This 20-year-old Magic card wrecks entire Earthbending Commander decks

Firebending in the new Avatar: The Last Airbender crossover set with Magic: The Gathering works beautifully in aggressive red decks. But Earthbending has quickly emerged as the most powerful of the four bending styles since the set’s launch last month. It’s often slow to get going, but over time it becomes positively overwhelming.

Earthbending transforms any land into a 0/0 creature with haste and a number of +1/+1 counters, which are determined by the Earthbending value on the card that triggered the ability. But it’s still a land that can generate mana, and when it dies or is exiled, it returns to the battlefield as its original land form. So you get a functionally immortal land creature that can grow even more powerful with more Earthbending or traditional counter generation methods. There are plenty of ways to cascade the ability with overwhelming effects: double counters, stacking more Earthbending moves on it, etc.

But players have already discovered one card from the 2005 set Betrayers of Kamigawa that can easily devastate simple monocolored Earthbending decks: Eradicate.

Let’s say someone has an Earthbent simple Forest land on the board that’s currently a 2/2. For two colorless and two black mana, an enemy player casts Eradicate (a sorcery). It removes a target nonblack creature from the game, in this case that 2/2 Forest. That triggers part of the Earthbend ability, returning that Forest to the battlefield tapped. Eradicate then exiles every card from that player’s graveyard, hand, and library that shares the name “Forest.”

An extremely basic Earthbender deck would usually be pure green, in which case, this would literally eradicate every mana card that’s not already on the battlefield. If you’re playing casually with a friend you know who is running a powerful pure green Earthbender deck, sneaking Eradicate in there might get them to flip the table over.

Because it’s 20 years old, Eradicate is technically only legal in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage formats. Astute Commander players who focus on Earthbending, however, are pretty much always going to go multicolor. Anyone with Toph, the First Metalbender as their Commander has a red-green-white deck and should be running plenty of named hybrid or otherwise unique lands in their deck. Even Toph, Hardheaded Teacher (a less explosive version of the same character) is still red-green, which similarly dilutes the potency of a card like Eradicate.

In Commander, you can only run one copy of Eradicate, so you’d want to set up a few more options to support this anti-Earthbender method.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Another option would be Splinter, also from Betrayers of Kamigawa. It exiles a target artifact, along with every copy from its controller’s graveyard, hand, and library. For that to work, you’d need to find a way to make the opponents’ lands also become artifacts. There are a few ways to do that, namely with something like Mycosynth Lattice from 2018’s Battlebond set, which classifies all permanents as artifacts in addition to their other types. Liquimetal Coating does that on a smaller, cheaper scale. Once on the board, you can tap it to make a target permanent become an artifact until the end of turn. So Liquimetal Coating or Mycosynth Lattice combined with Splinter can achieve the same effect.

Even if you probably won’t be completely disabling anybody’s deck in Commander anytime soon with Eradicate, it’s still probably worth including it in any of your Commander decks that dabbles in black — especially if you know your opponent has at least a little bit of Earthbending in theirs. It’s a quick and cheap way to instantly remove all of their basic lands. But timing is everything.