Rising Waters
Enchantment
Lands don't untap during their controllers' untap steps.
At the beginning of each player's upkeep, that player untaps a land they control.
- CMC
- 4
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- U
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- World Championship Decks 2000
- Price
- $0.68
- EDHREC rank
- #16835
Rising Waters locks every player to one untap per turn — including you — so it only earns its slot when your deck is built to exploit that symmetry, not just survive it. At three mana for a global enchantment that taxes the whole table's mana development, the effect is powerful enough to warp games; the cost is that you need a real plan to break parity or it just slows everyone down equally.
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 |
In Commander, Rising Waters is a prison piece for blue stax shells that generate mana outside the untap step — think Seedborn Muse, static mana doublers, or artifact mana — letting you operate freely while opponents are effectively capped at one land's worth of mana per turn. Legacy is the only competitive 1v1 format where it's legal, but dedicated land-lock strategies there reach for more efficient tools and Rising Waters has never found a foothold. Vintage has access to it in theory, but the sheer density of fast mana and broken permanents in that format means a three-mana enchantment that doesn't immediately win the game doesn't register. Oathbreaker is the sleeper application: the two-player nature keeps the political blowback manageable, and a planeswalker commander that activates at instant speed can operate right through the lock.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.68 bulk tier
At $0.68, Rising Waters sits firmly in bulk territory — easy to pick up as a throw-in without thinking twice about the cost. It's a narrow enough card that the price is unlikely to spike without a new Commander precon or high-profile deck tech pushing demand, so there's no urgency either way.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.