Invasion Submersible Pick Order: Why This Uncommon Dominates Avatar Draft (December 2025)
Invasion Submersible has become one of the clearest “take it early” signals in Avatar: The Last Airbender Limited on MTG Arena—so much so that some players have started talking about it like it’s a format-defining common. The data and the official rules text point in the same direction: this card consistently plays like a premium tempo spell stapled to a late-game threat, and it does so inside a set whose flagship mechanic (Waterbend) is explicitly designed to let you convert board presence into mana-like resources.
There is one important correction right up front, though: as of the major card databases and tracking sites used by competitive players, Invasion Submersible is widely listed as an uncommon, not a common. For example, mtg.wtf (a card database that mirrors official Oracle-style presentation) lists Invasion Submersible as Uncommon in Avatar: The Last Airbender (TLA #57). Untapped.gg also presents it as an uncommon card in its meta/card interface. Some seller pages have conflicting metadata (for example, EchoMTG’s listing title includes “(C)”), which likely helps explain why “common” keeps showing up in conversation—but the more consistent classification across the core gameplay/stat sites is uncommon. (If you’re publishing a pick-order guide, this distinction matters, because rarity affects how often you can expect to see the card and how realistic “build-around” patterns are.)
With that clarified, here’s what the hard facts (card text, rules notes, and tracked performance) say about why Invasion Submersible has earned a top-tier pick order in TLA Draft as of December 2025.
The format context: Avatar Draft is live, heavily played, and still rotating in late December
Avatar: The Last Airbender arrived on MTG Arena on November 18, 2025, with tabletop release following shortly after on November 21, 2025 (and a prerelease window of November 14–20, 2025). By late December, it was firmly embedded in Arena’s event rotation.
Wizards of the Coast’s official Arena announcements provide a useful snapshot of how “current” TLA Limited still is in late December:
- Midweek Magic: TLA Omniscience Draft ran December 23–25, 2025.
- Quick Draft: TLA was scheduled again for December 30, 2025–January 15, 2026 (and also appeared earlier as November 27–December 9, 2025 in the rotation).
Even outside Draft itself, Wizards was attaching meaningful stakes to TLA Limited during this period. Their Arena Direct page shows a TLA Sealed Arena Direct event with tightly specified timestamps: it opened Dec 26, 2025, 8 a.m. PT, signups closed Dec 29, 2025, 5 a.m. PT, and the event ended Dec 29, 2025, 8 a.m. PT. Entry was listed at 8,000 gems, and the event offered physical prizing—1 Play Booster box at 6 wins, or 2 Play Booster boxes at 7 wins (while supplies lasted). If supplies ran out, Wizards noted a substitution value of $209.70 cash prize per Play Booster box.
That schedule and prizing matters for interpreting card performance data: a format that is actively being pushed through official events tends to generate larger sample sizes, and larger sample sizes generally make early pick-order conclusions less “gut feeling” and more “measurable trend.”
What Invasion Submersible actually is (and what it does in game terms)
According to mtg.wtf, Invasion Submersible is:
- Mana cost: {2}{U}
- Type: Artifact — Vehicle
- Set/number: TLA #57
- Artist: Sylvain Sarrailh
- Rarity: Uncommon
But pick order isn’t driven by identity; it’s driven by text, timing, and how text interacts with a set’s mechanics.
Untapped.gg’s card page presents the key rules text that’s shaping draft outcomes:
- Immediate tempo on entry
– “When this Vehicle enters, return up to one other target nonland permanent to its owner’s hand.”
- A one-time “exhaust” transformation that creates a big threat
– “Exhaust — Waterbend {3}: This Vehicle becomes an artifact creature. Put three +1/+1 counters on it. … Activate each exhaust ability only once.”
Even without any extra speculation, those two lines establish a clear, factual baseline: Invasion Submersible provides an enter-the-battlefield bounce effect, and it also has a single-use upgrade that can turn it into a creature and add three +1/+1 counters.
From a drafting perspective, that combination is inherently attractive because it lets one card do two different jobs at two different points in the game: first, it can be a tempo piece (bounce); later, it can become a threat (exhaust upgrade).
The mechanical glue: Waterbend is explicitly designed to convert board presence into “mana payment”
To understand why Submersible’s exhaust line is more than just flavor text, you have to connect it to the set’s official rules for Waterbend.
Wizards’ Avatar: The Last Airbender Release Notes define Waterbend in functional terms:
- Waterbend [cost] means you pay that cost, but for each generic mana in the cost you may tap an untapped artifact or creature you control rather than pay {1}.
