Whatever the case, when we think of ramp effects, we usually think of Green
The basic landcycling works early to fix your mana
Each box contains 1 ready-to-play Blue-Black deck of 100 Magic cards (2 traditional foil, 98 nonfoil), 1 foil-etched Display Commander (a thick cardstock copy of the commander card with textured foil etched into the cards border and art), 10 double-sided tokens, 1 deck box (can hold 100 sleeved cards), 1 life tracker, and 1 reference card.
By then, gaining life was acknowledged to be a pretty meh effect, and the notion of exchanging life for resources was really starting to take off
You would like to have a 7/7 flier in play, of course
Of course, this means you need a character on board that can initiate the challenge before Maid Marian gets value, but there are 11 4-cost characters that all have decent Strength values, so it isn't hard to get something down the previous turn that can take the Challenge