Magic’s newest expansion takes us to the newly introduced plane of Duskmourn, a plane comprised entirely of a living haunted mansion that thrives on the fear of its denizens. A new set means new cards, and we’re kicking off our review with the multicolor cards that serve as signposts to let you know what direction each color pair is trying to build in.
Duskmourn will release to Magic the Gathering Online on September 24, 2024, and to the tabletop on September 27.
Last time we covered the mechanics, and this time as usual we won’t be looking at everything, but what we will be looking at, we’ll be looking at primarily but not exclusively with an eye for Commander play.
Multicolor Cards
Gremlin Tamer
FromTheShire: This is a fine effect but I’m not sure where it slots in right away. I guess in some kind of a bogles style deck where you’re sticking Auras on your creatures while this gives you extra fodder? Free tokens aren’t something you turn down but you want them to have a purpose beyond just being random 1/1’s. It does let you know what your colors want to be doing in draft well at least.
BPhillipYork: That’s an okay ETB trigger, though usually singleton decks that care about enchantments really just want more enchantments. So the big play with this would be using the creatures as fuel for something, sacrifices or maybe a deck built around Impact Tremors and or maybe aristocrats (or both).
Inquisitive Glimmer
FromTheShire: The unlock cost reduction is kind of whatever, you’re here for the enchantment cost reduction, which is very good. Between that and all of the card draw enchantress decks have you’ll be flooding the board in no time.
BPhillipYork: Enchantment cost reduction on an enchantment is pretty solid; it’s nice that it cheapens both sides of a Room, and plays well with the Room commander.
Niko, Light of Hope
FromTheShire: A callback to Niko Aris from Kaldheim, this is an interesting twist on blink shenanigans. Do you lean into populating and doubling tokens and creatures that do things when they attack or when they deal combat damage, or do you stay with more traditional flicker targets with the small upside of your shards becoming them until the end of the turn?
BPhillipYork: This is a fairly useful single trick. Creating your own exit and enter triggers on something is fairly cool, and turning your shards into copies of that has a lot of potential.
Restricted Office / Lecture Hall
FromTheShire: A conditional board wipe that hits most of the things you want to kill and then later can protect your team? Not bad. I would absolutely run this in heavy enchantment based decks. It’s quite expensive to unlock the second room though, you have to really be protecting your team from something bad for it to be worth it.
BPhillipYork: Nice. An enchantment conditional Wrath of God is uh, something else. You could potentially flicker this to just keep generating board clear. Hexproof is also pretty solid, though for 7 mana you could generally do better. Mass hexproof is usually more a green and white thing, so to see it bleeding into blue could be pretty useful.
Kaito, Bane of Nightmares
FromTheShire: A planeswalker with ninjutsu is pretty cool. It’s a shame you can’t get the emblem right away in combat, but the fact you can start stacking them directly after is solid. The selection and card draw combo is very nice as well, especially if you’re manipulating your graveyard which you definitely are because you’re in Dimir.
BPhillipYork: A planeswalker ninja is interesting. Ninjaing him out and insta-embleming is also interesting, it’s really too bad you can’t use planeswalkers during the combat step because ninjitsu him out, emblem, then ninjitsu a different ninja out would be very ninja.
Nashi, Searcher in the Dark
FromTheShire: See what I mean? In Dimir you take that whole ‘graveyard as a second hand’ thing pretty seriously. The counter growth is too slow for Commander so you’re going to want to lean into some classic Voltron pieces – might I suggest a bunch of Auras that just so happen to be enchantments you can return? Do note that this is not a may ability, so don’t accidentally hit one player for 80 and mill yourself out unless they’re the last one standing.
BPhillipYork: This seems fine for mill decks, it’s a growing threat with evasion that will mill most turns and can return your legendaries and enchantments, thankfully it’s optional to return them.
Skullsnap Nuisance
FromTheShire: Nice signpost card, blocks well until you can get your enchantment train rolling and then offers you a whole bunch of card selection.
BPhillipYork: Surveiling through your deck to get a win condition is very solid. There’s ways to generate enchantment entering loops, such as the classic Leonin Relic-Warder.
Undead Sprinter
FromTheShire: Very nice that this doesn’t somehow end up with finality counters, you can keep this sucker coming back over and over. For Commander it’s great repeatable sacrifice fodder.
BPhillipYork: Another Zombie you can cast from your yard is pretty nice to have. Red black instead of black. Really useful combo piece, and also just generally useful for Zombies R Us decks that revolve around Zombies coming back over and over.
Peer Past the Veil
FromTheShire: If you’re leaning into a self mill/ delirium game plan, this can draw you a whole lot of cards out of nowhere. Great piece for Disa the Restless decks.
BPhillipYork: 4 mana is a lot to effectively wheel yourself, though it’s at instant speed. Really solid if you can consistently get 5 or 6 card types into your yard. Black is the easiest mill color but red often has card selection mechanics that dump to the yard, and green has an increasing amount of mill itself.
Rip, Spawn Hunter
FromTheShire: Kind of an odd one, this doesn’t feel like it does enough fast enough to be more than a piece in the 99. You’re either investing resources into tapping this without being in combat, or getting it to survive combat to potentially draw a couple of extra cards, when there are already straight up better ways to just definitely draw those cards.
BPhillipYork: I don’t… wtf is that art. How is that a Magic card? Does he have some kind of lightning camera? The art direction of this set really bothers me. Hunting for vehicles or creatures is kind of meh for 4 mana and it has to be tapped.
