Magic: The Gathering - What Is Delve?

Delve: Unleashing Graveyard Power in Magic: The Gathering

Casting spells in Magic: The Gathering can be expensive, but numerous strategies exist to generate mana or reduce spell costs. These include paying life (Phyrexian mana), sacrificing creatures (Ashnod's Altar), and the powerful, yet controversial, mechanic: delve.

Delve utilizes your graveyard as a resource, permanently exiling cards to reduce spell costs, enabling earlier access to potent creatures and effects.

Understanding Delve

Introduced in Future Sight with cards like Death Rattle, Logic Knot, and Tombstalker, delve primarily appears on black and blue cards, with occasional appearances in green and red. It allows you to exile cards from your graveyard to pay for the generic mana cost of a spell. Each exiled card reduces the cost by one generic mana, but you cannot exile more cards than the generic mana cost.

Crucially, delve is a cost reduction, not an alternate cost. This allows combination with other cost reduction mechanics like escape. For example, you could use Underworld Breach's escape and then delve to cast Become Immense.

Limitations exist: delve cannot pay for colored mana costs, and you can't exile more cards than the generic mana cost.

Utilizing Delve Effectively

Delve enables casting powerful spells at reduced costs, but the exiled cards are lost permanently. Therefore, building a deck solely around delve is generally inefficient.

Delve excels in decks that naturally fill the graveyard without relying heavily on graveyard recursion. Spellslinger decks, for example, are a good fit. Reanimator decks, however, often have more graveyard resources than needed for optimal delve usage.

Synergizing delve with other effects significantly enhances its power. Cards like Kishla Skimmer, which benefit from cards leaving the graveyard, create powerful synergies. While delve spells often have higher base costs, the reduced cost becomes significant as your graveyard fills.

Top Delve Cards

Although not heavily featured in Standard, delve has produced several powerful cards, some even banned in various formats. Here are a few notable examples:

• Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis: Combines delve and convoke for an incredibly powerful early-game threat.

• Murktide Regent: A powerful win condition for Izzet and Dimir tempo decks in Modern.

• Treasure Cruise: Remarkably efficient card draw, banned or restricted in many formats.

• Dig Through Time: Highly efficient card selection at a low cost.

• Teval, Arbiter of Virtue: While not possessing delve itself, it grants delve to all other cards, creating powerful synergy.

The above is the detailed content of Magic: The Gathering - What Is Delve?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!