Golgari Depths Timeless Combo: Dark Depths and Marit Lage Strategy (January 2026)
Why “Depths” became a Timeless headline on MTG Arena
For years, Dark Depths has carried a very specific promise: if you can remove its ice counters—or otherwise get around them—you can turn a single land into Marit Lage, a legendary 20/20 black Avatar token with flying and indestructible. That’s an endgame compressed into one trigger, and it is exactly why the card’s arrival on MTG Arena’s Timeless format mattered immediately for competitive players looking for the next “must-answer” combo.
The key context is that Timeless was designed to be the Arena format where, in Wizards of the Coast’s own words, it is “a new Constructed format where all cards on MTG Arena are playable.” Timeless is also explicitly built around a restricted list rather than a traditional banlist, and it launched on December 12, 2023 alongside Khans of Tarkir on Arena. In other words, Timeless is meant to absorb powerful cards rather than exclude them—so when a famously explosive land combo becomes available on Arena, Timeless is the natural place it will be tested first and pushed hardest.
That pressure test arrived in late 2025. Wizards’ collecting guide for Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender lists Dark Depths as one of the set’s borderless “Source Material” reprints, and even notes that it can appear with an alternate flavor name: Dark Depths as “The Boy in the Iceberg.” The same guide also provides the release timeline: the full card image gallery was dated November 7, 2025, the MTG Arena release was November 18, 2025, and the tabletop release was November 21, 2025. Wizards’ Arena announcements likewise confirm the official Arena launch date: Tuesday, November 18, 2025.
With those dates, you can essentially mark the “starting gun” for Depths experimentation on Arena. From that point onward, the question wasn’t whether players would try to build around Dark Depths—it was which format would allow it, and what the best shell would look like.
Timeless vs. Historic: where Dark Depths is (and isn’t) allowed
One of the most important facts for any Arena player trying to build with Dark Depths is that Historic and Timeless diverged sharply right as Dark Depths entered the client.
In the November 10, 2025 banned-and-restricted update, Wizards pre-banned Dark Depths in Historic while explicitly stating “Timeless: No changes.” Wizards also gave a clear Historic rationale that speaks directly to how Depths decks function:
“The land tutors available in Historic make Dark Depths too consistent and noninteractive…”
(Wizards of the Coast, Banned and Restricted announcement, Nov. 10, 2025)
In that same explanation, Wizards pointed to Thespian’s Stage as a key enabler and flagged redundancy from tools like Crop Rotation, which would make the combo too consistent under Historic’s card pool. The practical implication is simple and concrete as of January 2026:
- If you want to play Dark Depths on Arena, Timeless is the primary competitive home, because Historic removed it at the door.
That also sets the stage for why “Golgari Depths” became a recognizable Timeless archetype name: it’s one of the cleanest ways to combine land tutoring and black disruption in a format designed to contain extreme power via restrictions rather than broad bans.
The combo, in plain terms: what Dark Depths actually does
The core combo is built around the literal text and rules behavior of Dark Depths.
Dark Depths enters the battlefield with ten ice counters. It has an activated ability to remove an ice counter for {3}, and once it has no ice counters, the card instructs you to sacrifice Dark Depths and then create Marit Lage—a legendary 20/20 black Avatar token with flying and indestructible.
That’s the engine. The “combo” part is about removing the counters far faster than spending 30 mana over many turns. In Timeless lists, two cards consistently show up as the main shortcuts:
- Thespian’s Stage
- Vampire Hexmage
And the reason they work is grounded in rules behavior that Wizards has spelled out in official release notes.
Why Thespian’s Stage is the cleanest “shortcut” to Marit Lage
If you’ve ever watched a Depths deck function in older Magic formats, the Thespian’s Stage interaction is usually the first thing you learn. Arena Timeless follows the same logic because it’s grounded in the same rules.
Wizards release notes for Thespian’s Stage include a crucial sentence:
- Counters and other effects aren’t copied.
- And importantly, because Thespian’s Stage is already on the battlefield when it becomes a copy, “this land enters with” effects (like Dark Depths entering with counters) won’t apply.
That matters because Dark Depths is designed to begin life with ten ice counters, and the Stage copy sidesteps that “default state.” In practical terms:
- When Thespian’s Stage becomes a copy of Dark Depths, it becomes a Dark Depths without the ice counters it would normally enter with.
- A Dark Depths with no ice counters is exactly the condition that leads to the sacrifice-and-token creation clause.
- That sequence sets up the creation of Marit Lage, the 20/20 flying, indestructible token.
This interaction is not a “trick” so much as a direct consequence of the official rules guidance Wizards publishes for copy effects and counters. That is why Stage is a four-of in many publicly posted Timeless Depths lists.
