Please let me know, MTG peeps: Is this seemingly innocuous design OP by Wizard's standards? From what I've seen, landcycling on commons seems to mostly only exist on cards with high CMC's, often that are somewhat "bad cards" by themselves (like over-costed creatures).

Huh. I hadn't noticed that. But apart from Ash Wastes, you're right. Then again, "landcycling" just isn't on many cards. There's only 14 of it, and about the same again in the various basic lands (forestcycling etc.) and all of THOSE are on expensive things too.

I think this is because it's usual that you want a land early on, and later on you would rather have the big effect. So on a small card like this, it's not much use later on in either mode.

But I am not sure there's a power problem with it. After all, this is either a 1/1 vanilla for one, or ", sorcery, fetch a non-basic land". Neither of which modes seem particularly game breaking.

If you expand it to just plain 'cycling' though - lots and lots of cards have that on low cmc. But again - mostly on cards that are only conditionally useful, so that you can cycle them if you don't want the ability. Closest match is probably... Cloud of Fairies? Which was strong but that was because of an interaction with a stupidly broken land, rather than because you could cycle it.

I agree that in practise it doesn't seem over powered to me, it's a pretty simple and semi-vanilla either/or. Your explaination for why landcycling is often on expensive cards makes sense too, and I've somewhat tried to follow that more on the instants and sorceries with it.