Read this article in full, then send it to five friends or you’ll be haunted in seven days. 👻
Welcome to Duskmourn where the entire dimensional plane is actually a house of horrors and every room is just another manifestation of your deepest fears.
This might be the first time in Magic’s history that a standard set has introduced concepts from our modern Earth into the planeswalker multiverse with CRT televisions and garden variety chainsaws featuring in the art.
The set is a comprehensive grab bag of horror tropes where you can equip a cheerleader with a baseball bat to facedown your opponent’s creepy clown, it might just be the biggest pop culture mash up Magic has done so far.
Some of the art in Duskmourn is just down right creepy with many cards featuring mal-formed creatures in reality defying shapes.
Other cards play into horror tropes of clowns and axe murderers with deranged expressions and toothy smiles.
Overall the art quality is on the upper side compared with some recent sets, it’s super evocative but perhaps a bit of a disappointment for the players not enamoured by the overwhelming number of pop culture references.
Many of the cards play on commonly held fears, the fear of falling, fear of lost teeth, fear of surveillance, and of course the classic fear of the dark.
There’s even a FOMO card which is particularly self referential for Magic seeing as this forms a core part of Wizards of the Coasts marketing strategy.
As usual the designers at Wizard’s of the Coast really do a good job in linking mechanics and theme.
The premier mechanic is actually a new subtype for enchantments that comes with some multi modal rules.
Room cards can be played for either side initially and once in play the second room can be unlocked provided you pay it’s mana cost.
Modal cards bring more choice and strategy to the game in their two for one value while usually remaining balanced in their more expensive casting costs.
Another new mechanic is Eerie which synergises with room cards to boost creatures or trigger effects whenever you play enchantments and unlock rooms.
Enchantment synergy commanders will be keenly assessing the eerie cards for inclusion in their decks.
Enchantment cards are not easily removed by all colours in Magic so they can be particularly sticky on the battlefield.
There’s also the manifest dread mechanic that is just a straight up improvement to an older mechanic called Manifest.
Where Manifest had you flipping the top card of your library, dread lets you choose from among the top two cards offering a greater chance to manifest a creature.
The card you don’t choose to manifest goes to your graveyard which should give your opponent an actual sense of dread as they try and guess what creature you might have just put down.
What would a horror themed set be without an ode to its defining trope?
Survivor triggers at the beginning of your second main phase (there are two main phases where you can play spells, before combat and after combat) assuming your creature is actually surviving the preceding combat phase, not many do in a meta with ample and cheap removal spells however.
How about some impending doom? This new mechanic lets you cast hugely powerful creatures for cheap mana so long as you’re happy with them lurking in the shadows for a number of turns.
I’m not sure these cards are up to scratch in the current standard meta. The aggressive decks will likely end you before your dreams come to fruition.
Playing this 6/5 for 3 mana on turn 3 is probably the last card you’ll cast as your opponent untaps with their Bloomburrow mouse dealing 20 damage to your face.
Found exclusively in collector boosters there are some seriously cool textured and fractured foils to collect in Duskmourn.
I believe this might be the first time Wizards has experimented with these new kind of foils in a standard set.
It can be hard to show on camera but some of the foils have a raised embossed effect which you can feel if you run your finger over them.
There are also random cards with alternate art treatments in Japanese language to be found in collector boosters, I pulled one that had a shiny foil treatment to boot.
Archenemy is a casual multiplayer format similar to commander where multiple players gang up on a single player who has double the life total and access to special cards that give them a leg up.
Archenemy was originally released in 2010 and has received little to no attention from Wizards of the Coast since then, so for Archenemy fans Duskmourn represents a pretty exciting release.
Duskmourn commander decks come with 10 oversized scheme cards all flavoured around the machinations of horror supervillians.
With Duskmourn taking Magic to peak pop culture fever, rest assured that Magic’s next set will be a welcome return to form with the release of Foundations in November.
Duskmourn is available now at your local friendly game store with all the typical products you expect, commander decks, booster packs and of course television shaped bundles.