Why Vampire Hexmage is the other core enabler
The second major shortcut is Vampire Hexmage, whose activated ability is plain and brutal:
- “Sacrifice this creature: Remove all counters from target permanent.”
Dark Depths’ entire “safety valve” is its counters. Hexmage ignores the incremental cost and simply strips the land clean in one action. Once the counters are gone, Dark Depths reaches its “no ice counters” state and proceeds to the Marit Lage creation sequence.
In practice, this turns the deck into a compact combo strategy: rather than gradually paying to remove counters, you assemble Dark Depths + Hexmage or Dark Depths + Thespian’s Stage, and the payoff is immediate.
Why Golgari (black-green) is the natural Timeless shell
There are several ways to package the Depths plan, but the late-2025 Timeless examples that got posted publicly show why black-green (Golgari) is a natural fit: the colors cleanly support both halves of the deck’s needs.
- Black provides early interaction, especially hand disruption. Published Depths lists include Thoughtseize as a four-of, giving a concrete example of how the archetype tries to proactively clear the way for the combo.
- Green provides land access and tutoring tools—especially Crop Rotation, which appears as a multi-copy staple in posted Timeless Depths builds. Notably, Wizards explicitly referenced Crop Rotation when explaining why Dark Depths was too consistent in Historic.
So the “Golgari” identity isn’t just an aesthetic label. It reflects a very direct division of labor:
- Green finds and assembles the land pieces.
- Black disrupts the opponent so the token can actually stick.
What real Timeless lists looked like right after Depths hit Arena
Because Dark Depths arrived on Arena in November 2025, one of the most useful ways to discuss “Golgari Depths” as a January 2026 topic is to anchor it in actual published decklists from the period when players were iterating quickly.
Two examples from MTGDecks (a decklist archive) illustrate the common core.
Example A: “Turbo Depths” (Timeless), dated Nov. 21, 2025
A posted “Turbo Depths” list dated November 21, 2025 includes the expected backbone:
- 4 Dark Depths
- 4 Thespian’s Stage
- 4 Vampire Hexmage
- 4 Crop Rotation
- 4 Thoughtseize
- 3 Once Upon a Time
- 1 Demonic Tutor (notable because Timeless uses a restricted list; Demonic Tutor is one of the format’s restricted cards as referenced in Wizards’ Arena Championship 10 materials)
- And also 4 Strip Mine, plus utility lands such as Boseiju, Who Endures (1) and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth (3)
Even without speculating about “the best build,” the counts themselves show a clear factual pattern: heavy redundancy on the combo pieces, plus disruption and powerful land interaction.
Example B: “Golgari” (Timeless), dated Dec. 13, 2025
A second posted list labeled “Golgari,” dated December 13, 2025, shows a similar core package:
- 4 Dark Depths
- 4 Thespian’s Stage
- 4 Vampire Hexmage
- 3 Crop Rotation
- Additional finders like 2 Sylvan Scrying
- And a restricted-style tutor package example with 2 Green Sun’s Zenith
- Disruption includes 4 Thoughtseize and 1 Duress
- Land interaction includes 4 Strip Mine
- The creature and planeswalker suite notably includes 4 Deathrite Shaman, 4 Wary Zone Guard, and 3 Grist, the Hunger Tide
- Sideboard tools include Surgical Extraction, Abrupt Decay, and Sheoldred’s Edict
The point of citing these lists isn’t to crown a definitive “best” version. It’s to establish what the archetype looked like in the weeks immediately following Dark Depths’ Arena release: heavy combo density, proactive disruption, and a serious commitment to land-based interaction.
The metagame reality check: Golgari Depths shows up, but it wasn’t dominant in December 2025
A common trap with famous combos is to assume they automatically take over. For Timeless Depths in late 2025, Wizards’ own tournament snapshot provides a grounded, numeric reality check.
Wizards published an Arena Championship 10 Timeless metagame breakdown by Frank Karsten for the event held December 20–21, 2025. The details are specific:
- 110 competitors
- Best-of-Three Timeless
- $250,000 prize pool
- Broadcast start time: 9 a.m. PT each day
In the deck-by-deck metagame table, “Golgari Depths” appears as 1 deck, which is 0.9% of the submitted field. That is a concrete measure of presence: the archetype was real enough to register, but it was not a defining portion of that elite tournament’s field.
For comparison, the same breakdown shows much larger shares for top archetypes:
- Mardu Energy: 34 players (30.9%)
- Mono-Black Necro: 13 (11.8%)
- Mono-Red Prison: 13 (11.8%)
Those numbers matter for framing. As of late December 2025, in a top-level Timeless event, Golgari Depths was part of the metagame conversation—but clearly not the central pillar of it by raw adoption.
