The Canadian Highlander points list, priced

Every card on the Canadian Highlander points list effective September 1, 2026, at its cheapest real printing. Seven points can cost $1.51 or thousands, and here is why.

Aymeric Lamontagne

Nov 6, 2026

Here is the honest headline: on the Canadian Highlander points list, seven points can cost $1.51 or $7,312.50. Flash and Black Lotus carry the same seven points on the list effective September 1, 2026. Flash read $1.51 on November 2, 2026. Black Lotus last read $7,312.50 on August 17, and no tournament-legal printing of it has had a reading since. Points are not a price list, and they were never meant to be.

The tempting correction is that points measure power instead. The people who set them won’t quite sign that either: the Canlander Council wrote on August 31, 2026 that the list is “not a direct comparison of the power level of individual cards.” Read their reasoning and points look more like pressure on specific decks. Flash barely does anything alone. The council discusses it as half of a two-card combo, which a later section spells out.

This piece covers five things: the format’s rules and how to count points, the whole list with a price on every card, the cost of each point tier, the cheapest and dearest ways to spend all ten points, and why prices and points disagree so badly. It describes the list as it stands today. The next update takes effect on December 1, 2026, and the council says it will be announced the day before. Nothing below guesses at it.

On the list

46 cards — 104 points in all, against a 10-point deck cap

Cheapest full 10 points

$2.31 — Flash plus the three cheapest one-pointers

Dearest full 10 points

$11,769.97 — Three Moxen and Intuition; no Black Lotus

Reserved List share of the cost

97.6% — 11 cards, 45 of the 104 points

List effective September 1, 2026, read November 4. Prices are TCGplayer market prices in our archive on November 2, 2026, with the two cards that had no reading that day at their last one.

The format, and how to count points

Canadian Highlander is a one-on-one, 100-card singleton format. Its own about page traces it to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1999, with a first tournament in 2007 and an early ban list that eventually became the points list. The construction rules are short:

• At least 100 cards, with no upper limit stated.
• One copy of each card, except basic lands and cards that explicitly allow more, such as Relentless Rats.
• No sideboards.
• The Vintage banned list, plus named categories: ante, conspiracy, dexterity and sub-game cards, cards with stickers or attractions, silver-bordered and acorn cards, and cards depicting racism or cultural insensitivity. The site’s own summary is that the format effectively shares a banned list with Vintage.
• No more than 10 points, from the points list.

Nothing obliges a deck to spend a point. A card that isn’t on the list counts for zero, and a ten-point deck is a ceiling reached, not a requirement met.

A points calculator is therefore addition. Sol Ring (3), Demonic Tutor (3), Mystical Tutor (2), Strip Mine (1) and Balance (1) come to exactly 10. Swap Strip Mine for Tolarian Academy and the same list reaches 11, which is illegal. That swap would have been free before September 1, 2026, when Academy went from 1 point to 2. The council’s stated plan is to re-evaluate the format every three months, so any total is only true for the list it was counted against.

The Canadian Highlander points list, priced

Every card on the official points list, read on November 4, 2026, at the cheapest printing we can price. “Cheapest” means the lowest TCGplayer market price in our archive on November 2, 2026, its latest day, across English paper printings. Black Lotus and Mox Sapphire had no reading on any tournament-legal printing that day, so they show their most recent one, with its date. † marks the Reserved List.

We left out Collectors’ Edition and 30th Anniversary printings, which Scryfall files as memorabilia. Wizards says 30th Anniversary cards are not legal in sanctioned events. Including them would flatter the top of the table: a Collectors’ Edition Black Lotus read $1,800 on November 2. The format’s rules pages say nothing about proxies, so that question belongs to whoever runs your event.

What each point tier costs

Buying one of everything, at those prices, would cost $37,487.84 for 104 points, or $360.46 a point. No deck can use more than ten of them. The tiers are where it gets strange.

