Natural Balance
Sorcery
Each player who controls six or more lands chooses five lands they control and sacrifices the rest. Each player who controls four or fewer lands may search their library for up to X basic land cards and put them onto the battlefield, where X is five minus the number of lands they control. Then each player who searched their library this way shuffles.
- CMC
- 4
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- G
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Oversized League Prizes
- Price
- —
- EDHREC rank
- #22177
Natural Balance levels the land count across the table — every player sacrifices down to three or keeps exactly three, whichever they already have — making it a one-sided reset when you've built around low land counts or land-from-hand tricks. The four-mana cost is the sweet spot: cheap enough to deploy before opponents stabilize, punishing enough to strand anyone who ramped ahead of you.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Natural Balance is almost exclusively a Commander card — its political, symmetrical-but-skewed land destruction reads as a mass-reset tool in a multiplayer context where one player has developed far ahead of the table. In Legacy and Vintage, where it's technically legal, it's too slow and too conditional to compete with Wasteland, Strip Mine, and actual combo infrastructure. Oathbreaker is the one other format where it could see play, specifically in low-land aggressive shells that can exploit the three-land floor. Outside of Commander, there's no real home for it.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
unknown tier
Current pricing data for Natural Balance isn't available in this snapshot, so check Scryfall or TCGPlayer for the live number. Given its narrow Commander application and low reprint profile, it tends to sit in the $1–$4 range — a low-stakes pickup if the archetype fits.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.