The “Strip Mine format” factor: why land combos face unique pressure in Timeless
Even more than the archetype share, Arena Championship 10 coverage highlights a structural fact about Timeless that any Depths player has to respect.
Frank Karsten’s breakdown states that Strip Mine was the most played card across all submitted main decks and sideboards. He also explains why that is especially notable: Timeless is “one of the few formats” where Strip Mine can be played as a four-of.
For a strategy built on assembling and protecting specific lands—Dark Depths and Thespian’s Stage—that environment is not a footnote. It’s a defining constraint. Whether you are attacking with land synergies or defending your combo, Timeless is a place where many opponents (and many decks) are structurally equipped to interact with lands at high frequency.
This is also reflected in the posted Depths lists themselves, which include 4 Strip Mine in both example builds. Factually, that shows Depths pilots weren’t only trying to “goldfish” their combo—they were also preparing to fight over lands in a format where Strip Mine is pervasive.
How Dark Depths was distributed (and why the Avatar tie-in matters)
Because Dark Depths entered Arena through the Avatar: The Last Airbender crossover product, Wizards also provided unusually concrete information about how players might encounter the card in boosters—useful context when explaining why the card suddenly became a talking point.
In the collecting guide, Wizards explains insertion rates for the “Source Material” reprints (the category that includes Dark Depths):
- A non-foil source material card appears in 1 of every 26 Play Boosters
- A non-foil or traditional foil source material card appears in every Collector Booster
Wizards also published MSRPs across multiple product types, including:
- Play Booster: $6.99
- Collector Booster: $37.99
- Bundle: $69.99
- Commander’s Bundle: $109.99
- (along with Jumpstart boosters, scene boxes, and a beginner box)
Those pricing and distribution facts are not directly about Timeless gameplay, but they are directly relevant to the “why now?” of the archetype. Dark Depths didn’t drift quietly onto Arena; it arrived as part of a heavily marketed, date-specific release with identifiable product channels and published price points.
Timeless as the long-term home for extreme strategies (and where Depths fits)
Finally, it helps to connect the Depths story back to Timeless’ founding identity. Wizards introduced Timeless as a format where all cards on MTG Arena are playable, governed by restrictions rather than sweeping bans. That philosophy is visible in top-level coverage, where Wizards explicitly references Timeless restricted cards such as Channel, Demonic Tutor, and Tibalt’s Trickery in the Arena Championship 10 metagame materials.
In that kind of ecosystem, a deck like Golgari Depths makes sense as an ongoing option:
- It leverages an iconic, high-ceiling combo (Dark Depths → Marit Lage).
- It uses enabling interactions supported by clear rules guidance (Thespian’s Stage copy rules; Vampire Hexmage removing counters).
- And it exists inside a metagame that, at least in December 2025 data, was heavily shaped by other pillars (like Mardu Energy) and by a ubiquitous land-interaction tool (Strip Mine).
As of January 2026, that combination of factors explains why Golgari Depths is simultaneously compelling and constrained in Timeless: it is one of the format’s sharpest “build-around” payoffs, but it must operate in a landscape where opponents are unusually equipped to fight over lands—and where tournament adoption, at least in the Arena Championship 10 snapshot, remained modest at 0.9% of the field.
Sources (official and decklist archives)
- Wizards: Introducing Timeless, a New MTG Arena Format (Dec. 4, 2023)
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/introducing-timeless-a-new-mtg-arena-format
- Wizards: Collecting Avatar: The Last Airbender (Oct. 28, 2025)
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/collecting-avatar-the-last-airbender
- Wizards: MTG Arena Announcements — November 17, 2025
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/announcements-november-17-2025
- Wizards: Banned and Restricted — November 10, 2025
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/banned-and-restricted-november-10-2025
- Wizards / Magic.gg: Arena Championship 10 Timeless Metagame Breakdown (Dec. 19, 2025; Frank Karsten)
https://magic.gg/news/arena-championship-10-timeless-metagame-breakdown
- MTGDecks: Turbo Depths (Timeless list dated Nov. 21, 2025)
https://mtgdecks.net/Timeless/turbo-depths-decklist-by-justinvamp15-2703953
- MTGDecks: Golgari (Timeless list dated Dec. 13, 2025)
https://mtgdecks.net/Timeless/golgari-decklist-by-steamgunner-2735568
If you want the next step, I can reshape this into a more “how to play it” strategic guide without adding new claims—for example, by describing only the lines that are directly evidenced by the card texts, Wizards rules notes, and the exact counts shown in the published lists.