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Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core

Legendary Artifact // Legendary Land

{T}: Draw a card, then discard a card.
{4}, {T}: Transform Matzalantli. Activate only if there are four or more permanent types among cards in your graveyard. (Artifact, battle, creature, enchantment, land, and planeswalker are permanent types.)

CMC
3
Mana cost
{3}
Color identity
C
Rarity
rare
Set
The Lost Caverns of Ixalan
Price
$3.76
EDHREC rank
#1692
Buy on TCGplayer
Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core card art
Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core lands as a mana rock that transforms into a repeatable reanimation engine — once flipped, The Core lets you pay mana to return permanents from your graveyard, which is a late-game engine most decks would build around. The cost is real: flipping it requires five artifacts entering under your control, so it belongs in dedicated artifact decks like Kitsa, Otterball Elite or Tetzin, Gnome Champion, not as a splash in slower builds.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01

Tetzin, Gnome Champion

88.2% of decks · synergy 0.87

Tetzin, Gnome Champion is the natural home — the deck floods the board with artifact tokens, hits the flip condition on Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core without breaking a sweat, and then uses The Core to rebuy any artifacts that got answered.

02
Lara Croft, Tomb Raider

Lara Croft, Tomb Raider

61.4% of decks · synergy 0.61

Lara Croft, Tomb Raider cares about artifacts entering the battlefield from exile and the graveyard, making Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core a double-duty piece that fuels the flip count while The Core later digs back the expensive artifacts Lara sacrificed to her own triggers.

03
The Capitoline Triad

The Capitoline Triad

63.4% of decks · synergy 0.59

The Capitoline Triad generates treasure and artifact tokens at scale, which makes hitting the five-artifact threshold on Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core trivial, and the reanimation back-half then recovers whatever the board wipes hit.

04
Oskar, Rubbish Reclaimer

Oskar, Rubbish Reclaimer

53.4% of decks · synergy 0.51

Oskar, Rubbish Reclaimer casts artifacts directly from the graveyard, so Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core serves as a redundant recovery engine that operates on a different axis — paying mana at any time rather than waiting for a discard trigger.

05
The Ancient One

The Ancient One

45.2% of decks · synergy 0.43

The Ancient One mills cards regularly to fuel its own awakening condition, and Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core converts that milled-artifact pile into a reanimation resource once flipped, turning self-mill from a cost into a pure upside.

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

Commander is where Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core does its best work — artifact-token commanders flip it early and then use The Core as a long-game engine that opponents have to answer or lose to attrition. In competitive non-rotating formats like Modern and Legacy, it's legal but never sees play; three mana for a mana rock with a steep flip condition is far too slow when those formats are over by turn four. Pioneer and Standard offer the most plausible homes outside Commander, specifically in artifact-go-wide shells that can realistically trigger the flip condition, but even there the payoff is modest compared to more linear options. Oathbreaker mirrors Commander's appeal in miniature — fast artifact token strategies can flip it quickly and leverage the reanimation in a shorter game.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

$3.76 cheap tier

At $3.76, Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core sits in the cheap tier but prices slightly above bulk because demand is concentrated in Tetzin, Gnome Champion and Lara Croft, Tomb Raider lists that treat it as a near-staple. That demand base is narrow enough that the price is unlikely to climb without a breakout showing, but it's also stable — this doesn't feel like a card waiting to crash.

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Sources

Mentioned

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