendikar set to have a lot of good nonbasics for the land interactions in Standard.
2) Flavor reasons. R&D wanted to show locations in the different Realms.

[Mookie]

I'll note that Zendikar Rising arguably has a bunch more nonbasic lands due to the MDFCs.

From a meta perspective, I'm not surprised to see the full cycle of common snow duals showing up - historically, they've printed the entire 10-card cycle for Blossoming Sands and friends in the same set, so there is precedent for doing so. Simultaneously, as snow lands, they require a snow set to be printed, so they can't just be thrown in a random set. It makes sense to print them all now instead of only printing half and waiting years for the other half.

The uncommon cycle, on the other hand... yeah, that cycle I find a bit odd. I can certainly comprehend that they're printing the full cycle for flavor reasons, but not sure why they chose to have a utility land for each color pair in the first place. Again, presumably flavor reasons.

[motleyslayer]

I was looking at spoilers yesterday and noticed we were getting a bunch of cool lands this set but didn't realize there were so many lands in the set.

I really like how they're showing off the different part of the worlds though. It's also neat how snow duals and utility lands are common and uncommon respectively to make them easier to get