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Arid Archway

Land — Desert

This land enters tapped.
When this land enters, return a land you control to its owner's hand. If another Desert was returned this way, surveil 1. (Look at the top card of your library. You may put it into your graveyard.)
{T}: Add {C}{C}.

CMC
0
Mana cost
Color identity
C
Rarity
uncommon
Set
Outlaws of Thunder Junction
Price
$0.40
EDHREC rank
#1442
Buy on TCGplayer
Arid Archway card art
Arid Archway enters tapped and bounces a land you control, but in exchange it puts a land card from your hand directly onto the battlefield — a net gain of one land on the board whenever you have a spare land in hand. Commanders like Kodama of the East Tree and Hazezon, Shaper of Sand treat that free land drop as a trigger engine, not a drawback.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Hazezon, Shaper of Sand

Hazezon, Shaper of Sand

73.8% of decks · synergy 0.70

Hazezon, Shaper of Sand triggers off Desert lands entering the battlefield, and Arid Archway is itself a Desert — so it both enters and enables a second trigger by bouncing a land back to hand for another play. At 74% inclusion across over 9,000 Hazezon, Shaper of Sand decks, this is a near-auto-include.

02
Yuma, Proud Protector

Yuma, Proud Protector

57.4% of decks · synergy 0.54

Yuma, Proud Protector cares about Deserts going to the graveyard, but the land-bounce loop Arid Archway enables also stacks land-enter triggers that fuel Yuma's token generation. The 57% inclusion rate in Yuma, Proud Protector decks reflects how reliably it feeds the engine.

04
Six

Six

21.2% of decks · synergy 0.18

Six counts the number of lands entering the battlefield to scale its damage output, and Arid Archway's bounce effect means one land in hand can generate multiple entry events. That makes Arid Archway a low-cost way to push Six's count higher without spending additional resources.

05
Yedora, Grave Gardener

Yedora, Grave Gardener

19.1% of decks · synergy 0.16

Yedora, Grave Gardener turns nontoken creature deaths into Forest land entries, and Arid Archway slots in as a bounce target that resets those Forests back to hand for another land-drop trigger. The synergy is narrower here, but the 19% inclusion in Yedora, Grave Gardener decks reflects its utility in any high land-entry-count shell.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

FormatVerdict
commander legal
legacy legal
modern legal
pioneer legal
standard legal
vintage legal
pauper not legal
oathbreaker legal

Arid Archway sees essentially zero competitive play in constructed formats — Modern, Pioneer, and Legacy all move too fast for a tapped land that requires a bounce setup to generate value. In Commander, it's a different conversation: the slower pace and ETB-centric strategies common to the format turn the bounce cost into an upside, especially in Desert-matters and land-synergy builds. Outside of Commander, the only realistic homes are niche Oathbreaker lists built around land-drop commanders. Standard legality is academic — it's not seeing play there either.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

$0.40 bulk tier

At $0.40, Arid Archway is firmly bulk, and that price is appropriate for a card whose demand is almost entirely concentrated in a handful of Commander archetypes. It's stable bulk — not a spec target, but also unlikely to crater further given consistent inclusion in Hazezon, Shaper of Sand and Yuma, Proud Protector lists.

Explore

Sources

Mentioned

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Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.