Magic: The Gathering - Duskmourn Review
Right on time for the spooky season comes Magic: The Gathering’s latest release, Duskmourn: House of Horror.
The house itself is the plane upon which this set takes place. Or rather, the plane is the house. The house is a sentient realm, but still a house. A BIG house, where even the woodlands and water-bodies are technically rooms within. It’s all very metaphysical.
Anyway, coming hot on the tail of the supremely cute and fuzzy Bloomburrow, Duskmourn is about the biggest tonal whiplash Magic has made in years from one set to the next. What it delivers is a cavalcade of tropes pulled mostly from the last 40 years of horror media. Demons, deadites, psycho-killers, paranormal investigators, monsters, messed-up toys, traps, haunted pieces of clothing, aliens, ghosts, gremlins, curses, infections, an unfortunate amount of spiders, and even a possessed goat. It’s a lot, and it’s glorious, (except for the spiders).
It’s another full-blown set featuring play and collector boosters, Commander decks, regular and premium bundles, as well as prerelease packs. The big new gimmick that it introduces is Room cards. These are split-card enchantments, each side of which represents a room in the house that can be unlocked and explored. The player chooses which side of the card to cast, (which door to unlock), and if they have one of the Commander decks, can cover-over the other side with a cute cardboard door token. The other room can be unlocked later should the player wish by paying its mana cost.
I love Room cards conceptually but my extremely casual play sensibilities rarely found them to be situationally more desirable to play than other cards in my hand at any given moment. There are cards featured in the series that specifically play off of them however, and Promising Stairs even provides an alternate path to victory should you wish to really focus on playing them which is cool.
The other wholly new mechanic Duskmourn introduces is rather fittingly, ‘Eerie’. It features on a relatively small number of cards in the set, and tends to cause an ability to trigger whenever the card’s owner plays an enchantment or fully unlocks a room. It’s cool, but infrequent.
Another gimmick the set features heavily is the ‘Manifest Dread’ keyword. Manifest isn’t new, but MD puts a subtle twist on it by having the player draw two cards from the top of their deck and choosing to manifest one of them, (placing them face-down as a 2/2 nameless and colourless creature), then graveyarding the other. As with regularly manifested creature cards, they can then be flipped over by paying their mana cost.
There’s two new creature types also, Toy and Glimmer. The former represents everything from your Chuckie-likes to things that look like Sid’s messed-up creations from the original Toy Story, while the latter are various forms of golden ghost. They’re both super neat and awesomely on-theme.
I was kindly sent the Jump Scare! Commander deck as well as a handful of play and collector boosters and have had a really wonderful time with them over the past couple of weeks. I don’t typically play green or blue decks, let alone a combo of both. Slow and steady just tends to unravel my ADHD-addled brain too badly. Zimone, Mystery Unraveler is a card I really enjoyed rocking with as a commander though. Her ability to continually pop Manifest Dread or flip over MD’d cards already in the field synergizes to delightfully chaotic effect with the large number of creatures in her deck that pop abilities themselves when such effects happen. With careful and lucky play you can domino-effect a whole bunch of cards at once whether she’s in the field or not, producing wildly varied outcomes that will keep your opponent on their toes. It’s really fun.
Included also with each Commander deck in the set is a new version of the Archenemy multiplayer mode from way back in the day. I’ve yet to play it but the oversized cards feature very good art and entertaining rules that are supposed to work as an extra layer to multiplayer Commander, so that’s nice.
Have any of Duskmourn‘s cards leapt out at me as must-haves for me, an extremely casual Magic player? Nah, but I still think it’s one of the cooler and better-executed sets we’ve had this year, and I’m not even a particularly massive horror buff. It’s left me eager to see where the setting is taken in the future, as well as keenly looking forward to the next spooky block of Magic with Innistrad Remastered landing in January.
Magic: The Gathering – Duskmourn was reviewed using products kindly provided by Wizards of the Coast.
