I'm a sucker for a good map, but I've noticed a real sameness in the landscapes sometimes. A lot of them just feel like Tolkien-lite. The ones that stick with me do something weird with the geography itself. Take 'The Fifth Season' by N.K. Jemisin. The map looks almost mundane, but the magic is in reading it after you start the book. You realize those coastlines are jagged because the whole continent gets periodically shattered by geological magic. The land is literally the antagonist. It's not a whimsical place to visit; it's a brutal, sentient force. That changed how I see fantasy maps entirely.
Another one is China Miéville's 'Perdido Street Station'. The map of New Crobuzon is this dense, oppressive spiderweb of railways, slums, and weird science labs. The 'magic' is in the grotesque, bio-engineered details—the Remade people fused with machinery, the Handlingers with their moth-wing heads. The land isn't ancient and noble; it's a grimy, industrial, living nightmare. The map serves as a guide to the sheer architectural and societal horror, not to some elven forest. Those are the maps that feel truly magical to me, because the magic is baked into the dirt and the bricks.