A random, unassuming Magic: The Gathering card from the Avatar The Last Airbender set has risen to a whopping $30 on the secondary market because it's apparently a lot rarer than it ought to be.
That card is Earthbending Student, an uncommon green three-drop with the earthbending ability. This card can animate one of your lands and also gives all your land creatures vigilance. That makes it a decent inclusion for Commander decks that turn lands into creatures, since being able to attack with those lands and still tap them for mana is very helpful.
Being an uncommon from the eternal-legal half of the Avatar set, you'd expect the supply of this card to more than meet the demand - it shouldn't cost more than a dollar or two at most. But if you look up this card in this MTG set's official card gallery, it stands apart from the rest of the Eternal-legal Avatar cards because it's mysteriously not listed in either the Jumpstart boosters or the beginner box. Instead, it seems to be exclusively found in collector boosters (and the commander's bundle, because it contains collector boosters).
I say 'seems to' because there's been some back and forth disagreement about whether this is actually true. On the MagicTCG Reddit, mods locked a thread about the issue, stating they'd "been reliably informed this is incorrect". Several commenters were also adamant they'd opened up the card in regular Jumpstart booster packs.
But to date no one has provided pictures to back up these claims. Now it's weeks later and the evidence is hard to deny. Absolutely zero non-foil copies of Earthbending Student have gone up for sale on TCGPlayer or other card marketplaces. Occam's Razor suggests this is because the card is exclusive to collector boosters, which would mean only foil copies exist.
If that's the case, just how rare is this uncommon? Well, according to the Collecting Avatar The Last Airbender article, there's just one uncommon eternal legal card in every Avatar collector booster and 50 cards that can fill this slot, so Earthbending Student only exists in 2% of collector boosters.
And since the MSRP price for a single Avatar collector booster is $38, that more than explains the $30 price tag for Earthbending Student. It's not a super useful card but it's not totally useless either, and we've seen that fans will pay good money for a rarer version of chaff simply because it has the word 'tutorial' printed on it.
Without confirmation from Wizards, we don't know why this card is limited to collector packs. It was revealed on August 14 with the beginner box spoilers, so the most likely answer is it was supposed to be part of the beginner box, then got removed for some unknown reason. Perhaps it was just lost in the shuffle?
Do you have an Earthbending Student in your collection? You might want to double check, because if you do you probably overlooked it! If you find one, let us know the good news on the Wargamer Discord.