Dust Bowl – Mercadian Masques (originally)
Date Reviewed: August 21, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 4.17
Casual: 3.67
Limited: 3.17
Multiplayer: 3.83
Commander [EDH]: 4.33
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Speck of dust on everyone,
Save our sun . . .
Dust Bowl is a card that’s easy to overrate but also easy to underrate. You can go back and forth for hours arguing with yourself, about the devastating potential of reusable, uncounterable land destruction versus the high activation cost of effectively well over four (paying three mana usually with lands and tapping the Dust Bowl itself, and sacrificing a land’s future mana production). But in a carefully constructed deck and a carefully played game, your opponent should already be under pressure when you get your Dust Bowl going, and neither of its extreme cases really applies. You’ll very rarely get every land your opponent plays; but you only really need to get enough to keep them under pressure as you have them now. There’s a reason this was one of the most feared cards in the whole game around the year 2000 – even a freely-mana-spending deck like the Rock was Vampiric Tutoring or Living Wishing for it. And it’s held up reasonably well since, too.
Constructed: 4
Casual: 3 (can be powerful, but do you really need it at the kitchen table?)
Limited: 2.5
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 4
A reusable Wasteland of sorts? Sounds scary, all right. That said, the mana cost on Dust Bown makes this generally worse at the Wasteland job of surgically picking off a problem land. It is, however, a land that doesn’t need to give itself up to do the job, and so while it’s worse at destroying a single land, it’s much better at slowly eating away at problems that need to be dealt with, and there are definitely ways to turn the sacrificed lands into upside if you’re enterprising enough.
The main issue, of course, is that this is a card that needs specific synergies and tools to not just be a “bad Wasteland” or, even worse, a “bad Tectonic Edge” (a card that is barely seen in spite of its upsides). It’s reusable more readily, of course, and that’s certainly worth mention, and there are decks that can weaponize what it does. But it’s never quite landed a foothold in Eternal formats, and while it’s a unique Commander piece with plenty of positives, this still should not be your first choice for pinpoint land removal from the land slot. It’s not bad, but there’s better if you just need one land gone.
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 3 (people tend to dislike seeing their lands get got)
Limited: 3 (not unplayable, but Limited rarely has suitable targets; still, when this does have a good target, it looks quite good)
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 4 (it’s perfectly suitable for Commander, and it sees plenty of use here)
Thijs
In the category Striplands, one always thinks of Strip Mine and Wasteland. Two of the most powerful cards that ever saw the light, and both actually quite old. Wasteland is originally from Tempest and Strip Mine is even older, being first printed in Antiquities. The only downside to these two is that you have to sacrifice them to use their ponza ability, something that Dust Bowl isn’t affected by.
Dust Bowl was first printed in Mercadian Masques, a set that produced a lot of interesting cards (think of Gush, Snuff Out and Unmask). Kai Budde played two of them in his Rebels deck that won him the Chicago Pro Tour in 2000. If you look at deck lists since then, you will see it has been played consistently up until today.
You pay three, you tap Dust Bowl and you sacrifice a land (any land). Then you can go nuts, you can destroy any nonbasic land that’s on the table. Think of players who have a ton of creature lands or triomes. They’re gone. You can easily recover the sacrificed lands with a Pulse of Murasa or a Hazezon. The fact that Dust Bowl doesn’t have to be sacrificed makes this a force to be reckoned with and this beautiful printing in EoE pays tribute to one of the greats.
Constructed: 5
Casual: 5
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 5
Commander [EDH]: 5
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