Back to Basics
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Grade shown above. Raw cards use the Near Mint → Damaged scale; slabbed cards carry the grading company’s grade. Card condition guide →
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Item Condition
Our grade: Near Mint. Pictured: this printing of the card. Every card ships triple-sleeved — a soft sleeve, a deck sleeve and a rigid top loader.
Item Description
Back to Basics is the card that sends greedy mana bases the bill. Nonbasic lands don't untap during their controllers' untap steps, so every dual land, shock land and utility land gets one use and then sits there tapped. Meanwhile, the deck that cast it is usually happily tapping a row of Islands.
That single line of text has kept it relevant since Urza's Saga in 1998. Blue control decks built on basic lands use it to choke opponents off their colors, and in Commander it can quietly cripple a table that leaned on duals and utility lands while your own basics keep working normally. The trick is building around it: run mostly basics, lean on artifacts for extra mana, and let the enchantment tax everyone else. Fetch lands can still be cracked, since they sacrifice rather than tap, but any nonbasic they find stays tapped once it has been used.
This is the Ultimate Masters printing, collector number 46, illustrated by Terese Nielsen, offered here in non-foil. Its flavor text from Barrin compares a ruler's crown with an ordinary hat on a rainy day, a wry nod to the humble basic land outlasting the fancy ones.
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Masters Sets
Back to Basics
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Masters Sets
Back to Basics
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