Hidden Cataract
Land — Cave
This land enters tapped.
: Add 
.
, , Sacrifice this land: Discover 4. Activate only as a sorcery. (Exile cards from the top of your library until you exile a nonland card with mana value 4 or less. Cast it without paying its mana cost or put it into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom in a random order.)
- CMC
- 0
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- The Lost Caverns of Ixalan
- Price
- $0.17
- EDHREC rank
- #4665
Hidden Cataract enters the battlefield and immediately puts a counter on every land you control, turning your mana base into a type-smeared engine that feeds counter-synergy commanders at zero ongoing cost. The one-time price is a single blue mana and a card slot — efficient enough that in the right shell it's an auto-include, and irrelevant outside of it.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Omo, Queen of Vesuva
Omo, Queen of Vesuva spreads counters across permanents to erase type lines and enable cross-type synergies, and Hidden Cataract front-loads that work by dropping a counter on every land at once the moment it resolves.
Kellan, the Kid
Kellan, the Kid cares about counters on permanents as a resource, and Hidden Cataract delivers a wide counter distribution across the mana base in a single trigger — exactly the kind of efficient setup Kellan decks want to accelerate their engine.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Hidden Cataract is a Commander card through and through — the payoff for flooding your lands with counters only matters when your commander or supporting pieces care about counter types, and that density of synergy lives almost exclusively in 100-card singleton. In competitive 60-card formats like Modern and Pioneer, a sorcery-speed enchantment that does nothing to the board state and doesn't advance a linear gameplan simply doesn't make the cut. Pauper and Legacy are similarly uninterested — neither format has a counter-on-lands archetype that needs this effect. Standard is the one context where Hidden Cataract could see fringe play if the right Omo-adjacent synergies are legal simultaneously, but it's a build-around piece, not a standalone.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.17 bulk tier
At $0.17, Hidden Cataract is deep bulk — pick it up without hesitation if Omo, Queen of Vesuva or any counter-stacking commander is on your build list. Bulk rares with narrow synergy profiles rarely climb unless a new commander breaks the effect wide open, so treat it as a cheap enabler, not a spec target.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.