Dragon's Maze (DGM): Set Guide for Magic Players

The third act of a story is supposed to bring everything together - and Dragon's Maze had a lot to tie up. Released on May 3, 2013, as the 61st Magic: The Gathering expansion, Dragon's Maze is the final set in the Return to Ravnica block, following Return to Ravnica (2012) and Gatecrash (2013). It brought all ten of Ravnica's guilds together under one roof for the first time, which is as ambitious a design premise as the game has seen.

Whether that ambition fully landed is, honestly, a matter of some debate - but there's still plenty worth knowing about this set.

What is Dragon's Maze?

Dragon's Maze (set code: DGM) is a 156-card expansion set on the plane of Ravnica. It was released on May 3, 2013, and forms the conclusion of the Return to Ravnica block alongside Return to Ravnica (RTR) and Gatecrash (GTC).

The central conceit of the set is the Implicit Maze - a hidden path winding through Ravnica's ten districts, each segment controlled by one of the ten guilds. Every guild races to solve the maze, believing its secrets will grant them ultimate power over the city. It's a dramatic setup, and it gave the design team a natural excuse to put all ten guilds in a single set for the first time in the block.

Format check: Dragon's Maze was legal in Standard alongside RTR and GTC at release. All three sets have since rotated out of Standard and Pioneer. Cards from DGM remain legal in Modern, Legacy, Vintage, and Pauper where individually applicable.

Themes and mechanics

With all ten guilds represented, Dragon's Maze leaned hard into multi-colour as its central mechanical identity. Rather than introducing a sweeping new mechanic, the set is largely defined by weaving together what RTR and GTC had already established.

Returning guild mechanics

Every guild's mechanic from the earlier sets returns here:

• Detain (Azorius) - tap an opponent's permanent and prevent it from being untapped or activated
• Unleash (Rakdos) - enter the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter, but lose the ability to block
• Overload (Izzet) - pay an alternate cost to affect every valid target instead of one
• Scavenge (Golgari) - exile a creature card from a graveyard to put +1/+1 counters on a creature
• Populate (Selesnya) - create a copy of a creature token you control
• Bloodrush (Gruul) - discard a creature card to pump an attacking creature
• Battalion (Boros) - trigger an ability when three or more creatures attack together
• Evolve (Simic) - put a +1/+1 counter on a creature when a bigger creature enters under your control
• Extort (Orzhov) - pay {W/B} when you cast a spell to drain each opponent for 1 life
• Cipher (Dimir) - encode a spell onto a creature, replaying it whenever that creature deals combat damage

Fuse: Dragon's Maze's signature new mechanic

The one genuinely new mechanic Dragon's Maze introduced is fuse. Fuse cards are split cards - two spells on one card - but with a twist: you can cast both halves simultaneously by paying both mana costs. It's an elegant design that rewards the multicolour theme, since most fuse cards span two guild colours and doing both things at once is often dramatically more powerful than either half alone.

Rules note: When you cast a fused split card, it counts as a single spell on the stack. This has implications for spell-counting effects and countering - one counterspell stops both halves.

Limited and draft

Dragon's Maze draft is a genuinely unusual format. Because all ten guilds are present, the natural two-colour lane structure of a typical draft breaks down. With so many colour combinations available and a relatively small set size (156 cards), the format rewards flexible drafters willing to spread across three or even four colours.

The prerelease used a unique guild-path structure where players registered a guild and built sealed decks from a mix of DGM, RTR, and GTC packs - which gave a much better sense of the full multicolour environment than DGM draft alone.

Notable Limited bombs at the prerelease and in draft included:

• Ral Zarek - a planeswalker who taps and untaps permanents, with an ultimate that could generate extra turns
• Lavinia of the Tenth - a legend who detained every opposing nonland permanent with converted mana cost 4 or less when she entered the battlefield
• Teysa, Envoy of Ghosts - a resilient threat with protection from creatures and a punishing death trigger
• Dragonshift - a rare capable of turning your whole board into 4/4 blue Dragon creatures for a turn, enabling sudden alpha strikes

The format's reputation was mixed. The ten-guild spread made it feel unfocused to some drafters, and the shallow card pool in DGM itself (since it's a small third set) made consistent draft archetypes harder to identify than in RTR or GTC.

Notable cards and impact

Dragon's Maze was largely panned by Magic writers and professional players on release. Several elements that players had loved about the earlier sets in the block felt absent, and the overall power level was considered lower than expected.

That said, a handful of cards genuinely stood out as tournament-playable:

Notion Thief was the quiet surprise of the set. A Human Rogue at {2}{U}{B} with flash and a replacement effect that redirects any card draw by opponents to you instead is extremely oppressive in the right moment - particularly cast in response to a Sphinx's Revelation. It's an innocuous-looking card that can completely blow out a control player who thought they were safely refuelling.

Voice of Resurgence was the set's breakout competitive card. A two-mana Elemental that punishes instant-speed interaction and leaves behind a potentially enormous token when it dies, Voice was a genuine threat against control decks and saw substantial play in Standard and beyond. In my opinion, it's probably the set's most lasting contribution to competitive Magic.

Lore and setting

Dragon's Maze takes place on Ravnica, the city-plane that covers its entire world in an endless urban sprawl, governed - or at least nominally divided - by ten powerful guilds. The maze storyline was told in parallel through the Dragon's Maze: The Secretist, Part Three novella by Doug Beyer, released in May 2013.

The story's cast reads like a who's-who of Ravnica characters: Jace Beleren, Niv-Mizzet, Ral Zarek, Teysa Karlov, Lavinia, Lazav, Varolz, Exava, Tajic, Emmara Tandris, Mirko Vosk, Melek, Vorel, and Ruric Thar all appear. Each guild sends a champion to run the maze, and the story follows the chaos and political manoeuvring that ensues.

Lore aside: Niv-Mizzet, the ancient dragon parun of the Izzet League, is revealed to have designed the Implicit Maze himself - which should surprise exactly no one who knows Niv-Mizzet's character. The dragon is the kind of entity who considers a city-spanning puzzle spanning centuries of history a reasonable hobby project.

The Ravnica setting had already proven one of Magic's most beloved planes by this point, and the maze storyline gave players a reason to care about every guild simultaneously - even if the mechanical execution of that idea in the set itself was divisive.

Set legacy

Honestly, Dragon's Maze is remembered with some affection by Ravnica fans but a fair amount of disappointment by competitive players and drafters. It arrived with enormous hype - ten guilds, the culmination of a beloved block - and delivered a set that felt thin in places by comparison to its predecessors.

The lasting legacy lives primarily in a few specific cards. Voice of Resurgence in particular went on to see play across multiple formats and is one of the more genuinely powerful creatures from the era. Notion Thief found occasional homes in Legacy and Commander. The fuse mechanic, while not widely reprinted, remains a beloved and clever design that players remember fondly.

As the conclusion of the Return to Ravnica block, Dragon's Maze also set the stage for everything that followed in Ravnica's story - including the later Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance sets in 2018-19, which revisited many of the same guilds and characters with fresh eyes. If Dragon's Maze felt like an ending that left something on the table, Ravnica's subsequent returns suggested the city-plane itself had plenty more story to tell.