🔗 Share this article

the popular card game’s collaboration with Avatar won’t get a wider release until later this week, yet after early access events this past weekend, a low-cost green spell experienced a surge in price.

From the initial reveals, the earthbending cub drew significant interest. A 2/2 that costs a single green and one generic mana, Badgermole Cub features the Earthbend 1 ability (arguably the best within the elemental mechanics available). The real boon with this card comes from its second ability: Whenever you tap a creature for mana, it provides bonus green mana.

At its cheapest, this card was available for $26.98. Following the early events, however, its value escalated to nearly $50 and one seller offering priced at sixty dollars. The reason for such high costs on this adorable card? Mainly due to the rapid resource generation it enables.

When it arrives the battlefield, Badgermole Cub transforms a terrain card to a creature land with earthbend. And with that second ability, as long as it stays in play, those lands produces twice the mana — plus mana-producing creatures in your control that produce resources.

The obvious go-to to combine with would be Llanowar Elves, a cheap 1/1 that produces one green mana. However there are plenty of creatures that make mana out there. This particular druid is a higher-cost choice with stats 1/3 costing two mana in comparison.

Using land cards, mana-producing creatures, alongside this card, you can easily get an enormous high-cost threat on the battlefield early in the game. Momentum builds out of control by maintaining dominance from there.

By incorporating another color in this strategy, examples including versatile mana producers are excellent picks which produce any color of mana. And something like Dryad of the Ilysian Grove enables playing another terrain per turn as well as makes all of your lands into every basic land type. Another possibility is something like a card called A Realm Reborn, costing six mana provides every card you own the ability to tap and generate one mana of any color — which covers each creature under your control.

This card could be too strong regarding ramping up your mana generation, but how do you win in such a strategy? One obvious and popular answer is Ashaya, Soul of the Wild. Its power and toughness are both equal to your land count, and it changes all of your nontoken creatures Forests in addition to their original types. Essentially, each creature you control can tap for two G when tapped.

Harmonious Grovestrider is another expensive, beefy creature which gains from many terrain cards (as with the previous card, P/T are based on the number of lands you control).

This Planeswalker works perfectly in this deck. One of her abilities makes every Forest produce extra green. (Combined with earthbend, so all earthbend forests produce triple green.) Her main ability is essentially an early earthbend, adding counters on a land, a useful effect but does not overlap with earthbend. Her -8 ability, on the other hand, makes your entire land base indestructible and allows you to draw out all the remaining forests in the deck. If you can actually activate that ability, this typically means you win.

The cub is a must-have for all green Avatar deck that use the earthbend mechanic. By including red-green, consider this legendary card. This card features earthbend 4, plus if damage is dealt to a player, all land creatures become untapped for another attack. While that version has emerged as a popular Commander choice, this small creature is definitely going to remain one of the most, maybe the popular pick from this expansion.