Reprints are a necessary part of the Magic: The Gathering ecosystem. Without them, any older card that’s stood the test of time and remained playable will be impossibly expensive. Many old powerhouses that have since received reprints are worth a fraction of what they used to be. For cases like Tarmogoyf, the card’s playability fell off a cliff, but in a lot of cases, while old titans aren’t quite what they used to be, they can still keep up.
Lotus Cobra is an MTG card that’s been impacting games for over a decade. The card isn’t hovering just below $20 anymore, but it hasn’t stopped impacting games, even though Lotus Cobra’s 16th birthday is coming up. Despite multiple reprints across sets, Lotus Cobra’s price seems to be rising again.
MTG Lotus Cobra
In the right deck, Lotus Cobra generates a ridiculous amount of mana. Partnering well with Fetch Lands, this Cobra can easily generate two or more mana per turn. In a Landfall deck that wants to play multiple lands in play, you can easily generate ten or more mana, but things don’t stop there.
Lotus Cobra currently sees the most play in Scapeshift-esque combo decks. This card, in a more roundabout way than Spelunking or Amulet of Vigor, overcomes the limitation of a spell dropping a massive amount of lands tapped into play. Cobra can generate mana for each land, allowing you to play more spells. You won’t be able to use other land-related abilities, which makes the untap cards better, but more often than not, mana is all you need. In Commander, redundancy is key, and that’s where this card is seeing the most play.
There are a lot of cards spiking in price because they play well in the World Shaper preconstructed deck from Edge of Eternities. Lotus Cobra also does that, but according to the patterns in demand for the Snake, this doesn’t seem to be as big a driver for Cobra’s price spike as other recently discussed cards, like Zuran Orb. That said, according to EDHREC, Lotus Cobra is seeing play in a majority of Hearthhull, the Worldseed Commander decks, which suggests that the card is still a popular upgrade for that precon.
While World Shaper should have an impact on Lotus Cobra’s price, the Snake is also seeing tons of cEDH play. Any Commander that wants to make multiple land drops in the format, like Lumra, Bellow of the Woods, Hearthhull, the Worldseed, The Wandering Minstrel, and more, all use Lotus Cobra. This card is also a very popular card in green Duel Commander decks. This high competitive Commander usage also suggests that Cobra is a powerful inclusion in many green casual Commander decks.
In addition to this, Lotus Cobra does see a little play in two-player formats. This is a common card to see in Pioneer Scapeshift combo decks, but that’s really the only play Lotus Cobra sees outside of various Commander-related formats. Instead of one particular deck causing Lotus Cobra to spike, landfall strategies simply seem rather popular at the moment, and Lotus Cobra is good in all of them.
The Spike
Similar to Zuran Orb, Lotus Cobra has a fair number of printings, some more expensive than others. The two cheapest copies of Lotus Cobra, prior to the spike, were its most recent reprintings in Zendikar Rising and Foundations Jumpstart. These spikes bring the cheaper variants of Lotus Cobra more in line with the other copies, which, while experiencing small spikes, aren’t particularly notable.
Over the past three months, the Zendikar Rising variant of Lotus Cobra has roughly spiked from $2.23 to $7.75, representing a 247% increase. The Foundations Jumpstart version saw a very similar spike, but has only increased by about 200%, comparatively. There hasn’t been a massive jump in demand at any point for Lotus Cobra. Instead, demand for the card has steadily increased over time, and Lotus Cobra’s price has increased alongside it.
All of Lotus Cobra’s cheapest variants, with one exception (which we’ll talk about later), are now selling for a minimum of $7.50 on average, even though some of the market averages haven’t quite caught up yet. Lotus Cobras from Zenikar Rising, Foundations Jumpstart, Iconic Masters, and the original Zendikar copy are all selling for about this price. These are all in nonfoil, mind you, as older copies of Lotus Cobra will have larger foil premiums.
Lotus Cobra does have a few premium printings that go for significantly more than the others. A Secret Lair variant of the card routintely sells for about $28, but is declining in price at the moment. A Grand Prix Promo variant of Cobra is going for about the same amount, but is currently rising in price slightly. The most expensive variant of Lotus Cobra is the 2025 Year of the Snake promo, priced at approximately $95.
The Exception
For whatever reason, one copy of Lotus Cobra seems to be getting a lot less love than the rest. The Zendikar Rising Showcase variant of Lotus Cobra is currently the cheapest on the market, priced at about $5. This doesn’t seem to be a result of the card being slower to spike than the others, either. While all of the other Lotus Cobras have less than 50 listings per copy on TCGplayer at the time of writing, this Lotus Cobra has over 100 copies available.
This card did see a price spike, however. Rising from $2.50, this Lotus Cobra hit a market average of $6.41 at its peak, but is already starting to cool off. This breaks the trend seen with the other cheaper variants of the Cobra, which are still rising.
Showcase Zendikar Rising cards are particularly common thanks to the rate at which they show up in Zendikar Rising Collector Boosters, but even with that in mind, players do not seem to be fond of this particular copy of the Snake. If you don’t mind the artwork, you can save a few bucks by picking up a Lotus Cobra for yourself. It’s impossible to know whether this Lotus Cobra will remain at its current price forever, but given the number of copies still on the market, the Cobra would need to see a lot of sudden demand to increase, and even then, it might not. We can’t tell the future.
If you’re dropping a lot of lands in your green Commander decks, it’s hard to go wrong with Lotus Cobra. As long as this Snake can consistently generate you two mana per turn, it’s going to function better than a majority of two-mana mana rocks. Those are incredibly popular in Commander, meaning that this upgrade for a lot of landfall decks could be seamless.
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