Reviewing Dragon's Maze Part 3: Utility and Mana

Welcome back to the final installment of The General Zone's review of Dragon's Maze. I'm your old Grandpa Growth. Today we are talking about mana producers and utility cards. Utility cards are kind of the nuts an bolts of Magic. They add functionality to your deck. If your deck was a tank: threats would be the cannon. Answers would be armor. Mana would be the engine. Utility cards would be radar, radio, guidance, gps; that sorta stuff. Looking through the list of cards, there isn't a whole lot to talk about so this will be a bit shorter than the previous installments. Let's take a look!

Here is what you do: play U/R, preferably Tibor and Lumia. Or George Bush. That will throw them off your trail. Use a series of tutors to collect the pieces: Squee, Goblin Nabob and Possibility Storm. Cast Storm. Cast said creature. Flip your deck down to a maximum size fatty like Ulamog (because you have no other creatures in your deck, duh). Profit and repeat as necessary. With nothing but lands and tutor/draw effects finding the Squee again shouldn't be a big deal.

Alternative Strategy: Play real cards in your real deck against other real players.








One of my favorite cards in the set and one of the most powerful. An extra card every turn is getting pretty expensive these days. I have already written a bunch about this card and I will be saying even more about it in an upcoming 'Stack'. So for now I will leave it alone, but I guarantee that I will be seeing this card on both sides of the table for a long time to come.











 As I have previously stated I don't really play token swarm decks. I also don't really play aggro decks. I ALSO don't really play Red decks. Even in the decks that I do play, I almost never play anthem effects. I will take Overrun over Collective Blessing any day of the week and that ain't changing. Such as all that mess is, I am probably not qualified to really evaluate this card. I will be happy when people play it against me. I will never cast it.












This is in the same boat as the last card, except it happens to be way better. Pyreheart Wolf was a card, very recently. It attacked on the ground and was somewhat hard to get rid of. This potentially represent more damage, still makes your guys tough to block, and is probably much harder to destroy. All that could add up to this card seeing some play at tournament tables.

This has a lot of classic appeal to me. I love Goblin War Drums. It is one of my favorite cards in my Pauper cube. It substantially alters the flow of combat and can seriously tilt control players. It pretty much staples Battle Cry onto War Drums for the price of a single Green. Deal. I could see losing to this in EDH, but I am not super worried because it still hasn't solved the Wrath problem. If this were a Rare, maybe cost a bit more, and protected you from board sweepers, then I would be discussing my nightmares with a counselor instead of posting on a blog.

This card is pretty gross. I make a habit of playing Beacon of Unrest because it gives you the versatilty to dig both creatures and artifacts. This lets you dig the whole buffet out of the trash for essentially the same price. Adding White severely limits the decks that it can go into in Commander, but I have been wanting to make a WBx deck for some time now and this set my just push me over the top.

I dig the art on this quite a bit. Performing the ritual around the points of the Orzhov symbol is a nice touch, but I think that it should be made a bit more obvious that the figures in the picture are, in fact, the Ghost Council. They look just like robed wizard dudes. Super generic. The flavor kind of reminds me of the plot of Mass Effect 2. "Back from the dead, Commander? I saw you get spaced." "I got lucky...with a lot of strings attached."


The new age of mana dorks has dawned. This card is cray cray. It ramps you up on turn two AND it pings not just one player, but ALL your opponents! Power common. You'll see this guy around the draft tables and in Pauper. It isn't impossible that it breaks into EDH, but I wouldn't know. I don't like to use this kind of card there. Putting and extra land in play is better than putting a mana guy in play most of the time. Wrath of God is just so much more common than Armageddon. Doing 6-7 damage though could change my mind. This is a lot of value from a common ramp spell.


The flavor text here is a giant let down. I wouldn't exactly call killing your opponent a 'cost'. I just don't get what this phrase means in terms of the world or what it is supposed to add to the overall presentation of the Magic card.

The Cluestone cycle is cool enough, I guess. I play the paint off of Mind Stone. These are a good bit worse than Mind Stone, but that shouldn't stop them from seeing play all over. Being able to cash your mana rocks later in the game or in response to a board sweeper really lets you keep your foot on the gas in a tight game. The fact that you can cycle it (albeit for a BUNCH of mana) insures that it won't be a dead draw when you need to close out a race or dig for removal.

As a whole Raoul Vitale did a good job with the art for these cards. He varies the perspective, size, and background with each piece and he has a distinctive color pallet that is vivid and poppy. The colors almost have a pastel like character to them and provide excellent definition to the subject. He also does a great job of encapsulating the architecture and character of each guild through the art. He is doing a stand-up job in his first year working on the game so a big thank you to him and a hearty congratulations.

All that being said the creative department had 10 separate attempts to come up with decent flavor text and failed all 10 times. That is just incredible.



I am a fan of  Thawing Glaciers. This seems like a cool way to modernize it and also support the 'Gate's Matter' theme. I think this is worth playing in just about every three color deck. Lands that produce card advantage are crazy powerful. Unfortunately, it doesn't ramp your mana the way that Krosan Verge  does and it can't thin your deck as much as Thawing Glaciers during the late game, but this is still completely playable. I just don't really understand why it is mythic rare and not legendary. Feels wrong to me. Unless there was more than one end to the maze...speaking of which, what exactly is going on in this set? Who wins? What was the point? We reveal the answers next time on Game Grumps.

I dig the art here. It hints at meaning. Why are some of the pillars smashed? Why are there only 9 of them? Is this a callback to the Guildpact?


I don't usually talk about reprints, but I want to make an exception here because of what Wizards decided to do with the 'new' art. The new perspective shows more of the cityscape surround the gates. That is a great idea. Ravnica is a cool place. Getting to see more of it is a pure bonus to me. I will never complain about getting more work from great artists like John Avon. Victory.












Aaaand that's all I have to say about that. This seems to be a decent set. Not my favorite in recent memory, but there is lot's of fun new stuff to play with so get out there and start brewing. Feel free to leave your feedback on the review, the General Zone, and the cards themselves in the comments. That about wraps things up on this end. There are new posts every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday so make sure you stay tuned to the General Zone for all the Commander content you can handle. GG.