Technically, Confluence costs five mana, but if it grabs three untapped lands, we make three of that mana back immediately, which essentially makes it cost just two mana to ramp three times! Spelunking is doubly absurd with Cosmium Confluence since the lands it tutors up will come into play untapped. That by itself would make Spelunking an easy inclusion in Caves, but it gets even better. Since most Caves enter the battlefield tapped, Spelunking negates this downside while also ramping us, drawing us a card, and gaining us some life. Later, Cosmium Confluence becomes our primary finisher by growing a Cave into a massive threat with +1/+1 counters, with the help of a couple of other cards. In general, for the first copy or two we cast, we choose the first mode-tutoring up a Cave-three times to develop our mana and get all of our Cavernous Maws on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Cosmium Confluence is probably the strongest card in our entire deck. In all honesty, Glimpse the Core usually tutors up one of our basic Forests, but in the late game, it is a good way to get back one of the discover Caves we sacrificed or maybe a Cavernous Maw that died in combat. Our final two Cave payoffs are ramp spells in Glimpse the Core and Cosmium Confluence. While it does die to removal and typically doesn't finish the game, it is a great blocker against aggro, and the lifegain it offers can help us stay alive long enough to get our powerful late game online. It often costs just a single mana in the mid-game once we have a bunch of Caves on the battlefield, which is a great deal for a 5/5 lifelink. While I'm not sure it really counts as a full Cave payoff since I've never actually won a game with it, we also have a playset of Gargantuan Leech. Meanwhile, Bat Colony is essentially Cave Spectral Procession, giving us three 1/1 fliers for three mana with the bonus of growing our creatures as Caves enter the battlefield, which makes it the perfect way to stabilize the board early by making some chump blockers and a fine way to close out the game later by growing our Bats into big, evasive beaters. Calamitous Cave-In is a super-sweeper, killing all the planeswalkers and creatures on the battlefield for just four mana, assuming we have a bunch of Caves in play. Thankfully, much like Gates, Caves have some really solid payoffs that reward us for filling our deck with Cave lands. While having a solid budget mana base is nice, that's not really enough to make a successful deck. This includes a bunch of the common discover lands, Forgotten Monument to turn all of our Caves into City of Brasses to give us perfect mana, Cavernous Maw as a creatureland to finish the game, and Sunken Citadel to speed things up by giving us extra mana to activate Maw and the discover lands. Apart from a few basic Forests for ramping purposes with Glimpse the Core, every single land in our deck today is a Cave. Our deck today is all about our lands: Caves! While almost all random commons and uncommons (with Sunken Citadel being the one exception), Caves are actually pretty strong, especially in a deck built to harness their power.
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