Spending mana is the foundation of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering.💟 Casting spells and activating abilities both need mana, and carefully choosing which cards are worth tapping your hard-earned lands for is a big part of becoming skilled at the ꦆgame.

Expend is a mechanic int𒈔roduced ⭕in Bloomburrow that rewards you even more for this most basic of actions. Spend mana to cast big spells, and you’ll be rewarded with even moree bang for your buck.

What Is Expend?

Unlike most mechanics, expend isn’t a keyword or even an ability word, it’s simply a stat that is tracked that cares about how much mana you’ve used to cast spells during a turn. If you’ve spent four mana, yo🍸u have expended four.

In some ways, this is similar to the Lost Caverns of Ixalan’s descending mechanic, which instead tracked how many permanent𓃲 cards you’d put in your graveyard.

E🥀xpending is then used in a series of triggered abilities that go off when you’ve spent the specified amount of mana. For example, Wanderblade Mentor gets a +1/+1 counter once you’ve spent your fourth mana that turn to cast a spell.

Expend doesn’t care about mana spent for other things, like activating abilities. However, it does care about additional or alternative costs, so kicker, offspring,✤ mutate, foretell; just about anything that has you spending mana to put a card on the stack and attempt to resolve it counts for expending.

Keep in mind that expending doesn’t trigger additional times for the same amount of mana. A card can have two expend costs, like Muerra, Trash Tactician having “expend 4” and “expend 8” on it, but both of those only trigger the first timꦛe you spend that amount of mana.

Finally, expending mana is tracked even if there’s nothing with an expend ability on the battlefield. If you spent three mana to cast Muerra, Trash Tactician, you’ll only need to spend one more to trigger her first expend ability once she en﷽ters the battlefield.

The opposite is also true: if you’ve spent a lot of mana already and cast a creature with expend, you may have already passed its 🌄expend number and it won’t be able to trigger th🦹at turn.

How To Use Expend

The beauty of expend is that it rewards you for doing something you’re already going to do. It’s additional value for casting spells, instead of an additional hoop to jump through. Simply stack up expend effects and watch the triggers roll in.

It’s a good idea to have a way to track the mana you’re spending in a turn. A d20 dice, or a Commander lifetracker that goes up to 40 should be plenty, but it helps prevent any confusion about how much you’ve spent ♌this turn.

This mechanic is right at home in two specific archetypes in particular: big mana, which ramps the mana sources to cast big, splashy spells, and spellslinging, which instead casts lots of smaller ones. It doesn’t matter if you’ve cast one sp🌳ell or five in a turn, as long as you expend the right amount of mana.

Because expend doesn’t need the spells you cast to resolve, it’s a potential answer to control decks. As long as you can get one thing with expend out, even if yo⭕ur opponent then counters everything you play ꩲfor the rest of the game, you’ll be expending mana and generating value.

The Best Expend Cards

In Bloomburrow, expend is closely linked to the red and green colours, and the Raccoon creature 🌳type. It wants you to hit hard, go big, and spend lots of mana to do so.

With this in mind, Muerra, Trash Tactician is perhaps the best way to enable expending, especially if you’re using other Raccoons with their own expend abilities. Gaining life and exiling off the top of your library is good, bu♏t the fact she also gives💝 you mana to pay towards spells makes her an efficient machine.

Byway Barterer is a tricky card to keep going, but if you’re able to keep your handsize down to one or two cards, expending four and discarding your hand could enable graveyard strategies, madness, discard triggers, or 🦋simply draw enough cards to keep the smackdown going.

Bark-Knuckle Boxer is already a good creature with its 3/2 for two mana. But the addition of giving it indestructible by expending four could mean it remains a threaꦜt throughout the game, long after it otherwise would’ve stopped being useful.