- The notes also clarify a subtle but crucial point: you may tap artifacts/creatures to pay Waterbend even if you haven’t controlled them since the beginning of your most recent turn (i.e., the “summoning sickness” restriction doesn’t apply to tapping to pay Waterbend costs).
Those are mechanical facts with immediate drafting implications. If a strong card’s “expensive” text box is written as Waterbend, the effective cost can shrink depending on how many creatures and artifacts you have available to tap.
And in this case, Invasion Submersible’s upgrade is literally written as “Exhaust — Waterbend {3}.” Because Submersible is itself an artifact, it is part of the card type set that Waterbend can tap to help pay generic costs. (That’s also reflected in commentary on limited rating pages like MTGA Assistant, which notes you can tap the Submersible itself as part of paying Waterbend—consistent with the Release Notes’ definition.)
So, when players describe Submersible as “easy to turn on,” they’re not just vibing; they’re describing a card whose payoff is attached to a mechanic that Wizards explicitly engineered to be flexible in how it’s paid.
Exhaust keeps it fair—but the one shot is still a big deal
The same official Release Notes explain the limiter on Exhaust abilities:
- Exhaust abilities can be activated normally, but each exhaust ability can be activated only once per object (if it leaves and comes back, it’s treated as a new object and can exhaust again).
That matters because it defines the card’s ceiling and its reliability. You’re not drafting a repeatable engine that dominates every long game automatically. Instead, you’re drafting a card that has:
- a guaranteed, immediate ETB effect (bounce), and
- a single, high-leverage “upgrade” activation you can choose when the timing is best.
In Limited terms, this frequently lines up with the moments that decide games: stabilizing a board by bouncing a problematic permanent, or setting up a turn where you swing tempo, then turn the vehicle into a meaningful attacker/defender with counters.
Importantly, none of that requires assuming any hidden text or unwritten synergies; it follows directly from the rules text and the set’s official mechanics definitions.
The performance data: Submersible is a top-tier pick by tier list and by win rate
The qualitative story (tempo now, threat later; upgrade cost supported by set mechanic) becomes more persuasive when the quantitative tracking agrees.
Untapped.gg card-level performance
Untapped.gg’s page for Invasion Submersible lists the following Limited stats:
- Limited winrate: 55.1%
- Limited in-hand win rate: 59.4%
- Limited popularity: 9.1%
- Limited total games: 71,000
These figures matter because they give two different perspectives:
- Winrate tells you how decks containing the card are performing overall in the tracked dataset.
- In-hand win rate is often treated by drafters as a proxy for “when you draw this card, do you tend to win more?” Untapped reports 59.4% in-hand for Submersible.
And the 71,000-game sample is not tiny—especially for a single card in a relatively new Limited environment. That scale makes it harder to dismiss Submersible’s performance as a fluke of early hype.
Untapped.gg pick-order / tier placement
Untapped’s broader TLA Limited Draft Pick Order page lists:
- Total matches: 780,000 (as shown on the page)
- A tiering system described as “Tiering by In Hand WR”
- Invasion Submersible placed in Tier A-
Tier placement is not a direct “take this over everything” instruction, but it is exactly the kind of practical artifact drafters use when building pick heuristics. An A- placement, backed by a massive match pool, signals that Submersible isn’t just “playable”; it’s rated as one of the stronger cards you can open.
A second dataset signal: early 17Lands chatter put Submersible at the top of uncommons
It’s important to separate official numbers from community summaries, but the community summary is still relevant as context—especially because it aligns with Untapped’s tiering and in-hand results.
A Reddit post in r/MagicArena summarizing early 17Lands outcomes claimed:
- “The top overall uncommon in this set is Invasion Submersible, with a 63.0% win rating.”
That statement is not an official Wizards position, and in this research bundle it appears as a community paraphrase rather than a directly quoted 17Lands table. So the responsible way to use it in an article is careful attribution: it’s a 17Lands-based community analysis claim, not a verified Wizards statistic.
Still, it’s notable for one reason that matters to journalists and competitive players alike: it independently points to the same conclusion the Untapped pages point to—Submersible is performing at the high end of the format’s power band.
Why the pick order is so high: it plays two roles cleanly, and both roles matter in TLA
Staying strictly inside the factual boundaries of what we’ve sourced, there are three grounded reasons Submersible rises in pick order.