A price list would climb steadily from the bottom row to the top. This one doesn’t. The three-point tier is the most expensive per point, above the eight-point card, because five of its nine cards are Moxen. It also holds Sol Ring at $1.16 and Tinker at $1.30. The seven-point tier has a $7,311 gap between its cheapest and dearest cards. Averages barely mean anything in a table like this, which is why the median column sits beside them: the median five-point card, Mana Crypt, cost $35.96.

The cheapest and dearest ways to spend ten points

Each row spends exactly 10 points, one copy of each card, at the prices above, and each was found by exhaustive search rather than by eye.

The dearest spend holds no Black Lotus. Lotus plus Mox Sapphire, the obvious answer, comes to $11,212.50. Three Moxen and a one-pointer beat it because a Mox costs three points, so more dollars fit under the cap. The budget rations points; it says nothing about money.

These are accounting exercises, not deck recommendations. The $2.31 row has no reason to exist as a plan unless the deck contains a creature worth flashing in. The spread is the point: on these readings, the same ten points can differ in price by a factor of about 4,700.

Why points and prices disagree

Three mechanisms explain most of it, and none of them is the council.

The Reserved List sets the top of the market. Wizards’ reprint policy promises that cards on the list won’t be printed again in functionally identical form, and it closes the list to both additions and removals. Eleven of the 46 pointed cards are on it. They hold 45 of the 104 points and 97.6% of the cost: $812.70 a point against $15.53 for the other 35 cards. Intuition shows the effect in one line. At $356.64 it is the most expensive one-pointer, nearly double the two-point Tolarian Academy, and its price is a statement about Tempest’s supply in 1997 rather than anything the council decided.

Reprints can swamp demand. Sol Ring is the top-ranked card on EDHREC in our index, and it still reads $1.16, with 127 tournament-legal English printings in that same index. It costs the same three points as a Mox.

A Commander ban removes a whole class of buyer. Four of the eight cheapest pointed cards are banned in Commander: Nadu, Winged Wisdom, Balance, Tinker and Flash. So is Mana Crypt, at five points and $35.96. Our data can’t separate that effect from reprints, but the pattern is hard to miss.

Which brings back Flash, the card that started this. For two mana it lets you put a creature from your hand onto the battlefield, sacrificing it unless you pay its mana cost reduced by two. Put in Protean Hulk, decline to pay, and the Hulk’s death trigger searches up any number of creatures with total mana value 6 or less. The council’s August 31 post names Flash Hulk among the format’s top combo decks. The two cards together read $7.54 on November 2: Flash at $1.51 and a Dissension Hulk at $6.03, and the Hulk carries no points at all. The format puts seven points on one half of that pairing. The market has no idea.

One number sums this up. Rank all 46 cards by points and by price, and the rank correlation is 0.47, where 1 would be lockstep and 0 no relationship. Remove the Reserved List and it falls to 0.04. Among the 35 cards Wizards can reprint, knowing a card’s points tells you essentially nothing about its price.

The cheap end of the list

• Flash — 7 points, $1.51. Ties Black Lotus and Time Vault for the second-highest value on the list.
• Sol Ring — 3 points, $1.16. Same points as a Mox.
• Tinker — 3 points, $1.30, from Mystery Booster 2.
• Balance — 1 point, $0.77, from The List.
• Nadu, Winged Wisdom — 1 point, $0.33. The council discusses it alongside the format’s combo decks.
• The Fantasticar — 1 point since September 1, $0.70.

The reverse holds too, and it is the cleanest evidence that money isn’t the input: some of the most expensive cards in Magic carry no points at all. On November 2, 2026, an Unlimited Timetwister read $6,400.00, more than the cheapest printing of any pointed card that day, for zero points. Mishra's Workshop read $3,699.99, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale $3,619.50, Bazaar of Baghdad $1,984.60, Library of Alexandria $1,963.33 and Gaea's Cradle $1,630.77. The same flat, thin caveat below applies to them. In the Fall update the council also voted on Yawgmoth's Will ($239.10) and Demonic Counsel ($1.83) and passed neither, so both stayed at zero.

Did adding a point move the price?

