Treva's Ruins

The toll is paid up front: play this Lair, then put one of your existing lands back in hand or watch the new arrival sacrifice itself. The returned land waits there, costing a replay and a turn of tempo, while the Lair stays behind to tap for any of green, white, or blue. That bounce is the price for entering untapped: these are not ramp pieces but color-fixing for the allied-color shard decks the Primeval Dragon legends headlined, with Treva, the Renewer presiding over the Bant grouping. When this kind of triple-fixing land first appeared, the cleaner templates that later defined the category had not been worked out, and the Lairs are an early, rougher attempt at putting three colors on a single source. The sacrifice clause keeps the design honest: with nothing eligible to send home, the Lair simply dies rather than handing you free fixing, which also means it can never be your opening play. Later tri-lands answered the same problem by entering tapped instead, a smoother trade that has aged better and made the bounce look like a relic of an older design vocabulary. What survives is the narrow window the Lair was built for: a deck running enough lands that giving one back, and replaying it, barely registers against the fixing gained.