Did you know that Bloomburrow was supposed to be a world that was totally fine then some shit happened and now it has cuter things instead? Yeah, Duskmourn went through with that, so that it can becomes crueler. Which I probably like more. So now you gotta sell me something I know I want, easier because I do want it, but harder in my higher standards.
(Well I may digress to say that yes I want goth sets to see goth woman. There is one thankfully.)
How are the first impressions? So far, things are split into two sides. The villain side, the monsters the enchantments the world itself, great goth stuff, probably exactly why they want this to exist to begin with. And the human side, survivors, heroes, gang of planeswalkers from about 2 winter sets, doesn’t quite inspire the same. They have these sneakers, headphones, chainsaws, CRTs that just seems too close to reality for a “fantasy game”. Capenna may have gotten away because its trope was 100 years in the past, decently long enough, Kamigawa got away because its trope was futuristic enough and it was well designed. This one just doesn’t feel as necessary.
I think MaRo would have an absolute essay explaining why a human faction to be against the monsters is totally necessary, see Innistrad or Ikoria. But well, we’re talking about the word execution here. Totally could have been a new continent of Innistrad, whose villagers we know well fit in. (especially one) Or as I showerthought this rant, worst idea, have Bloomburrow visitors in. It doesn’t feel cruel anymore, especially when I force drafted rabbits so much.
Why can’t these be MDFCs? Well, for one, after that 2021-2022 run of 6/8 standard sets using them, yeah let’s pump the brakes. And also, so that you can have the effects of both sides at the same time, provided you can track which side you have somehow in real life. In a way, it’s quite a bit like Classes, except instead of 3 states of level 1, 2, 3, you get left door, right door and both doors, so still 3 states. But unlike those that borrowed from Sagas the really intuitive design, these feels a lot more claustrophobic.
It’s almost as if the frame originally made for magecrafts that’s mostly seen on the stack just doesn’t work well with permanents. Let’s break down everything wrong and feeling shoehorned with this frame:
Well, under the standards of cards with 2 halved they definitely feels shoehorned on. But consider some design lore, these things may have used their own deck and you can only activate one at a time with a moving pawn piece therefore it makes more sense to have more rooms on one card but turns out 3 or 4 rooms one card is way too much so down to 2. Maybe they don’t have that much time figuring the frame out, they playtested with the Eldraine role tokens frame after all. You know what maybe laying the two halves vertically would have been better to the eye, just take some slightly lore tweaking and the moth demon could give everyone both sides at least the mercy of verticality.
Continuing the good trend that Bloomburrow returned of not having too many multicolor mythics, we actually do better here. There’s only 2 left, that being 2 important heroes I presume. The rest is just 18 moncolored cards, 4 for each color and 3 for white and blue. I presume the white card got swapped for Niko and the blue for Kaito, adding the color to the right. I guess there’s trivia in the fact that both are 4 mana 3/4 creatures in one way or another, I would add the fact that they’re both Humans but Kaito is just a Ninja in your turn, this clause in his text box still has the space for it, come on. And well they also draw cards, guess why if you look at how blue their default arts are.
Which definitely left a lot of rooms for monocolor cycles. We have two this time in fact. One is a cyle of Rooms, one for each color. These have one cheaper 1 devotion side on the left, costing 2 mana (or in white’s case 2 or red’s case 4). And one more expensive 2 devotion side on the right, costing any amount from 5 to 8, which 6 being the most common, both Red and White have them. These are the most enchantmentsy of the bunch, with only 3 of the 10 halves being one time effects.
The other cycle are five overlords, giant 2 devotion creatures with the titan trigger (arrives or attacks) that you could pay a much cheaper cost for impending, basically a version of suspend since these titan triggers only activate once that way and has no static effect unless you can animate the enchantment or flicker it. Cutting the reminder text of this keyword reminds of older time, more elegant times. When these things don’t have to be two stage value engines, don’t have to be legendary (not like these can with that giant type line). More technical going, blue is the only one with flying, which make the text box a lot wonkier looking, admittedly looting +2-1 isn’t quite the strongest thing compared to creating a land token or just 4 damage. 5 mana is the most common cost, 6 has red and 7 has white. Impending ranks black lowest at 2, green and blue next at 3 and red and white most at 4. Subtracting the two costs, 2 mana for each of temur, 3 mana for each of orzhov. Statwise, black and red are both 5/5, green has 1 more power, blue has 2 less toughness because flying and white is the biggest at 6/6.
And whatever is left. Green and white gets the other 2 important heroes, the cool thing about them is that they don’t feel so fussed about value engines, they just provide things for allied creatures. Admittedly the way Wanderer have to have 3 keywords on separate lines is just silly, I get it the first 2 are cast keywords and the last a creature keyword, but if you combine them into 1 line you can surely have some flavor text. Everyone knows convoke through that Boros deck back in the gother days of Crimson Vow still in standard for that 1 mana 1/1 that create a blood token and ping for 1.
The other monocolored commander is Valgavoth, an Elder that leads me to a fun fact: If you consider the main set and commander set of Duskmourn together, there’ll be two Valgavoths coming together, which makes it the 4th time in a row there’s a set with two Elders coming together. It goes something like MOM having two elder dinosaurs, one completed and one teamed up, LCI having the dinosaur in the teamup and a new fungus that isn’t that elder if you remove it quickly enough, MH3 have a Theros titan and an Orzhov demon, and now Duskmourn has two Valgavoths. Before that Elders probably come in either 5 (LEG, DTK, M19, STX, CLB), 1 (DOM, MH2) and both (RIX) and the other time with 2 is THB, brought us Uro, haha broken 1GU card.