The September 1, 2026 update is a small natural experiment, since it changed four cards. It raised Enlightened Tutor, Spellseeker and The Fantasticar from 0 to 1, and Tolarian Academy from 1 to 2. Each row follows one printing, with Flash, unchanged on the list, as a comparison.

Two tutors moved in opposite directions, and Academy rose a little despite becoming harder to fit. There is no visible signal, which fits the rest of this piece. The likeliest reading is that a points change touches one format while these cards also sell to players of others. Two months is a short window, so that is a description of these two months and no more.

The Fantasticar looks like the exception and isn’t. Almost all of its fall came first: the printing read $39.66 on June 30, 2026, four days after release, and had already reached $4.34 on August 30, the day before the council announced its point. That is a new Commander-set rare finding its level, with the point arriving late in the slide.

Three caveats on these numbers

First, at the top of the list a price is barely a market. Our archive holds prices, not sales, but a figure that never moves is what few sales would look like. As of November 2, 2026, Mox Pearl had read $3,513.33 unchanged since July 6, Mox Jet $4,000.00 since July 8, Ancestral Recall $4,999.95 since July 17, Time Walk $5,719.99 since July 28 and Time Vault $1,080.00 since August 24. Timetwister’s $6,400.00 had stood since October 5. Black Lotus and Mox Sapphire had no reading at all.

The printings don’t even sort sensibly. A Beta Time Walk last read $2,790.00 on September 12, about half its Unlimited price. Black Lotus last read $12,000.00 in Beta on August 5, then $7,700.00 in Alpha and $7,312.50 in Unlimited on August 17. Mox Jet’s entry above is a Beta copy only because Unlimited’s last reading, $2,800.00, dates from March 23. And a Beta Mox Pearl read $300 until February 6, 2026, which we did not use: the archive records neither condition nor seller, so we can’t say whether that was a damaged copy or a bad listing. Treat every four-figure price here as an order of magnitude, not a quote.

Second, the rest of the table is one market on one basis. These are US-dollar TCGplayer market prices for English cards, of unstated condition, and the cheapest printing is not always the obvious one: four come from The List, and The One Ring’s is a borderless foil that read below its own nonfoil. Other languages and other sellers will differ.

Third, the archive has gaps. It holds 47 reading days in the 90 days to November 2, not 90, so a date quoted here is the nearest reading we hold. Prices will have moved since. And the list itself has a known expiry: it is good until the December 1 update takes effect, at which point the points columns above, and every total built on them, may need redoing.

A Canadian Highlander deck builder, and its limits

Manamancer is a free MTG deck builder that treats Canadian Highlander as a format of its own. Set a deck to it and the builder holds it to at least 100 cards, one copy of each card with the usual exceptions, no sideboard, a card pool read from Vintage legality, and a points meter against the 10-point cap in the stats panel. The format-legality guide explains how its warnings work. An account is needed to save decks. If you use the Agent on a Canadian Highlander deck, cards it proposes are checked against the same points, along with the index, legality and the copy limit.

Two things you should know before trusting that meter.

First, our copy of the list is behind the official one. On November 4, 2026, the list our app loads held 43 cards totalling 100 points, where the official list holds 46 totalling 104. It has no entries for Enlightened Tutor, Spellseeker or The Fantasticar, and it has Tolarian Academy at 1 instead of 2. Those are exactly the four changes from September 1. So a deck containing all four can read up to 4 points lower here than it really is, and a meter showing 10/10 can hide a 14-point deck. Until our copy catches up, add those four by hand, and treat the official page as the authority whenever the two disagree.

Second, a clean check is not tournament approval. It is arithmetic and a legality lookup, run against our copy of the list and our reading of the card pool. Whoever runs your event decides what is legal at it, and the council decides what the list says.

Build a Canadian Highlander deck — Set the deck’s format to Canadian Highlander to see the points meter, then check the total against the official list.

The prices above are dated, and the December 1 update may date the points too. If your own total matters this week, the official page is one click away and the addition takes a minute.

May your ten points always be spent on purpose, and may your Flash keep costing less than your Hulk.