Allegedly these things were in Arena’s code back in the ancient days, then they argued that those old code don’t work anymore so remaking these cards take effort. Which is apparently why it took so long for these sets to finally come. So long, as in when they finally need to bring back meld for Brothers War. Also, this is probably the end of those two set blocks remastered because BFZ seems too much like a design mistake so who is proud of that to bring it back, outside of MH3?

Shadows over Innistrad in a nutshell

It reeks of Gatewatch era sanitization where all the things people really belove about original Innistrad doesn’t feel as present as they should have been, and now instead we need to dedicate the place to these Gatewatch members to do their totally heroic act against the Eldrazi again. Here’s the mechanical breakdown of these two sets:

• Investigate: The dawn of the artifact tokens we have so much of nowadays was here, as a way to “draw half a card”.
• Delirium: A weird version of threshold that certainly succeeds at making you looking at Magic decks in a weird way to feature all the types in your deck, as opposed to nowadays you can just cram dual typed artifact or enchantment creatures in your decks to easily discard toward delirium.
• Madness: The weirdest of Odyssey block’s trio of mechanics as in it puts value to discarding cards, obviously in a more rational manners than some of Odyssey block’s actual doings. It certainly works now.
• Escalate: A new version of entwine for spells with more modes, this one definitely makes sense to exist, just that you do wonder whether Innistrad is the best home for prowess gameplay. Oh well, there’s the red creature that untaps upon magecraft, so that sticks.
• Emerge: Another kicker variant, this time to solution to make colored Eldrazi without the horrible mistake that is devoid. This one tries to emulate how eldrazis came to be as mutated normal beings, and well given how the original being in case of this mechanic just dies, I’m not too sure. But well the alternative is mutate, that works.
• Meld: The logical next step from TDFCs, I think that describes meld both quickly and adequately.
• Transforming DFCs: The one thing from original Innistrad that actually stuck to this one. Is that too few?

Main set

The two original sets were oversized compared to how they normally would have been to add the DFCs in. And for that, this set is also relatively bigger.

Mythics

Each monocolor gets three cards, except green has one actually green card, then one Golgari commander, and lastly one Eldrazi that emerges with green. Characters wise, each color get one commander or planeswalker except the red one got turned into white? Now I remember that Avacyn transforms into a red card, hence why she got killed. So that’s even less color balance than I remembered. Each non-blue color then get a sorcery, black and red get two creatures each, you can see a whole Kaalia kindred trio here along with the lone zombie, green has the aforementioned Eldrazi and lastly blue has the only enchantment.

Onto multicolored, each allied pair except Azorius get one character, and the two non-Golgari enemy pairs got two feuding planeswalkers. Which leaves Tamiyo as the sole tricolor card of the block I think I remember, does she fit in Azorius or Simic? So that leaves Izzet guaranteed to be vacant.

Oh right there’s also the 13 mana Emrakul that could mindslaves, that works on Arena right?

It should also be known that this Innistrad set got rid of the sun and crescent moon and moon and Eldrazi symbols to indicate DFC sides and instead go for the standardized triangles. Which the mythic slot has 4, which yeah that would leave the SFCs at 19 which is the weirdest number I’ve seen.

Rares

Each monocolor gets 10 cards except blue and red gets 11 through the weirdest means. Blue get it from one Eldrazi that emerges, Red gets it from the land to meld with some people. By that logic, we should count black as just 9 card plus the Eldrazi too. And also to remind you this is not current day Magic, the only color with commanders at all is mono white, at three whole, two women and one man.

The dual colored cycle sees the two missing color pairs being Orzhov and Boros, oh right maybe Sorin and Nahiri could have filled in these. In the colorless section, most important to note is one DFC land that turns black, so that’s Simic finally left in the dust. Speaking about DFCs, the rare slot sees just 9 of them, which leaves 57 SFCs, so just for those the 1:7 mythic pull rate does work but for the DFCs it’s slightly better. In which, blue and red got two cards each, the Abzan colors got just as much as Gruul and colorless, so one each.

Uncommons