Rite of the Moth
FromTheShire: I’m curious to see if this does something neat in Standard, in Commander you have much more efficient ways to reanimate creatures in black.
BPhillipYork: This is an alright reusable creature animation, but really outperformed by already extant cards like Dance of the Dead or Reanimate, 4 and 6 mana is just a lot to get 1 creature back 1 time.
Victor, Valgavoth’s Seneschal
FromTheShire: This is potentially super powerful if you can actually make it to the third trigger reliably. I think more often you will do some graveyard filling and potential snipe the occasional card out of your opponents’ hands. I can see it being really annoying in 60 card though.
BPhillipYork: So this is uh, super solid. You could definitely build a loop around this that does something really abusive, with creatures getting reanimated over and over then sacrificing and renimating. Also a decently solid commander, dumping to the yard until you are ready to pull off your win con, or else just as a value proposition.
Intruding Soulrager
FromTheShire: Seems like you want to be getting rid of rooms you’ve either already fully unlocked that do anything else, or planning to cast one half cheaply and then turn it into damage and cards to try and push damage through. Seems narrow even for Standard but I could well be wrong. In Commander it’s definitely too parasitic since this only triggers off of Rooms.
BPhillipYork: Um, this seems uh, like a way to sacrifice a super expensive permanent, so the only real use would be if you have a way to get Rooms back from the yard consistently, in which case it’s neat but also super expensive for a value loop.
Roaring Furnace / Steaming Sauna
FromTheShire: Something cheap like this feels like what you’re supposed to use with Soulrager, and on paper kill their creature then sacrifice this to deal damage is neat, it feels too clunky though.
BPhillipYork: Neat but too expensive. Probably solid enough for 4-of. Maybe. Maybe not.
Drag to the Roots
FromTheShire: Depends a lot on how quickly decks can hit delirium. Once you’re there this is crazy good to be able to cast something and still hold up outstanding removal, it’s a lot of hoops again though. Plus there’s still lots of ways to hate on graveyards.
BPhillipYork: This is a pretty decent blow up anything spell. If it’s a mill deck you can bet you consistently will have 4 card types in your yard.
The Swarmweaver
FromTheShire: Seems like a nasty little card when you can turn it on in 60 card, and a solid support piece for Insect and Spider decks in Commander. Giving your horde of cheap gribblies deathtouch is really nice for either pushing damage through right away, or next turn when their blockers are dead.
BPhillipYork: Well, Insects are okay, it’s another Scarecrow, which is fun for the Scarecrow 5 color commander, and pumping your Insects is kind of meh, though funny with all the Spiders with reach. Why does it buff Spiders and Insects? Aren’t they like mortal enemies?
Arabella, Abandoned Doll
FromTheShire: In go wide token shells this can throw so, so much damage around pretty quickly. As the game goes long you need to do a lot of work to make sure it survives the combat but whoo boy, that trigger. Even better if you can double it up with something like Strionic Resonator.
BPhillipYork: Decent for decks that spam out a ton of weenies, which is something that Boros excels at. Combine this with extra combat steps and you can win the game out of nowhere by going wide and then blowing up your opponents really fast.
The Jolly Balloon Man
FromTheShire: Spoiler alert, when you start creating hasty token copies of creatures, it’s not going to be very long until you’ve built Splinter Twin again. Yes this version is theoretically hampered by the activation cost but oops who put that Ashnod’s Altar there? Good thing there’s no source of token copies of Felidar Guardian around or this would get ugly!
BPhillipYork: Super weird, but kind of scary since you can use this to make copies of something nasty and throw it at your opponents like a cruise missile.
Growing Dread
FromTheShire: Very clear indicator of what you want to be doing in draft with this color pair. How good it is in other formats relies mostly on how much other support you have for turning things face up.
BPhillipYork: Neat. For your manifest deck or your morph deck, it’s just a solid cheap buffer and enabler.
Zimone, All-Questioning
FromTheShire: I scoop in response to this attempt at making me do math.
BPhillipYork: I guess, like, this is going back to Magics’ roots teaching about math?
Winter, Misanthropic Guide
FromTheShire: Fun for you but this is simultaneously going to annoy the hell out of the whole table while also giving them the cards they need to exact their revenge on you. I would plan on packing a bunch of Underworld Dreams effects to punish them for drawing since you’re already going to be the archenemy.
BPhillipYork: This seems not bad, but that is incorrect, and it is bad, unless you are just punishing your opponents for drawing.
Marina Vendrell
FromTheShire: We’ll have to see what the most powerful Rooms we get are, this could either be a massive value engine that lets you lock and unlock multiple Rooms per turn and drowns the table out, or a bit of incremental advantage that is more cute than good. Absolutely the kind of card that spikes in price in 5 years because we returned to this mechanic though.
BPhillipYork: Yeah, this is the 5 color Room commander, which is okay for also just enchantments in general. There’s some fun things you can do with Rooms, maybe throwing like Instill Energy on Marina and lock and unlock Rooms repeatedly. There don’t really seem to be any strong Room loops, some of the effects are individually strong but there doesn’t seem to be a lot that is truly broken you can do with Rooms.
Next Time: The Set’s White, Blue, and Black Cards
That wraps up our look at the multicolor cards of Duskmourn: House of Horror. Join us next time as we begin reviewing the monocolor cards, picking out our favorites, and talking about the future build-arounds.
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