MTG's Dramatic Entrance card explains one of Avatar’s best season 1 moments
King Bumi’s reveal mirrors green mana’s philosophy and Magic’s love of sudden, destabilizing turns.
In season 1 of Avatar: The Last Airbender, few moments land harder than the reveal that the ancient, mad king of Omashu is, in fact, Aang’s childhood friend Bumi. He’s introduced as a cackling, erratic old man who is both frail and senile, someone the Avatar doesn’t recognize at all. It’s been a century, after all. As the episode plays out, Bumi presides over a bizarre series of “tests” that feel less like trials and more like a joke played at Aang’s expense. In the last test, Aang has to fight the champion of his choice. When he picks the king, he’s shocked to find out that underneath that hunch and large robes, Bumi retains a muscular physique and sharp skills that make him one of the most powerful earthbenders in the world.
It’s such a memorable twist because Bumi doesn’t arrive as a threat. He takes advantage of how he’s perceived and then, with a magician’s flourish, suddenly reveals the truth. The moment is sudden and destabilizing, so it’s fitting that Bumi himself stars in the Secret Lair reprint of a Magic: The Gathering card from the Shadowmoor set called Dramatic Entrance.
Image: Wizards of the Coast
At face value, Dramatic Entrance is disarmingly simple: for five mana, you may put a green creature card from your hand onto the battlefield. There’s no extra cost reduction, no protection, no weird twists that are hard to understand. It’s not even all that efficient. But it lets the player interrupt the game’s expected rhythm. Green decks almost always build toward big creatures that cost a lot of mana, which is why they often focus on ways to generate more mana faster. Dramatic Entrance technically “cheats” a big creature onto the board, but you’re still paying a substantial amount of mana. So you’re only getting good value with Dramatic Entrance if you use it as early as possible to play something that costs seven mana or more. Better yet, pair it with Progenitus, a virtually unkillable 10/10 that costs 10 mana.
The original Dramatic Entrance card art from Mike Dringenberg features a neon green sky as a hulking, green-skinned giant has just landed. Trees around him are bent and broken as a massive cloud of dust and dirt explodes under his feet. The holes in the clouds above make it look like he was shot down from the heavens like a cannon ball and stuck the superhero landing. “Some things aren’t worth waiting for,” reads the flavor text.
Almost 20 years later, the art for Dramatic Entrance still inspires awe.
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Despite some excellent art, Dramatic Entrance never really found a place in competitive play, no doubt due to its high mana cost and the fact that it’s limited to green creatures. So it was printed once with Shadowmoor in 2008 and largely ignored for years. Its first taste of notoriety came in 2015, when a fabricated tournament result circulated online, falsely claiming that a Dramatic Entrance deck had played a crucial role. But that hype didn’t last.
In 2023, a real Modern deck built around Dramatic Entrance and Atraxa, Grand Unifier surfaced via a popular content creator, triggering an explosive spike driven by genuine demand and low supply. The price briefly skyrocketed before settling back down in a matter of days.
Then, Dramatic Entrance resurfaced as part of the Avatar: The Last Airbender Secret Lair Superdrop released in November 2025, specifically the “Everything Changed” Drop. "Some power burns bright and vanishes," the Drop's description reads. "Some hides in plain sight. And some threatens to consume the world entirely." Other cards in the Drop depict iconic battles and moments from the show, but Bumi's moment might be the best: "Even Bumi, underestimated behind a laugh and a crown, revealed strength that no one saw coming."
The card features art from Eduardo Francesco depicting the moment where an unhinged-looking Bumi tosses off his heavy robes to reveal his chiseled bod. “Your final test is a duel,” it reads. “And as a special treat, you may choose your opponent. Choose wisely!” It’s a direct quote from the show as Bumi brings out a group of scary-looking warriors. Aang, thinking he’s making the right choice, points at Bumi. That’s when the mad king makes his big reveal.
Dramatic Entrance has always been less about spectacle than perception, because it only works when the opponent believes they still have time. That was true in Shadowmoor, it was true when the card briefly broke into the spotlight years later, and it’s true now as Magic returns to Lorwyn-Shadowmoor with Lorwyn Eclipsed. The plane has changed, but the lesson hasn’t: Power like Bumi’s doesn’t need an introduction. It just needs the right moment to stop pretending.