1) It generates immediate value: a built-in bounce effect
Untapped’s rules text confirms the ETB ability returns “up to one other target nonland permanent” to hand. In Draft, “nonland permanent” is a wide umbrella: creatures, artifacts, enchantments—anything that’s on the board and not a land.
A bounce effect does not permanently remove a card, but it frequently does two concrete things that win games:
- It undoes mana investment by forcing a replay.
- It changes combat math by removing a blocker or attacker for a turn.
You don’t have to claim anything about the set’s speed to say this is valuable; it’s a fundamentally versatile effect that is almost never “dead.”
2) It turns into a serious threat through a mechanic the set supports
The exhaust line doesn’t say “pay {3}.” It says Waterbend {3}, and Wizards’ Release Notes explicitly define Waterbend as a cost you can pay by tapping artifacts/creatures for the generic portion.
That is a mechanical bridge between “board development” and “ability activation.” In other words: as you naturally play Limited (deploy creatures, deploy artifacts), Waterbend provides a rules-supported way to cash in that board presence to pay for key activations.
3) It is constrained (Exhaust once), which makes it a reliable early pick rather than a fragile combo
The Release Notes’ definition of Exhaust (“activate each exhaust ability only once”) means Submersible doesn’t demand that your entire deck be built to loop the same ability repeatedly. It’s “one big activation,” not “assemble three pieces and hope.” In pick-order terms, that typically increases early-pick confidence: you’re less likely to draft a dead card that only works in an ultra-specific shell.
“Common that dominates”? The real story is an uncommon that’s strong enough to be mischaracterized
Finally, it’s worth returning to the premise that Submersible is “the common that dominates Avatar Draft.”
The most verifiable pieces of evidence we have point to a slightly different—but arguably more interesting—truth:
- Invasion Submersible is broadly listed as an uncommon (mtg.wtf; Untapped).
- Despite being uncommon, it shows high in-hand win rate (59.4%) and A- tier placement on a pick-order list built from 780,000 total matches.
- Community analysis summarizing early 17Lands results went further, describing it as the top overall uncommon with a very high quoted win rating (63.0%), though that claim should be treated as community-reported rather than directly verified from 17Lands in this packet.
So if the card is being talked about like a “common that runs the format,” that’s less about official rarity and more about how frequently it seems to decide games when it shows up.
A December 2025 takeaway for pick order
By late December 2025, Avatar: The Last Airbender Draft is still in active Arena rotation (including scheduled Quick Draft windows and a late-December Arena Direct event). In that live environment, the tracked performance pages show Invasion Submersible standing out both in tier placement and in win-rate-oriented metrics.
Grounded in the sources above, the most defensible pick-order conclusion is:
- Invasion Submersible is a premium uncommon that combines an immediate ETB tempo effect with a powerful, Waterbend-enabled exhaust upgrade, and its measured results on major MTG Arena tracking sites place it among the strongest cards to prioritize early in TLA Draft.
Sources (from the research set)
- Wizards — MTG Arena Announcements (Dec 15, 2025): https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/announcements-december-15-2025
- Wizards — MTG Arena Announcements (Dec 1, 2025): https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/announcements-december-1-2025
- Wizards — Arena Direct (TLA Sealed): https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/arena-direct
- Wizards — Avatar: The Last Airbender Release Notes (Waterbend/Exhaust): https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/avatar-the-last-airbender-release-notes
- Wizards — Designing TLA: The Four Elements: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/designing-avatar-the-last-airbender-the-four-elements
- Wizards — Designing TLA: Allies, Clues, and Lessons: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/designing-avatar-the-last-airbender-allies-clues-and-lessons
- Untapped.gg — Invasion Submersible stats: https://mtga.untapped.gg/meta/cards/1070479/invasion-submersible
- Untapped.gg — TLA Pick Order: https://mtga.untapped.gg/limited/avatar-the-last-airbender/pick-order
- mtg.wtf — Invasion Submersible (TLA #57): https://mtg.wtf/card/tla/57/Invasion-Submersible
- Reddit (community summary of 17Lands): https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/1p372ap/tladraftsupervaluehiddengemsandavoidover/
- EchoMTG (conflicting “(C)” listing indicator example): https://www.echomtg.com/mtg/items/invasion-submersible/184536/
If you want the next revision to be even more “pick-order practical,” I can restructure this into (1) what the card does, (2) what the rules allow you to do with Waterbend, and (3) what the data says, ending with a clean “when to first-pick it” decision tree—while still only using the sourced facts above.