Maze's End

The rare alternate win condition that the design actually expects you to assemble piece by piece, not stumble into. Most "you win the game" lines hide behind a single impossible trigger; this one lays the work out in plain sight: ten Gates, each with a different name, fetched one at a time by bouncing the card back to hand and paying three mana per cycle. That clock is the whole engine. Each activation costs you the land back to your hand, a tempo tax that turns the victory into a slow accumulation rather than a sudden combo, and it means the path is fully legible to the opponent the moment the second or third Gate hits the table. The colorless tap-for-one mana is almost an afterthought, a way to make the land not a complete dead draw while you stall toward the count. What makes the design hold together is that the Gate subtype was seeded across a full cycle of dual lands, so the cards you need to win double as your manabase: the deck plays Plaza, Guildgate, and the like as functional fixing first and assembly fodder second. It is one of the cleanest examples of a win condition built on top of an existing card pool rather than a standalone trick, asking the deckbuilder to commit a land slot and a slow grind toward an event the table can see coming from a mile away.