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Magic: The Gathering’s collaboration with Avatar won’t become widely available in the coming days, yet due to prerelease weekends recently, an affordable green creature experienced a surge in market worth.

From the initial reveals, the earthbending cub garnered significant interest. A 2/2 priced at G and 1 mana, Badgermole Cub includes the Earthbend 1 ability (possibly the most effective within the four bending abilities in the set). The major perk in its design is its second ability: Whenever you tap a creature for mana, add an additional green mana.

At its cheapest, this card sold at around $27. After the pre-release weekend, however, the market price jumped to nearly $50 and one seller offering as high as $60. Why are we seeing such high costs for this little creature? Mostly because of the rapid resource generation it enables.

When it arrives play, Badgermole Cub transforms a land so it becomes a creature that has earthbending. And with that second ability, as long as it remains on the board, each affected land produces twice the mana — in addition to mana-producing creatures in your control which tap for mana.

The obvious go-to for synergy includes this one-mana elf, a cheap 1/1 that taps to generate a green resource. But numerous creatures that make mana out there. Druid of the Cowl is a higher-cost choice that’s a 1/3 at a two-mana value as an alternative.

By playing lands, mana-producing creatures, and Badgermole Cub, you may quickly play an enormous high-cost creature into play within a few turns. And things just keep spiraling exponentially by maintaining dominance from there.

If you dip into an additional hue in this strategy, options such as versatile mana producers work perfectly that generate any color of mana. Additionally, a useful enchantment creature allows you to put one extra land per turn as well as transforms all of your lands so they count as all basics. You can also consider something like a card called A Realm Reborn, which for six mana grants each permanent you control the power to be tapped for a mana of any type — including each creature you have on the board.

The cub may be OP regarding ramping up your mana generation, yet how do you win for a deck like this? An often-seen solution already is this legendary creature. Its stats are set by how many lands you have, and it makes each creature you own into Forests as well as their other types. In other words, each creature on your board can tap for two G by tapping.

Harmonious Grovestrider is another expensive, beefy creature that benefits from a high land count (as with the previous card, its stats are equal to how many lands you have).

This Planeswalker works perfectly as a staple. Her static effect allows all Forests generate an additional green mana. (If you have the cub, so each one yield three G.) One loyalty ability is essentially a proto-earthbend, adding counters to a noncreature land, handy but does not overlap with the cub's ability. The minus ability, on the other hand, renders each land you control unbreakable and lets you put onto the battlefield every Forest left in your deck. Once you trigger this power, it’s pretty much you win.

Badgermole Cub is pretty much essential for all green Avatar deck that use the earthbend mechanic. By including red-green, there’s Bumi. It possesses earthbend 4, and when damage is dealt to an opponent, each animated land are ready again and can attack again. Even though Bumi has emerged as a popular Commander choice, this small creature is set to be one of the most, maybe the popular pick in the Avatar set.