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Moxonomy

Cartographer's Hawk

Creature — Bird1 generic manaWhite mana

A 2/1 flier that only pays off when you're losing, and only against the player who put you there. The bounce trigger keys entirely off a land-count comparison: connect with someone who controls more lands than you and the Hawk returns to hand, fetching a Plains onto the battlefield tapped before shuffling; connect with anyone at parity or behind and the flier just keeps swinging with nothing to show for it. That asymmetry does two jobs at once. It caps the ramp: the engine runs while you trail and switches off the instant you draw level, so it corrects toward parity rather than accelerating past it, and the tapped land means the fix is durable board development, never a same-turn mana burst. And it writes a targeting decision into the trigger, because the payoff only exists when you aim the attack at whoever is pulling ahead. The fetch is capped to the Plains type, which still admits nonbasic Plains-typed duals, so the loop can pull real fixing rather than a bare basic. What separates it from a plain repeatable land tutor is that political shape: the card literally cannot reward you for beating up on the person losing worse than you are. It is catch-up equity built for boards where land totals drift apart over many turns, a self-correcting route back to level that stops the moment it gets there.

Cartographer's Hawk (c20)
C20 · #24rare
Pricing
Normal: $0.71
Foil:
Oracle Text

Rules text

Flying When this creature deals combat damage to a player who controls more lands than you, return it to its owner's hand. If you do, you may search your library for a Plains card, put it onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
N/A
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
N/A
Historic
N/A
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
N/A
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
N/A
Pauper Commander
N/A
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
N/A
Penny Dreadful
N/A
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
N/A
TLR
Legal
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

2 sets
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