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Magic: The Gathering’s special Avatar expansion won’t hit the general market until later this week, yet due to prerelease weekends this past weekend, one cheap green card saw a sharp rise in value.

From the initial reveals, Badgermole Cub attracted widespread focus. A 2/2 that costs one green and one colorless mana, Badgermole Cub has level 1 earthbending (possibly the strongest of the four bending abilities in the set). Its key advantage with this card lies in its second ability: Each time you tap a creature for mana, you gain one extra green mana.

At its cheapest, this card sold for $26.98. Post-prerelease, yet, the going rate escalated to nearly $50 with at least one listed priced at sixty dollars. What explains such high costs for this cute lil guy? Mainly because of the rapid resource generation it provides.

Upon entering the board, this creature transforms a land into a creature that has earthbending. Combined with its other power, while it remains on the board, those lands produces twice the mana — in addition to mana-producing creatures in your control which tap for mana.

An ideal partner for synergy includes the classic Llanowar Elves, a cheap 1/1 that taps to generate one green mana. But there are plenty of other mana generation creatures available. This particular druid is a more expensive alternative that’s a 1/3 costing two mana instead.

Using land cards, dorks that generate resources, plus the cub, it's simple to summon a massive high-cost monster on the battlefield within a few turns. The situation escalates exponentially by maintaining dominance after that.

By incorporating an additional hue with this approach, options such as versatile mana producers are excellent picks that generate any color of mana. Another card, this powerful dryad lets you play another terrain each turn AND makes your entire land base into every basic land type. It's also worth trying such as the enchantment A Realm Reborn, which for six mana grants all of your permanents the power to produce a mana of any type — which covers any creature you have on the board.

The cub could be too strong regarding accelerating your resources, yet how do you win with this archetype? One obvious and popular answer has been Ashaya, Soul of the Wild. Its stats match your land count, and it makes all of your nontoken creatures to be Forests as well as their other types. Essentially, each creature you control may tap for two G by tapping.

Harmonious Grovestrider is a costly, large threat that benefits from lots of lands (as with the previous card, its stats are equal to how many lands you have).

This Planeswalker works perfectly as a go-to Planeswalker. Her passive ability causes every Forest generate an additional green mana. (If you have the cub, this results in each one produce triple green.) Her plus ability functions like a proto-earthbend, putting +1/+1 counters on a land, which is great though it doesn't stack with the cub's ability. Her ultimate, on the other hand, renders all of your lands indestructible enabling you to search for all the remaining forests from your library. Once you trigger this power, it almost certainly game over.

The cub is pretty much essential in any green Avatar deck built around Earthbending. By including red-green, there’s Bumi Unleashed. He has earthbend 4, and when he deals combat damage to a player, land creatures untap and can attack again. Even though Bumi has become a popular Commander choice, the cute little Badgermole Cub is definitely going to remain one of, if not the most desired card in the collaboration.