Guilds of Ravnica (GRN): Set Guide & Card List

Ravnica is Magic's most beloved city, and Guilds of Ravnica (GRN) marks the third time Wizards of the Coast has taken us back to its cobblestoned streets and guild-politics intrigue. Released in October 2018, GRN is a large expansion of 273 cards and the opening set of what's informally called the Guilds of Ravnica block - a trio of large sets released between October 2018 and May 2019.

If you've spent any time in Magic's community, you already know the guilds by reputation. The ten two-colour factions of Ravnica have become a kind of shorthand for player identity - "I'm an Izzet player" carries real meaning at the table. GRN spotlights five of those ten guilds, each with its own distinct ideology, mechanical identity, and flavour.

Themes and mechanics

The five featured guilds

GRN doesn't try to cram all ten guilds into one set. Instead it focuses on five, letting each one breathe with dedicated mechanical space and flavour:

| Guild | Colours | Identity | |---|---|---| | Selesnya | {G}{W} | Collectivist nature conclave | | Boros | {R}{W} | Military legion of law and justice | | Golgari | {B}{G} | Death-and-renewal swarm | | Izzet | {U}{R} | Chaotic league of mad scientists | | Dimir | {U}{B} | Shadow network of spies and assassins |

Each guild's mechanical identity is tightly married to its flavour. The Izzet love casting spells recklessly fast; the Golgari thrive on the graveyard as a resource; Dimir rewards patience and information asymmetry. Playing a guild in GRN draft feels like genuinely embodying that faction, which is one of the reasons this set is fondly remembered by Limited players.

Guild mechanics

GRN introduced and returned several mechanics, each tied to a specific guild:

• Convoke (Selesnya) - Tap your creatures to help pay a spell's mana cost. Creatures as currency, which fits perfectly for a guild that preaches unity and collective strength.
• Mentor (Boros) - When a creature with mentor attacks, put a +1/+1 counter on a smaller attacking creature. A military guild drilling its soldiers into a more powerful force.
• Undergrowth (Golgari) - Abilities that scale with the number of creature cards in your graveyard. Death is just fertiliser for the next wave.
• Jump-start (Izzet) - Cast an instant or sorcery from your graveyard by discarding a card in addition to paying its cost. Izzet wizards recycling their own experiments with characteristic recklessness.
• Surveil (Dimir) - Look at the top cards of your library and put any number into your graveyard, the rest back on top. Information control as a mechanic, exactly what you'd expect from a spy network.

Surveil in particular went on to have a lasting rules legacy. It was later added to the official evergreen keyword list, which tells you how cleanly it captured a concept the game had been approximating in other ways for years.

Limited and draft

GRN draft is widely considered one of the cleaner guild-draft formats in Magic's history, largely because the set is so disciplined about keeping its five guilds mechanically separate. There's very little reason to splash a third colour - each guild's rewards are so internal that you're almost always better off staying focused.

Draft archetypes

Each of the five guilds maps cleanly to a draft archetype:

• Selesnya ({G}{W}) - Wide token strategies that convoke out large threats earlier than opponents expect.
• Boros ({R}{W}) - Aggressive go-wide attacks buffed by mentor, aiming to close games before opponents stabilise.
• Golgari ({B}{G}) - Midrange value decks that fill the graveyard early and scale undergrowth effects into the late game.
• Izzet ({U}{R}) - Spell-heavy tempo decks that use jump-start to maintain card parity while disrupting the opponent.
• Dimir ({U}{B}) - Control and tempo builds that use surveil to set up their draws and find answers consistently.

The format rewards committing to a guild early, which makes early signal-reading in pack one unusually important. Because the guilds are so self-contained, a table of eight players splitting cleanly two per guild tends to produce well-functioning decks across the board.

Format speed sits comfortably in the midrange territory - Boros can apply early pressure, but the format isn't so fast that control strategies fold before they get going.

Lore and setting

Guilds of Ravnica returns us to Ravnica, the city-plane that is essentially one enormous metropolis stretching across the entire world. Ten guilds have governed its civil life since ancient times under a pact called the Guildpact - and the story threads running through GRN and its block sequels concern what happens when that pact is threatened from within.

Ravnica's ten guilds are among the most richly developed factions in all of Magic's lore. Each has its own internal hierarchy, history, and philosophy - the Selesnya's near-hive-mind collectivism sits in direct tension with Dimir's radical individualism, for instance, and those tensions are as much a part of the plane's texture as the architecture.

Lore aside: The guild names have become so embedded in Magic culture that players use them as identity shorthand far beyond Ravnica sets. Calling yourself an "Izzet player" communicates something real about your relationship to the game - spell-slinging, experimentation, a certain enjoyment of things going interestingly wrong - even in formats that have nothing to do with Ravnica.

Preconstructed products

GRN shipped with a range of preconstructed products that are worth knowing about if you're hunting down singles or sealed product.

Planeswalker decks

Two planeswalker decks were released alongside the set:

| Deck | Colours | Featured Planeswalker | |---|---|---| | Ral | {U}{R} | Ral, Caller of Storms | | Vraska | {B}{G} | Vraska, Regal Gorgon |

Guild Kits

Five Guild Kits were released - one per featured guild - each built around that guild's identity and containing cards from across Ravnica's history:

| Guild Kit | Colours | |---|---| | Selesnya | {W}{G} | | Boros | {W}{R} | | Golgari | {B}{G} | | Izzet | {U}{R} | | Dimir | {U}{B} |

The Guild Kits are a nice entry point for players who want to explore a guild's flavour without jumping straight into draft or constructed - they lean into the fantasy of picking a faction and playing it.

Set legacy

Guilds of Ravnica is remembered warmly for a few reasons. The draft format is often cited as one of the more elegant guild-draft environments - disciplined enough that each guild feels distinct, but not so rigid that the format becomes solved or stale.

Surveil's promotion to an evergreen keyword is perhaps the clearest marker of GRN's mechanical legacy. A mechanic introduced in this set proved useful and intuitive enough that Wizards decided it belonged in the game's permanent vocabulary.

More broadly, GRN reinforced just how powerful the guild identities are as a design framework. The idea that two colours can carry a whole philosophy - aesthetic, social, mechanical - has proven durable across three full returns to Ravnica, and the player culture around guild identity shows no sign of fading. Telling someone you're a Golgari player still communicates something real, and that's a kind of design success that's genuinely hard to achieve.