Casting spells can be expensive, butMagic: The Gatheringhas countless ways to generate extra mana or reduce the mana cost of spells, from paying life instead of Phyrexian mana or sacrificing creatures to Ashnod’s Altar. But one of the strongest cost-reducing mechanics is delve.

Delve allows you to use your graveyard as a resource to pay for spells, permanently losing access to discarded cards in order to access powerful creatures and effects earlier than you’d be able to get them otherwise. It’s an incredible yet controversial mechanic.

Tasigur digs his fingers into the cranium of a man with glowing purple eyes, mouth, and veins.

What Is Delve?

Delve isa cost-reduction mechanic originally introduced in Future Sightwith three future-shifted cards: Death Rattle, Logic Knot, and Tombstalker. It appears primarily on black and blue cards, with a minor presence in green and red.

When you cast a spell with delve, you may choose to exile cards from your graveyard to pay for the generic portion of the mana cost.Each card you exile reduces the cost of the spell by one generic mana, but you can’t exile more cards than the generic portion of the mana cost.

The Become Immense card, from Khans of Tarkir.

Technically, delve is a cost reduction effect, not an alternate cost, which means you’re able to use delve in conjunction withalternate costs like escape. So you could use Underworld Breach to give Become Immense escape, then exile eight cards (three for Underworld Breach’s escape and five for Become Immense’s delve) and pay one green mana to cast it.

While delve is a powerful cost-reducing effect, it does have a couple of limitations: delvecannot be used to pay for the colored portionof a spell’s mana cost, and itcannot exile more cards from your graveyard than the generic portionof the mana cost, so you’re able to’t use it to empty your graveyard.

A red-haired wizard counters a red spell using a blue sigil.

Flavor-wise,delve represents digging for resources, either physically, like digging in a graveyard (black), or metaphorically, digging through time (blue).

How To Use Delve

Delve allows you to cast powerful spells at a fraction of their mana value by exiling cards from your graveyard. The loss of cards in your graveyard is permanent, soit isn’t a good idea to build a deck strictly around a delve theme.

Delve works best in decks that tend to throw a lot of cards into the graveyardand don’t have much more use for them. Spellslinger decks, for example, cast a lot of spells and usually don’t have much recursion, while reanimator decks usually have more cards in the graveyard than they need.

The Kishla Skimmer card, from Tarkir: Dragonstorm.

Delve works best as a tool that synergizes with other effects, such as triggered abilities that look for cards leaving the graveyard. Kishla Skimmer, for example, will give you a free card when you delve once per turn.

Whilespells with delve tend to cost more than other spells with similar effects, as long as you aren’t trying to play them on the first turn or two, it doesn’t much matter, since they’ll get cheaper as your graveyard grows.

A blue dragon lounges in a cave near a pool of water.

Best Cards With Delve

There are only a couple dozen cards with delve. Since the mechanic tends to lead to anti-linear gameplay and has produced several cards banned in different formats,it isn’t printed heavily in Standard-legal sets. However, a few are particularly potent.

Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis

Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis was released in Modern Horizons, and immediately shifted the Modern metagame. Itcombines delve and convoke, allowing you to tap creatures in play and exile cards from your graveyard to get an 8/8 with trample into play as early as turn two, and then replay it from your graveyard if your opponent destroyed it.

Murktide Regent

Modern Izzet (blue/red) and Dimir (blue/black) tempo decks love Murktide Regent as a win condition.It comes into play with a +1/+1 counter for each instant or sorcery exiled to cast it, and then gets more +1/+1 counters as you exile more cards later… like while casting a second Murktide Regent.

Treasure Cruise

Typically, drawing three cards will cost you about five mana. Treasure Cruise allows you todraw three cards for just one, making itthe most efficient card draw spell since Ancestral Recall. While it’s banned or restricted in multiple formats, it’s a staple in Commander, with frequent reprints in preconstructed decks.

Dig Through Time

For as little as two blue mana, Dig Through Time allows you tolook at your top seven cards, pick two to keep, and puts the rest on the bottom of your library. A couple of other spells have the same or a similar effect, but at its lowest, it’shalf the cost of the next cheapest version, and it’s the only instant with this level of variability.

Teval, Arbiter of Virtue

Teval, Arbiter of Virtue doesn’t have delve, but itgives delve to every other card you own. This allows you to play some spells much earlier than you could otherwise, but will also cost you some life. Thankfully, it has lifelink to help offset some of the life loss, and synergy with the Sultai (black/green/blue) theme of graveyard removal.

Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis MTG Card.

The Murktide Regent card, from Modern Horizons 2.

The Magic The Gathering card Treasure Cruise by Cynthia Sheppard.

MTG Dig Through Time card with the art in the background.

MTG Teval, Arbiter of Virtue card with the art in the background.