Insanely Popular Landfall Card Gets Small Rules Tweak

Last updated on August 25, 2025

Rampaging Baloths | Illustration by Steve Prescott

Question for all the landfall lovers in the house: Have you ever hit a land drop with Rampaging Baloths in play and chosen not to create the 4/4 Beast token? For many of you, the answer is an obvious no, and for many others, you probably just looked up Rampaging Baloths on Scryfall and discovered that Baloths has had a “may” ability this whole time.

Well, up until now. The most recent reprint of the card from Edge of Eternities Commander did away with the may. Now, you’re making those beast tokens whether you like it or not.

Functional Errata

It probably went over everyone’s heads when it came out, but as the Edge of Eternities Update Bulletin from Wizards of the Coast points out: “Rampaging Baloths has been updated to remove the ‘you may’ from its ability.”

This is a perfectly reasonable change to a card that’s meant to smooth out the gameplay experience ever-so-slightly, mostly on digital platforms. By removing the “may” from an ability that you’re going to opt for nearly 100% of the time, you get to remove one click from whatever program you’re playing on, be it Magic Online or MTG Arena (and yes, Rampaging Baloths is legal on Arena thanks to Foundations). One less unnecessary click on an ability that happens over and over again just makes for a better digital experience. In paper, there should be virtually no difference.

This sort of change happens very rarely. We saw it before with a digital-only version of Blood Artist, specifically the version that’s conjured by Sanguine Brushstroke. While normal, paper versions of Blood Artist can target any player with its death trigger, the Alchemy version created by the digital-only enchantment only targets opponents. That means it can essentially auto-target your opponent when a creature dies, which the normal version can’t do, since you could technically target yourself if you wanted to for some reason.

Wait… Isn’t This a Downgrade?

Suture Priest | Illustration by Igor Kieryluk

If you want to get really in the weeds about the Baloths change, yes, it’s technically a strict downgrade. It’ll lead to a better play experience digitally, but taking any effect with a “may” in it and removing the optionality behind it actually makes the card worse. It might not be noticeably worse, since there’s a near-zero number of times you wouldn’t want to make the beast token from the landfall trigger, but there’s also a non-zero number of games where you would opt out of making the token if you could.

Consider the following, totally reasonable, not highly fabricated gameplay scenario:

• You’re at 1 life.
• Your opponent controls Suture Priest.
• You control a newly errata’d Rampaging Baloths.
• You need to play a land to have enough mana to make a play this turn.

Tough luck. If you hit your land drop, landfall on Baloths will trigger, you must create a Beast token, which will trigger the opposing Suture Priest and your opponent may take you out of the game.

This change is a “functional errata“, which they don’t do for cards very often. That means the card’s rules text has been changed in such a way that the card actually plays differently than it used to. Again, the purpose is to better facilitate the repetitive landfall trigger digitally, but the end result is that the landfall staple is now marginally worse than it used to be. And in case you’re unaware, this rules update applies to all copies of Rampaging Baloths, even the ones that still use “may” in their printed text.