The Sultai brood are an opulent and decadent clan of necromancers, naga, and naga necromancers. They revere the ruthlessness of the long-gone dragons, and their symbol is a single dragon’s fang. Even their dead fuel their war machine, thanks to their returning Delve mechanic, first pre-printed in Future Sight. Delve works an awful lot like Convoke: where Convoke allows your living minions to help power your big spells, Delve has your DEAD power them. When you’re casting a Delve spell, you can exile cards from your graveyard to pay for the colorless mana requirements. So, for example, you want to cast Dead Drop which costs 9B. That’s an awful high cost- but you can pay as little as a single black mana for it. As you’re paying the costs, you can choose to exile up to 9 cards from your graveyard to pay for that colorless component. You could also do fewer than that, if you didn’t have as many, or didn’t WANT to use up certain cards- you pick and choose which cards to exile, and how many you want to exile. Maybe you’ve got a few big scary creatures you want to reanimate, but a lot of chaff you don’t need? You can keep the good cards, and get rid of the chaff! You can also not Delve at all, if you happen to be flush with mana. However, you can’t “over-delve”- with Dead Drop, for example, the maximum number of cards you could exile with Delve is 9. You can’t pitch 10 or 15 cards to the Delve just to get them out of your graveyard, because once you’ve done 9, you’ve run out of costs that Delve can cover. Delve is also part of casting the spell. Your opponent won’t be able to respond to it! They can’t wait to see what you plan on exiling and then try to interrupt you, they’ve got to wait until your spell has been fully cast. Finally, Delve works in any zone. If you can cast a creature card from your library (thanks to Garruk’s Horde, perhaps), or even from another wacky zone, you can Delve from there.

Today’s Rules Tip written by Trevor Nunez