Last updated on October 27, 2025
Tears of Valakut | Illustration by Noah Bradley
If you played Modern around 2015ish, you probably got your teeth kicked in by Scapeshift decks running Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle as their wincon. Those decks have slowly warped into Amulet Titan builds over the years, though you’ll occasionally see some bright-eyed brewer keeping the Valakut dream alive.
In all fairness, it’s an extremely powerful land, just slow by today’s standards. It provides inevitability in long games, and it’s not often a land can actually be the main source of damage in your deck. It even inspired Field of the Dead many years later, which is a much more problematic take on the formula. Valakut’s been dormant in competitive play for a while now, but it looks like it’s ready to erupt again, reskinned as Volcano of Roku's Island on Avatar: The Last Airbender‘s bonus sheet.
A Stacked Bonus Sheet
Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle is the third card revealed from Avatar‘s bonus sheet, which looks incredible so far. Granted, there are 61 cards on the sheet total (one for each episode of the original series), and they’ve clearly cherry-picked some of the best to show off early. We’ve already seen The Great Henge and Force of Negation in the early previews, and Valakut now joins the pile as well. They’re all marked as mythic rares, but that might not really mean anything; the Marvel’s Spider-Man bonus sheet cards were all “mythics”, but appeared at the same frequency, so the rarity distinction didn’t matter much.
The unfortunate news is that the rate of opening a bonus sheet card in a normal Play booster has dropped significantly lately, and only 1 in every 24 Play boosters will contain one of these cards. You’ll always get one in a Collector booster, sure, but have you seen the price of those things lately? The Spider-Man sheet was very similar, but with only 40 cards total.
And before you get too trigger-happy, these bonus sheet cards will not be Standard-legal, unlike the main Avatar set. The bonus sheet won’t affect card legality, so anything that wasn’t already legal in Standard won’t change with these reprints. Unless I’m mistaken, Valakut’s not hiding in a Standard-legal set anywhere (could be in the Foundations card file somewhere, I’m still finding cards in that set I didn’t know about).
Valakut Reprint History
Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle has seen a couple reprints, but never in standard booster packs outside of its original printing in 2009’s Zendikar. Aside from the OG and an alternate prerelease version from the same set, Valakut’s only appeared as a promo card in supplementary products, including a Secret Lair drop, as well as its Expedition printing in Zendikar Rising.
It’s still a relatively expensive card due to its lack of proper reprints. The cheapest Zendikar versions hover around $17 right now, the Expedition version is sitting at $22, and the Secret Lair version is just over $30. The latest reprint has a chance at being the cheapest version yet; while people won’t be opening many of these in Play boosters, the guaranteed bonus sheet slot in Collector boosters means you’ll see a decent chunk of Valakuts and other bonus sheet reprints flood the market.
Notably, this reprint also brings Valakut to MTG Arena for the first time. Formats like Brawl and Timeless can revitalize old favorites, and Valakut just might have a place in some Arena-only formats. The client already has some Valakut-friendly synergy pieces like Scapeshift, Primeval Titan, and Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, as well as all the Mountains one’s heart can desire, so there’s a chance people might experiment with the old, dormant volcano and see if they can kick up some ash.
Just missing the old tried-and-true Valakut staples like Sakura-Tribe Elder and Search for Tomorrow, but at the rate they’re putting old cards on Arena, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see a full 2015 Valakut deck be playable on the client soon.
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