Maze’s End – Dragon’s Maze
Date Reviewed: January 4, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 1.38
Casual: 4.13
Limited: 1.50
Multiplayer: 3.50
Commander [EDH]: 3.63
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
I still remember my first Maze’s End deck from 2013. It was basically Turbo-Fog with an actual win condition, if you count Maze’s End as such. It also had more support for land stuff and less support for mill, which meant that if it went up against a better-prepared casual opponent who had Ghost Quarter just in case, it had almost no chance of winning.
Fortunately, Gates are now much more than Ravnica’s excuse to have common color fixing: they’re an actual niche casual archetype. The third Ravnica block brought midrange-oriented Gate cards like Gatebreaker Ram and Glaive of the Guildpact. Battle for Baldur’s Gate brought Gates that mimic Jumpstart‘s Thriving lands, and ones that provide serious pressure. Ironically, these make Maze’s End look even slower than before, but in the right deck, they can also make it the last, uncounterable, out-of-nowhere line of attack. I think that’s pretty cool.
Constructed: 1
Casual: 4
Limited: 1.5 (all three sets of the Return to Ravnica block have Gates, so it is probably technically possible)
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.5
As a note, Maze’s End is in Ravnica Remastered, but is not available in draft boosters. Limited score will reflect its Limited format it was in, the weird RTR-GTC-DGM hellscape.
Maze’s End is always going to attract attention because of the txt of winning the game being written on it…and, to its credit, it has gotten better in the intervening years. The Gates were color-correcting common lands with a handful of interactions introduced in Return to Ravnica…and there were exactly 10 unique gates at the time, making a Maze’s End deck have to play all of them and play a really weird brew to make the most of it. It was cute, but it was an awkward, slow stall deck that won slowly (if at all).
Today, we have a couple more Gates…22 uniquely-named ones at the present time, and so it’s a bit more forgiving to try and make a Maze’s End package work. It’s effectively a Thawing Glaciers that slowly digs through your deck in an effort to get to 10 while helping correct your mana. It’s still interminably slow, but having more gates has mad the stall strategies that try to ride this to a win a lot more tenable. It’s arguably a high-maintenance strategy whose payoff is sometimes a bit erratic, but you can parley this into a win with careful and calculated planning, and I’d say this definitely shines more brightly in the modern game than it did 10 years ago. Don’t bring it to a tournament, though.
Constructed: 1.75 (slow and clunky, and not all Gates are legal in Modern; this is way too fragile for Legacy)
Casual: 4.25
Limited: 1.5 (good luck)
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.75
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