Braidwood Cup MTG Card

Mana cost
Converted mana cost	3
Rarity	Uncommon
Type	Artifact
Released	1999-06-07
Set symbol
Set name	Urza's Destiny
Set code	UDS
Number	126
Frame	1997
Layout	Normal
Border	Black
Illustred by	Greg Hildebrandt & Tim Hildebrandt

Key Takeaways

The Braidwood Cup offers steady card draw, enhancing strategic options and maintaining game pressure.
Its instant-speed activation allows for flexible, tactical gameplay, optimizing your turns.
Despite discard requirements, Braidwood Cup’s life gain can be potent in long matches.

Text of card

oc T: You gain 1 life.

"I think it no accident that every civilized people has discovered the art of distillation." —Rofellos of Llanowar

Card Pros

Card Advantage: The Braidwood Cup ensures steady card draw, empowering players to keep their hands filled with options and maintains pressure on the opponent.

Resource Acceleration: This artifact excels at ramping up your mana resources, increasing your ability to cast more impactful spells earlier in the match.

Instant Speed: Its capability to be activated at instant speed provides flexibility, allowing strategic players to optimize their turns and react to opponents’ moves.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: The Braidwood Cup’s activation calls for you to discard a card, which can deplete your hand and be detrimental if you’re already dealing with limited card options.

Specific Mana Cost: This artifact requires green mana to both cast and utilize its ability, potentially restricting its integration into multi-colored or colorless decks that may not prioritize green mana sources.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: While Braidwood Cup’s life gain ability can be beneficial, the four mana needed to bring it into play is significant, especially when other cards may provide a more cost-effective method for achieving similar results.

Reasons to Include Braidwood Cup in Your Collection

Versatility: Braidwood Cup offers an advantage in a variety of deck builds by providing consistent life gain every turn. Its simple yet effective ability can be a game-changer in long drawn-out matches.

Combo Potential: This card synergizes well with strategies that capitalize on life gain. It can serve as a key piece in triggering effects that require you to gain life or in decks that reward you for having a higher life total.

Meta-Relevance: In a gameplay environment where aggressive strategies are common, Braidwood Cup becomes especially significant. It helps stabilize your health against fast-paced decks and shores up your defenses while you set up your winning condition.

How to beat

The Braidwood Cup is an artifact card that often slips under the radar in Magic: The Gathering, but its capacity to provide incremental life gains can be deceptively impactful over the course of a game. Tackling a seemingly innocuous artifact such as Braidwood Cup requires a strategy that not only mitigates its life gain but also focuses on applying consistent pressure on the opponent.

One effective method is to employ artifact removal spells or abilities, which are common across colors like green and red. Naturalize and Shatter are classic examples that can dispatch Braidwood Cup at a low cost. Keeping such answers in hand until the Cup becomes a significant threat can be a smart play. Additionally, focusing on aggressive strategies that overwhelm the opponent can render the life gain from Braidwood Cup negligible. Cards that deal direct damage or have the potential for explosive turns can outpace the gradual life padding the Cup provides.

In essence, when confronting the Braidwood Cup, players should aim to neutralize its life gain early or simply race past it with a strategy that edges out its slow value over time, ensuring its impact on the game remains minimal.

Cards like Braidwood Cup

Braidwood Cup holds its own within Magic: The Gathering artifacts designed to bolster life gain. Echoing the abilities of cards like Pristine Talisman, it provides a consistent method to pad a player’s life total. Pristine Talisman allows one to gain life while simultaneously adding mana to their pool, but without the need to sacrifice the artifact itself.

Alabaster Potion is another card in the family of life gain. This instant not only offers life points but also has the versatility to target any player, allowing life gain as a political tool in multi-player formats. It lacks the permanence of Braidwood Cup but trades it for immediate impact.

Lastly, we have Elixir of Immortality, an artifact that offers life gain and the added bonus of reshuffling your graveyard into your library. While Braidwood Cup offers life gain every turn as a static ability as long as you retain creature control, Elixir’s effect is a one-time usage that demands mana investment for its activation. These different dynamics give players various strategic options for managing life totals during the demanding trials of gameplay.

Elixir of Immortality - MTG Card versions

Cards similar to Braidwood Cup by color, type and mana cost

Scale of Chiss-Goria - MTG Card versions

Sword of Feast and Famine - MTG Card versions

Where to buy

If you're looking to purchase Braidwood Cup MTG card by a specific set like Urza's Destiny, there are several reliable options to consider. One of the primary sources is your local game store, where you can often find booster packs, individual cards, and preconstructed decks from current and some past sets. They often offer the added benefit of a community where you can trade with other players.

For a broader inventory, particularly of older sets, online marketplaces like TCGPlayer, Card Kingdom and Card Market offer extensive selections and allow you to search for cards from specific sets. Larger e-commerce platforms like eBay and Amazon also have listings from various sellers, which can be a good place to look for sealed product and rare finds.

Additionally, Magic’s official site often has a store locator and retailer lists for finding Wizards of the Coast licensed products. Remember to check for authenticity and the condition of the cards when purchasing, especially from individual sellers on larger marketplaces.

Below is a list of some store websites where you can buy the Braidwood Cup and other MTG cards: