Peat Bog

Depletion lands sold a tempting lie: free mana that pays you back double. The math is brutal once you run it. The land enters tapped with two depletion counters, and each tap removes one, so it produces exactly twice before sacrificing itself: two activations for , four black mana spread across the early turns, from a permanent that vanishes when it is done. It is a ritual wearing a land's clothing, a way to front-load color into the opening turns while accepting that your manabase shrinks afterward. As the black member of a five-card depletion-counter cycle (one per color) from an early-era set that wanted every color to have a self-consuming acceleration land, it asks for permanent card-economy loss in exchange for a temporary mana spike. That trade reads worse than it plays in the rare deck built to spend the burst before it evaporates: storm-style engines, big single-turn payoffs, anything that would rather have four mana now than a stable land forever. The tapped entry is the toll: it costs you a turn of acceleration so the headline "double black" never arrives without delay. Later burst sources that want to do this, the Lotus-shaped accelerants and temporary-mana rituals, all wrestle with the same problem this land answered so cleanly: how to make a mana source pay its own bill and then leave the table.